21 Dec 2007
by Alessandroin Travels
Finally some vacations! My life has been a great rush lately, so I really needed to take a pause and relax. 
Today, despite the extreme weather conditions in Oslo (-11C and fog), I managed to fly back to Italy, where I will stay for a short while. I will spend one week with my family and then I will visit my friend Fabio in Milan. We will celebrate New Year’s eve together in an “Italian-Norwegian” party in Como’s lake.
Thereby, I will try to be as far as possible from my laptop before 2008 starts, so I take this chance to wish everyone Merry Christmas, Buon Natale, Bon Nadal, Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noël, God Jul…
14 Dec 2007
by Alessandroin Personal Life
It is about five months that I moved to Norway, and I can definitely say that “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”. My life has been really full of happenings, but as always I have too short time to write about them all.
Well, let’s start from my social life. My purpose of having mainly local friends has been at the moment a partial failure. People here seem to need more time to get confident with someone, and my personal experience is that is much easier to become friends with girls than guys… I do not know what to think about it. Being Italian did not “help me” that much, I had a couple of unpleasant experiences with that but I still feel confident that in the future, especially once I will be able to speak Norwegian fluently, things will be much better.
So as you can imagine I had to spend a lot of efforts to enter a little network of friends, and even though sometimes I still feel that I still miss something, I met some very nice persons, who helped me in the difficult moments and who gave me a lot of remembering. My special thanks go to Mikal, Federico, Silje, Petra, Sonia, Valentin, Enrichetto, Diego, Fabio, and Regine, (merely ordered by who I met first) for all the moments shared together.
I finally started to study Norwegian. Here the approach with the languages is completely different from what I am used to have in Italy. They have two official forms of written Norwegian — Bokmål that is the one I study (literally “book language”, used by 86% of the population) and Nynorsk (literally “new Norwegian”, used by 14% of the population). On the contrary, there is no officially sanctioned standard of spoken Norwegian.
My course is a 48-hour intensive course, and I have to say that my Norwegian skills improved considerably, but it is still hard to try to jump into a conversation. I am mainly trained to listen to the spoken variety of the urban upper and middle class in East Norway, upon which Bokmål is primarily based, because this is the form generally taught to foreign student. In real life instead, people use to speak their own dialect with anyone, and they are able to have a fluent communication even if their spoken variants can have significant differences (especially when coming from very distant rural areas). Anyway, I will continue with an intermediate course the next year, not only because I really want to improve my skills but also because I have to be ready to speak fluent Norwegian as soon as possible.
The reason is that another big change is going to happen again in my life. I was a bit unsatisfied with my work lately, so I decided to come back to my original plan of continuing my studies. Becoming a researcher has been one of my biggest ambitions, so I applied for a PhD scholarship at the University of Bergen in October. I received a positive answer from the committee in the early days of November, while I was having the visit of my parents. At the beginning I was surprised and shocked, but it has been very nice to share this moment with them.
This PhD scholarship counts three years of research and one year of teaching, meaning that I will live in Bergen for a long while. I will start on the 10th of January 2008, and I will probably be travelling several times and spending some months abroad as visitor student, hopefully in some sunny warm place where I will be able to charge a bit the batteries. 
I will research in the field of Model-Driven Development, under the supervision of Prof. Khalid A. Mughal and Torill Hamre. I really look forward to start this new experience, my enthusiasm and motivation is really high. It was a difficult choice, but I feel it was the best for the pursuit of my personal expectations in life.
That’s all at the moment. Please, keep the finger crossed for me once more.
13 Dec 2007
by Alessandroin Politics
New York Times wrote a very interesting article about the “malaise” of Italy. It outlines quite precisely most of the reasons behind the Italian decline.
Read the full article here.
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