Just some ramblings

Driver's Licence: the Saga continues.

The licencing office called me this week, because there was something wrong with one of the documents. That is, I had to make three separate payments to them, and the way this works in Italy is as follows: you go to a post office, and fill in a slip of paper. This slip of paper is then processed by the post office (of course you also have to pay for them to process it, but that's obvious). You then get two receipts for having paid. Now for all of the payments I made, I left one of the receipts at the Licencing Office (in fact, the lady there choose which one she was gonna keep). But it turns out that these are not exactly 100% identical. I still don't know exactly what the difference is, but there is one word different, or something along those lines. And she had to wrong slip for one of my payments. So I spent another 2.5 hours (it was busy in the metro) to get there and come back to give her the right f.ing piece of paper! Of course, we'll have to see whether the whole thing is finally going to work out or not: that's still completely unknown. Although my old licence has now officially expired, so if I don't get the Italian one, I'm f.ed.

For the rest, the week has been work-work-work. I have started working on a new project that I really would like to start to get going before moving to Berlin (omg, only 23 days left!), so I'm pretty busy with that. It's all pretty sad here, anyway, with lots of people leaving. Louisa had her goodbye a week-and-a-half ago, because she's moved to Trieste. Gili had her goodbye this week, because she moved back to Israel. It's getting quiet here... Our Costarican friends are leaving at the end of the year as well. Another friend of mine, however, will actually be moving to Milan probably, as he was offered an assistant professorship here. So that's cool (and we'll have a place to stay that way!).

Anyway, that's about all I have to say for now. I want you all to check out Meghan's website, with a cool blog and an online shop for the clothes she designs: It's HERE. Tomorrow, we're gonna go to Genova, as I haven't gone there yet in the 3.5 years of living in Milano and this will be the last opportunity. Because things are pretty tightly packed during the next weeks: I will go to San Francisco for a conference next weekend (yes, I know it's insane: I will be in San Francisco for a grand total of 46 hours), Fedor's father is visiting the weekend after and Fedor will be in Frankfurt the weekend after that with a friend. And then it's time for me to leave............

Ciao,
OJ

PS The weather is fantastic right now!!! Sunny, relatively warm: that is one thing I'm gonna miss about Milano!