La Mano di Ferro nel Guanto di Velluto

Last Sunday we had a Tai Ji workshop in our hotel here in Nemi.

It was directed by Anthony, holding the students with his usual mix of music and martial arts, even after several times it's always a new discovering, really awesome.


It was a very pleasant day, altough I didn't sleep at all due to a party that we had in the very same room, which ended around 5.00 am.

I'll spare you the description of how was the room after 300 drunk people danced for 6 hours, only thing was that we had to rush to clean the most we can until workshop started.


We had wonderful meals at the restaurant, people were really happy of the day so I think we'll having another one next year :-)

Ahh, Cymru!

I'm back from Wales (Cymru in Gaelic) from two days and I've just the time to write few lines about it, cause today Anthony is coming here in Nemi for tomorrow's workshop, plus there's full booked for almost ten days from today so we're quite busy here.

Cymru is one of those place that change your state of mind, whatever happened to you before: got evidence of that this year especially.

We left Rome almost in a hurry, cause for the days before departure both me and Lele we were quite busy at work, so when we got our way out of Stanstead terminal and discover that our confirmed car to rent was not available to us, cause we had both prepaid credit cards which Hertz doesn't accept (obviously nothing was wrong when we booked the car!) our mood was quite not good, all the accumulated stress was flowing out in a continuos series of deadly attacks to all those car rental clerks (luckily for them only in our minds).
After this shocking moment, thinking about going to Leicester by train or bus, we found another company whom accept our money straight away, in 20 min we got the car.

Only thing was that despite of its name (Budget) they charge us something like triple the price of Hertz rental, so from now on this company will be known as Awesome Budget, or Blow Your Budget.

Our budget was then put enough down to let us think about eating only apples for the following days, but there was not much time for thinking, cause we had 100 miles driving on unknown streets up to Leicester, with already almost one hour delay for the beginning of the workshop.

This vacation must be a sort of lesson from the Universe, cause when we got to the place we discovered that no one was there, and at that point we realized that we forgot to write down Eli's phone.
After a trip to around the city, looking for a Internet cafe, we decided to check in first in the hotel, then we write an SMS to Eli and we tried to get to the workshop after lunch.

Now a praise for this message, first of a long serie, with which our teacher Eli explained directions to two Italian blokes at their first driving experience in UK: "Le12 8tz. It's a community hall, give me a call if you want."

Needless to say that we got to the place after sunset and after have looked in every house or hall in the hood, finding no one, so for that day the only right thing to do was having a fish 'n' chips and a movie at the local cinema, before driving back the 25 odd miles to our hotel in Leicester.
Next day we start from the morning, we even bought a UK Sim card to try to talk with him or with someone there at the workshop who could explain us something about directions, for us is still hard to believe that someone that lives in a place is not able to explain how to get from one place to another in his neighbourhood.
If you want to find an excuse you can say that Central Midlands is packed of towns and cities full of roads and buildings pretty similar to each other, but the thing is that we asked them 10 odd times before finally get there, just one hour before workshop finish.
Along the way we managed to flat a tire, so inside that hall last thing we wanted to do was relaxing doing Tai Ji.

We changed the flat tire in the car park and after we drived all the morning to get there, without lunch we start the 180 miles driving to Wales.

Thank goodness we stopped to fuel and toilet along the way, this vacation was starting to look like a working trip..

And then everything changed when we got to our hotel in Llandovery: we start to chill out immediately, and after few hours, a steak and a couple of faboulous Welsh beer those two days of nightmare were over.

We spent wonderful days visiting some towns around the area, this year with the car we enjoyed a lot the contryside, although I didn't took lots of pics cause I think most part of this place you can't just see with your eyes, you have to be here to understand it.

If you want to see them you can go on my facebook account, and that's all folks! Today it's a working day, this afternoon Anthony and the other friends from my town are coming for tomorrow workshop, so next post will be more "martial" :-)