While Michael was striking roots in his office waiting for our Mini-Z ordering, I decided to wait under a lot nicer circumstances. Saying `Goodbye´ to autumnal Hamburg I went to Trento, northern Italy, to visit some good friends and to spend nice holidays together with them.
The best way to gear oneself up for a turbulent new season of heavy RC-Car-Racing is relaxing, apart from shooting out an insane amount of money (without really having it) on tiny little parts to satisfy the NERD´s play instinct. Thus 50% of the requirements for a successful season were achieved by ordering all the Mini-Z stuff. The other half had to be fulfilled by visiting Lago di Levico which is a very good place to center oneself. The small lake in the Alps features a beautiful landscape, crystal clear water, extremely good nearby restaurants, peace and an easy atmosphere. Due to the fact that the summer season officially was over, the hut we lived in was ridiculously cheap which additionally fired our sense of well-being.
After waking up around noon we usually took the 2-minutes-walk to the small wooden quay to capture our personal pedal boats and maneuver them to the center of the lake. Arriving there I took a swim, read a book or took stupid pictures of my sunburned face (or pics of a beautiful snake in the water) for this article.
Okay, there were other people on the lake who were much cooler than us. We tried to race this guy but damn he was fast. But as one can see he was wearing the yellow jersey. There´s no need for any further explanation…
Mini-Z was very far at this point of time although we battled a lot. The evenings were extremely affected by the board game `RISK´. Playing this game the intercultural exchange between Italians and Germans became very tempestuously. To make it short: These evenings I seemed to have learned the most important Italian vocabularies: `Cazzo!´, `Troia!´ (sometimes `Puta!´ in order to make cursing more eloquent by not using the same word hundreds of times) and, of course, `Vaffanculo!´, a word as common as the pizza in Italy. The most important thing is that you try to use these words as often as possible in varying combinations for example in the little Italian restaurant around the corner or on a trip in Italy. If you follow this rule you´ll find many new friends… Interestingly Italy (around 60 mio inhabitants) does not only have the best pasta but also at least five or six high quality RC-Car-Magazines whereas Germany (81 mio inhabitants) only has two (?) magazines. The intermediate result of northern Italy: Better food, better weather, better nature, RC-enthusiasm and the girls… damn. Anyway, the pretty cool Wild Willy II in the shopping centre recovered me from my emotional damages.
After seven very relaxing days including one day in Venice in order to check out 'my' personal tea room ...
... and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection of modern art, which I really recommend to see (If I could drive my Mini-Z as smooth as Yves Tanguy painted 'En Lieu oblique' I'd be uncatchable!) we took the train to Milan in order to spend another five days in the centre of fashion.
Okay, arriving there we had to share our glamorous two-star-hotel-six-bed-room with many mosquitoes, mold and four guys from Bulgaria who really liked to drink a lot but overall it was not too bad, though. I´m still in training from 6 ½ months in Asia.
In the first day there was very heavy rain so that the streets were completely flooded. We had around half a meter on crossroads. Afterwards the underground and the trams didn´t work at all. Using buses instead was not very clever because many people had the same idea or used their cars instead which caused huge traffic jams all over Milan. Nevertheless my mood was good not only because I spotted this amusing billboard advertising:
The city itself is very nice and worth seeing if you´re interested in beautiful architecture, fashion and/or beautiful women. But after five days of checking out the whole city we had to take our seat in the Ryanair flight back to 'Hamburg'. Yeah, everyone know that Ryanair´s naming of cities is different to everyone elses's… Right now I should be concentrating on my Bachelor-thesis but I received a huge package with Mini-Z parts in the meantime to spend some time on. As we can see all pre-preparations are done in order start a successful Mini-Z season and to pluto Michael ;-)
Let the battle begin ...
Flo
