Monday, January 31, 2011

Why Does My Leg Itch After Knee Surgery

The Citadel of Cairo


that dominates the city, where the army has moved from where we hope for a change. Visit of 2005.

To try to understand, I get to the Citadel, including school groups visiting the most significant areas of the city faithful and devoted to the mosque of Mohammed Ali rose to testify that God is one, although the city is manifold. Tourists? There are despite the bombs against them, but seem to decrease, rather than crushed or dispersed and scattered by the majesty of the place. Here is from Cairo, wrapped in the pall of smog and foul-smelling waste fumes mephitic a fleet of the most dilapidated in the world. In the foreground two beautiful mosques of Sultan Hassan and that of ar-Rifai, where the remains of the last Shah of Iran, Reza Palha. Here is the Cairo property but mobile, because even on the roofs of new stems dotted round the god cathode life teems, the terraces also seem to accommodate the dance without rhythm and without any apparent sense of the chaos of civilization. I understand from up here that democracy is compatible with these lands and these people is not and will not be that of Montesquier and Moro and Tocqueville, but perhaps a more authoritarian, with more strength and determination, some enlightened, and respectful of human rights, but perhaps more with less, or rather with the simplest of our laws. Maybe even with the law Koran interpreted with clemency and mercy, shari'a revisited. Who knows.

Why, I say, there is chaos, and not very impressive in size manageable by the resources of men of power. But at the same time, from that chaos always manages to get out, and not so disappointed. And not so destroyed. And not so upset. Living in chaos, however, creates unexpected antibodies able to reorder the psyche and soul. Maybe it will touch a biologist to study this phenomenon, rather than a sociologist.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

Purple Highlights Vegas

Sidi Bou Said, where he lived Ben Ali


A fabulous presidential palace was built by the deposed President Ben Ali near the town of Tunisia. Visit of 2005.

Sidi Bou Said. Or when a village, although having a clear tourism destination at the same time expresses the vocation of a people and a country.

Sidi Bou Saïd, a few miles north of Carthage, is the sea and the sky is. The land? The hides in its belly, as he can. There is the blue of the sea, there is the sky and the doors, windows, railings, frames, benches, streetlights, the dustbins, canopies, cover page, stalls ... Sometimes even the tiles and sidewalks. There is the blue, especially the balconies covered with wood which protected - and protect - the Tunisian and Arab women from prying eyes. Blue camouflage, now the sky, now the sea, depending on the time and the inclination solar.

It's no accident that the country will attract Tunisian artists - and more - on this hill that slopes toward the Gulf of Carthage. Paul Klee, a name for all of these lands to the blue one who knew how to associate any other color, as if the white - the lack of color - which only emphasizes magnifies and illuminates the blue, would explode inside its tone implied nothing that is everything. It is with surprise that suddenly the blue multiplies and fragments into a thousand blue, each different, intense or soft, possible or impossible, bold or collected.

the country culminating in the minaret of the small mausoleum dedicated just to Sidi Bou Said. But at his feet is the Café des Nattes placid, a meeting place for artists of yesterday and today, where we sipped the famous mint tea with pine nuts floating mocking and laughing in small glasses. A break from the balustrades on the terraces of course blue wooden, writing some notes on tables also suspended between sky and blue sea, is one of those experiences of peace in the exaltation of the senses very difficult to forget.

You reach the shore of the sea with a long paved climb that sometimes, here and there, with no apparent logic, seems to change in light and gentle stairway, together with left and right by the blue-white quilted Housing cured, just stained some bouganviller or tuft of green or orange juice a lemon tree. Perhaps it is a staircase, but the imitation of the ripples of the sea, or just fluff of clouds that veil the sky. Sidi Bou Saïd

, Islam made blue green gold by the sun. That is absolutely no air of violence. The moderation of the lack of moderation. This is what you enjoy as evidence in the latest offshoot of the country occupied by a lovely bar with terrace, the Café Sidi Chabanne, overlooking the bay and the beautiful villas of the seaside town. Lovely bar, delicious coffee tables white and blue, lovely sun in November. Unrestrained beauty of the place, with its stepped terraces that seem to infinity of blue. Islamic? Divine.

Then the slope to the harbor, a long stone stairway victim of the usual neglect of the South. It would be enough just to keep it clean, almost charming. But then I discover that the descent is the land, which is also exasperated: red, boldly red and green, soft green as the agaves that cover it. Sidi Bou Saïd hid the red earth.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

3d Invitation Butterfly

70. The right thing

presented himself as a pilgrim to a Zen master: "I come here so that you explain to me what is the right thing to do to give meaning to my life. I listened to the advice of many people and, as I think about it and think back, I can not understand what this thing right. "
"You must not do anything but to free your mind of these thoughts. When you have exceeded the concepts of right and wrong with your dilemma vanish"
The pilgrim, who was fascinated by the words of the master, he stopped to sleep in the monastery.
The next day it started again, after thinking all night, he decided that staying there was not the right thing to do.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Groping In Crowded Bus Or Train

Carthage, where chaos now reigns


The delicate political situation in Tunisia has had as one of its main centers of fighting the old city of Carthage, near the palace of deposed President Ben Ali. Visit of 2005.

I've seen so many old buildings around the world. Not all really interesting, not all height of the evoked memory. I fear that Carthage was a victim of the curse of the looting and cement. I fear that the neglect had the better of the rightness of the old, on his great modesty. And who knows if I will be able to capture that feeling that will never die.

brooded on these questions taxis darting in the thin strip of land that cuts off the saltwater lagoon of Tunis. The driver runs like a madman at the wheel of his VW with 400,000 km, I still wonder how you do not fall apart in the middle of the road, many are the creaks and noises affecting it.

Carthage, Carthago old, being announced with the steeples and domes of the Catholic cathedral dedicated to Saint-Louis, an example not to follow architecture at the same time wants to be colonial, Gothic and Romanesque architecture. You can imagine ... The museum stretches lazy and acquitted at his feet, full of artifacts Phoenician, Punic, Greek and Roman. The mosaics that captures and preserves are not just, make reference to ancient times of glory. The Phoenician pottery is with the grace and the boldness of accumulated millennia. A couple of skeletons that tell you Punic compounds show almost enough to inspire affection. That's it. Leaving the museum, the space opens up a snapshot of marine and archaeological: columns, capitals and pediments and sea. Nothing more. The cement business and are hidden from the heights.

It's all right. And then I see that Augustine admonishes and encourages Christians threatened by so many heresies of the time. I see Hannibal admonishes and encourages his troops ready to campaign craziest thing you could imagine. I see Hadrian, the emperor, who admonishes and encourages its fans using his eloquence and his deep vision.

The amphitheater - three thousand spectators - is marred by the metal structures that make summer arena still in use. Moreover, it rests on a minaret cheap. At Ephesus is the most complete, most picturesque Taormina, Pompeii's oldest ... But here, again, I can imagine in the company of Adrian, Annibale, Agostino. And the magic is reborn, and this certainly s'oblia in a more glorious past.

Some Roman villa, a few broken column, s'indovina an area that once was a circus up. Little else. And a flight of steps, they say, did ascend to the Temple of Apollo in Roman memory. The staircase is now reduced to little more than a steep grassy slope. It matters little, Carthage is now in my memory, and we have left.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Birthday Card Sayings For 1 Year Old

Forio and the sea and something else


A stroll in one of the prettiest towns on the island of Ischia, in the passage of years between 2010 and 2011.

The right of the Neapolitan urban disorder - I would say a vocation rather than a conviction - even on the island of Ischia operates at full capacity. Indeed, they say that these aprti up area is 80 percent in one way or another abusive. Incredible figures that telling a person in the world "rather than a mass escape attempt, plus a dasein that un'imbrogliatina corrupt. People have to live. Yet in this chaos (relative, because in reality you live on the island very well) and emerging Bourbon Baroque jewels adorning the town and its inhabitants. Hopping from one to another - Covatta Palace, Palace Biondi, Queens House, Tower Street Mansion - not as a tarantolato but as a pilgrim who comes to the nobility, as a nomad of the transient human beauty.

I only stop at the edge of, on the promontory occupied - it seems to preserve the beautiful location - a precious church, absolutely marina, I would say rich quintessential Mediterranean. Santa Maria del Soccorso has its own history is not insignificant, and an endless series of legends: old Augustinian convent of the fourteenth century, they say that it was built because, during one of the most violent storms that the Neapolitan coast had ever known, perhaps in the thirteenth century, there emerged a crucifix that lags behind the rocks of the cape without wanting to know more to be reabsorbed by the undertow, or gale, or storm surges.

The tiles chipped and stocks washed out, nevertheless shine on the whitewashed walls, as wakes the god of light, which on Earth is forced to sign compromise color cosmetics and circumlocutions to suggest the idea of \u200b\u200blight, which then it is beauty itself. Nothing will shine if the intense blue of the sky, I would say the ground, not defining the boundaries of human mastery over the divine, or perhaps more-than-human-human. Surrounding the church steps and affection - a basilica style unknown and mysterious, "the main facade there are other examples," wrote the Saved, "official biographer" of the island - I realize that water paves the horizon school education and the earth. Rippling of the north wind, sun cream, sparkling with foam, the other half of the world - the part changing - s'atteggia a nectar of the gods, or rather to amniotic warmth, or a carpet of light and concise thoughts. Suomi Forio and the sea, and something else.