Group C: Zara

Photo by To Marinaki

Rucksacks on shoulders, hand bags and wheeled luggage carried up and down busses, cars, trains or airplanes… These are travel tools which strongly characterize youth’s society. When I was 19 I decided to study at University and moved to Padua, 180 kilometres far from my city, Udine.
From that time on travelling became a need, a duty and a true school of life in which positive aspects go beyond feeling free to do what you want or filling your spare time with much more dizzy tasks, such as spend an entire evening to look for an item of your comic books collection, drink a spritz in Piazza delle Erbe (which is the dizziest!), make some photos of the city, walk alone or with someone else without a precise destination, everything done with no need to apologize for being late…
As you start being a traveller the most of your time you can count only on yourself and you are out of the caring and relieving mood of your family. When you have a problem you may receive any help by friends you’ve met in the new city, but this is not always possible because you start being an adult, the exclusive protagonist of your life, the one who acts for him/herself. Even if at the beginning of my new life in Padua I felt alone and lost due to the weight of such a change in life style, shortly I appreciated the possibility to take decisions on my own, to meet a lot of people coming from very different cities and countries, and to feel free to go farther, in places I’ve never been before. In particular, living in university dormitories and sharing a kitchen with oter 150 other students I’ve known a people from every part of Italy and from different countries of Europe, Asia and North America. So, carrying my luggage and my rucksack I went and see friends to Genova, Savona, Firenze, Bari, Cosenza, Bologna, Verona, Venezia, Torino, Paris, Seville, Madrid, and other places. In the next future, I’m expected to go and call on some people in Dresden, Berlin and Gottingen, in Germany. I was asked to go to Teheran, but I think this is not the right moment to go there…
Travel, travel, travel… And last year, when I went in Spain to live in Zaragoza for 10 months I’ve done it even more often. One of my best travels in Spain was in July when, a Lithuanian friend of mine and I went alone on Pyrenees’ mountains. We slept wrapped in sleeping bags in, as my friend used to say, “An hostel of 1 hundred stars!” that was the wonderful sky the nature offered us.
Of course travelling gives you a collection of memories, smells, faces, voices, views, sensations and emotions that no money can buy.
But this life style does not only fill your life with wonderful gifts as there is always the other side of the medal. After I came back from Spain I felt like I was everywhere but in the same time nowhere; I mean that if you move from one house to another and change room-mates every year you meet a lot of people and you learn to feel ok regardless of the place where you are and you become sort of a world citizen, but at the same time it is difficult for you to share memories and build your identity within the same group of people. Somewhat you feel you have lost your roots somewhere in the past, especially when you go back to see your parents and see that lots of things changed and friends you had since you were 12 are out of sight.
However during these last 5 years I’ve collected some stories I hope I’ll have the chance to tell you all. I’d like to know which is your personal experience of these last 4/5 years and what you think about what I told you above. Before going, I show you three web sites I visit the most:

http://www.imdb.com/

The Internet Movie Database. An English/American web site (also translated in German, Italian and Spanish) where you can find news, information and photos about movies, TV series, actor/actresses. I think this is the best web site where you can find info about cinema productions. There are sections dedicated to goofs and best quotes of the movies as well!
E.g.: If you put as a tag “Robert Redford” you’ll have his biography, his photos and his filmography as an actor, a director or a producer. Moreover the page is enriched with numerous links to technical data, plot synopsis and credit cast.

http://www.musica.com/

Musica.com. It is a Spanish web site in which you can find more than 330.000 song lyrics, videos, ringing tones and wallpapers. There is a quiz section in which you can answer to questions about songs, and a chat opened to the registered visitors.
E.g.: If you put “Queen” as a tag, the new page will show you a list of artists whose names contain the word “queen”. Than you click on the one you are interested in (e.g. “Queen” the greatest group with Freddy Mercury) and you’ll have another page with a list of songs whose lyrics are in the site.
If you want you can register to the web site and add other lyrics to the page of your favourite singers or groups.

http://saralabellafriulana.spaces.live.com/

Le Conchiglie del Mare. This is my blog which is written in Italian, Spanish and English! Through MSN.Messenger I had the possibility to build -absolutely free- my own blog.
Here you can see my photos, read my posts, leave any comments if you want and, of course, know me better! Hope you’ll have fun!!

Bye,
Zara