Sun and haircut. v1.1

Friday, at the end we are in friday. The letters of this noun sound really good when pronounced in any language (even in swiss-german!). F R I D A Y. Yes, sounds good. Especially when after two weeks of "end of the world weather" this morning the sky looked exactly like you can see in the picture I took in my way to work. Blue. That is, in my opinion, the right colour for te sky. Ok now enough about weather because some people may think I am obsessed with this and it is not the case.

I was supposed to go to Amsterdam this weekend but at the end I will have to stay here. Among various reasons, because i will spend some time this weekend with my friend "Power" and his brother "Point". Yes, lovely pps presentations. Today at lunch, because it is part of the life of 90% of the interns I guess, we were talking about how useless is sometimes to spend so many hours adjusting graphs, colours, tables.etc Everything to make very easy and simple things look better for 5 min. Of course pps is very useful and necessary, but sometimes...."Man, the sales are 25milion" Isn´t that enough???That I use my mouth instead of a red-colour bar with special bright effect to tell you.....25. Do you need the 25 milion in 10 colours and plotted against 20 graphs in 30 colours? The useless part comes when you start (especially if you are like me in this issues) to adjust every line at the same height, every font at the same size. You can spend hours and hours and still doesn´t looks "enough" good. And you are not really doing any useful job, just changing colours and shapes.....Eh, wait a sec, the numbers and the colours mentioned here do not apply to reality. I don´t want anybody to think that this is my opinion of the work I have been doing last days, but sometimes this powerpoint.....

Ok, another thing. Now I am again with agent Jack Bauer in the evenings. My first shopping in amazon worked and I am again enjoying 24 the days I stay at home.

Yesterday we had the BOW at cargo, a bar close to the River. Helen is leaving us and lot of people showed up. She goes on exchange to Berkeley. I guess we will see each other again maybe before the Olympics. The number of assistants to the bar of the week is increasing week after week.

I have to leave. I escaped from work one hour ago because I have an appointment to cut my hair. Yes, hair does not stop growing during summer-time and I think it is necessary to stop this Jacksons5 look that I am starting to adopt, especially because I have still more than a month here in Basel and I am not sure if the afro look would be very welcomed in my department. Anyway, I took a picture of my hair yesterday (my face is there because I can not sepparate it from my hair), just to remember how it was in case the things go wrong in some minutes, although I think that for 60 francs, yes, 60 francs!! the girl won't go crazy qith the scissors.

Good weekend to everyone

Fast Update: I was going to delete the pps part, which I don´t like, but instead of this I will announce that the haircut was ok. yes, ok. I survived. There is people afraid of going to the dentist, I am afraid of hairdressers when I am not in bcn (I have had some really bad experiences when cutting my hair abroad). Doesn´t matter is an expensive hairdresser. When they see you as a foregineer that does not speak the language, they send you straight to the "begginer", and you never know if you will end up looking like Jim Carrey in "Dumb & Dumber". Anyway, at the end of the day a haircut is not important because "La mona, vestida de seda, mona se queda".
I go to the jazz festival we have in town today.
Again, good weekend.
Ah, the music: Gnarls barkley - smiley faces

Ni chicha ni limoná

I have been thinking today that without my weekend photos this would be a really boring blog, more or less like my weekdays here in basel since the weather turned to be a kind of soft winter. I can't go to swim in the river after work, and don´t know why but I prefer to stay at home after having dinner (I am still waiting for the second pack of 24 series that I bought in amazon last week). Work...I promised myself I would not speak about work in the blog, but you can guess it is having some influence in my mood lately, and is making me think a lot about what or where I want to be next year once I have to come back to reality after the MBA. But this is another story, and as I have heard somewhere before, "forecasts are difficult to make - particularly those about the future".

Well, we will always have the weekends. Until now not bad. I haven´t got the marevlous experiences that other bloggers are having in airports during weekends but I still have some weekends to go, lets see. Maybe we go to Amsterdam on Friday and Paco is tempting me with a trip to Berlin on the following.

I think one of the things that has more influence in my "down" mood is the weather. In Spanish we say "ni chicha ni limoná"= useless or half way between nothing and nothing. This is a bit difficult to translate and it will take half of this post (if you are not interested in Spanish jargon you'd better skip this). Literally, "ni chicha ni limoná" means neither "meat" (or "fat"), nor lemon juice. Weird eh! If you search a bit you will find that "chicha", appart from the eatable thing or the excess of kg, it also refers to an alcoholic drink from mais (originally from southamerica). Wrap up: People used this saying to mean that there were no alcohololic nor refreshing drinks left = No drinks, bad mood..."useless"....more or less. Now the connection with the weather in Basel. Well, I guess I would be rather enjoying a bit of snow in the weekends and go everyday to the office with a proper jacket full up of feathers under -10ºC, than thinking we are in the middle of august and my wardrobe is full of (now) useless fancy summer t-shirts and shorts that I only see when I take one of my suits. By the way, another type of clothes that are not exactly appropriate for this weather: Suits.
I admit that myself and some other people from "dry" countries like spain are a bit weird with the clima, especially when we claim for more sun and always complain when it is raining, while in Spain there are around 200 fires all over the country because if there is something for which we should claim a bit, that is precisely rain. (ahh, but now I am not in Spain). At least in London you think it is always shit weather and that is fine. Here you buy your swimming bag to go to the river because is summer-time, and then what you find instead of summer-time is "ni chicha ni limoná". And I have to walk around 20 min to work everyday, 20 min full of uncertainty :)

This reminds me that I have started another routine here: Reading in my way to the office while I walk. Ali told me the other day she usually does that, and I thought I never do this. Now I know the reason. This is a clean country (with a strange weather, but clean), and reading while you walk is not dangerous because there is a very low probability of putting your foot right in the middle of a dog´s disposable income, sorry, disposable intake I mean.

Music: Victor Jara - ni chicha ni limona

Zürich and Street Parade2006...Yippie Yippie Yeah!

Quiet and relaxing Sunday at home. I needed to rest sooooo much. Ah, by the way, summer is definetely finished in Switzerland :(
At the end I managed to take the 7:07pm Friday train to Zürich, after having to come back home twice because of my chronic tendency to forget things. At 8pm I met Rene at the station, another friend from last summer in London that I managed to see again after one year, who offered me hospedage for Friday night. And then a veeery long and exhausting weekend started. First we had dinner at his place with his girlfriend Simone, who is pregnant and will have the baby most probably the day I leave Basel on September. (This is a summer full of babys and weddings surrounding me...I am scared...Don´t know how to interpret this sign from my surroundings). After dinner, Dorjee and his girlfriend Ivana came for some drinks. We were talking about the fact that I only see Rene and Dorjee when there is a terrorist attack in London. Casualidades de la vida.

After good conversations, and once we finished the wine, it was time to try Zürich nightlife, and we went to Hive club where joined some other friends. Among them, (this is only for IESE people), the Swiss version of Rodolfo!!! Clavadito, with the yellow jacket. I guess that I also have a person that looks exactly like me in some part of the world, however this weekend I have only seen Rodolfo's swiss twin.
We finished quite late on Friday, and Saturday morning I realized that I was not in the perfect shape for....Street Parade. An obvious thing that everybody knows but I ignored on friday: If you are of my size, never try to drink at the same rithm as a 1'90 smth tall guy and his Nepali-Swiss-Argentinian friend. No way.

Saturday....Street Parade: If you have time and want to see all the weird, funny, wasted, not so wasted, old, young, and other kinds of people that I captured with my camera, you can see them Here. No comments for these pics.

Well well, just one comment from the pic below. have you seen what is that guy doing!!! Another advice: Methylenedioxymethamphetamine is bad for your health, but appart from that, if you have a "cleanning lady soul inside you", maybe it goes out. Cleanning the Street parade streets...utopia. I think that guy is still there with his broom.







Good Bye!!

Music for the weekend. Both Friday and Saturday heared this so there is no doubt today: Deichkind-Remmidemmi, and Prodigy-Out of Space (but the reggae version ;)