Christmas Hampers

It always seems strange just how early the world prepares for Christmas. At least in certain parts of the world, it seems like window displays start promoting Christmas as early as the beginning of the fall season! Have you ever seen a plastic Christmas tree in a store window in October, or heard Christmas carols softly playing in the background at local malls in September? This comes of course on the same day no less than Justin Bieber will turn on the lights at Westfield in Shepherd’s Bush.

It seems that there are two reasons for this ridiculously premature tendency that stores and malls seem to have: first, it is simply exciting to be preparing for Christmas. Who doesn’t look forward to the holiday season, after all? However, early promotion of the Christmas season also encourages people to shop early, and get the hard or tedious parts of the holiday over with in advance. In London, for example, they are already offering products like Marks and Spencer Christmas Hampers to simplify people’s shopping experiences.

Many people who are not from the UK, or who tend to do more hands-on shopping for individual family members and friends over the Christmas season may be wondering what exactly a Christmas Hamper is. Essentially, it is just what it sounds like: a sort of gift basket full of Christmas treats or gifts, and often decorated according to the holiday.

Of course, with this sort of gift, there is a good deal of variety. It is not as if “a Christmas Hamper” is a single item that is suggested as a gift. There are plenty of different types of these Hampers… some full of small gifts, some with foods and treats, some with alcoholic beverages, etc. Ultimately, the selection and style of this gift makes it very easy to purchase in advance, and simplifies not only your shopping experience, but also your decision-making process when trying to figure out what to give people this year.

Overall, it is still almost comical to see such items already available for sale in stores all over the world. In many parts of the world, people are still enjoying the warmth of summer and have not even begun to think about the fall, let alone the wintery holiday season. However, if you are interested in convenience, or even if you just happened to find last holiday season particularly stressful, it might be an appealing option to get the bulk of your shopping done in advance. There is after all a certain appeal in simply stashing Christmas gifts away in a closet so that instead of hitting the crowded stores and shopping malls this December, you need only open a door and send out your gifts.

Happy preparation everybody, and good luck with all your presents!

[Disclaimer. This post was brought to you by M&S.]

But now it’s time to leave October behind – my AC Milan calendar (my mum gives me one as a present for Christmas every year) has Ronaldinho and Papastathopoulos on the October page, so it’s probably about time – and enter one of the most exciting months of the year, Movember.

Yep, you read that right, it’s Movember. November is boring, cold, there’s less light in the day and all that. Movember is cool and fun. “What is Movember?”, I hear some of you ask.

Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces in the UK and around the world. The aim of which is to raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

What that means in practice is I’m going to “donate my face” for the whole of the month, will grow a moustache and will raise funds and awareness for the likes of The Prostate Cancer Charity, The Institute of Cancer Research and of course The Movember Foundation.

And that’s what I’ll do. What can you do? You can help me in my journey of ever-growing facial hair in the upper-lip region and (please!) donate what you can.

We’re getting pretty excited about all this at We Are Social Towers, and we’ve set up a 10+ strong team (which you can donate to directly in case, say, you hate me but love We Are Social) ready to kick off clean shaven on Tuesday morning (our progress will of course be trackable on the dedicated Tumblr) and to grow lovely moustaches for charity for the coming 30 days.

So please, show us your support: grow your own Mo or help us raise funds! (and thanks once again to everyone who supported Gioia)

My "Share of cake" cake - pic courtesy of lovelychaos. on Flickr

#wins

It is safe to say the scheme does its job. Need a short ride in central London? The scheme’s got it covered, and it’s the perfect alternative to the short one-or-two-stops tube journey. At the time of writing the furthest docking stations are at Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel to the East, Kensington Olympia to the West, North of Regent’s Park to the North and in Kennington to the South.

Boris Bikes in central London, September 2011

It’s constantly improving. If not improving, expanding. New docking stations have already been opened, and others have been expanded to accomodate more spaces. There are already rumours of expansion of the scheme, perhaps most notably the one reported in July about further expansion into Tower Hamlets. This would obviously be good news for us, as some of the unofficial locations would serve us well between home and, say, Canary Wharf. Of course criticism is always around the corner, and some of the most frequent arguments highlight how the expansion (do to be carried out some time next year, apparently) does not go near enough to the Olympic Park, perhaps something to do with the fact one of the Olympic sponsors is Lloyds TSB and not Barclays.

(unofficial) future locations of BorisBikes in Tower Hamlets

People are embracing them. It seems like a secondary pint, but were people not to use the bikes, the scheme would be a failure. It is not. On top of that, people seem to have silently agreed upon the sattle-turned-around-equals-bike-does-not-work already in place in Paris (btw, we did not get round to try les Borís Bikes on the other side of the Channel as I originally intended because when we went it just pissed it down).

It’s pretty cheap. £45 a year works out at less than a pound a week, provided you cycle for less than half an hour at the time that’s all you’re going to spend.

#fails, #mehs

Apps are lame-ish. Yep, moved them here from the positives, where they were last year. There’s plenty of apps to chose from if you’re on the techy side, but you would expect them to work properly. Some do not report accurately on availability of bikes or docking spaces, or do not connect to the servers at all. I got to the point where I’m basically not relying on apps at all, and if I’m lucky then fine, otherwise I’ll have better luck somewhere else. The only thing I find myself using apps for is finding stations in locations I’m not really familiar with, but that’s pretty much it. Lost interest in Chromaroma, too.

Peak hour. Yeah, good luck with that.

Creativity. Went down the drain, after the Braganza bies we’ve not seen any other partnership.

Actually, me. We moved into an area where the closest docking station is about 3 miles away, compared to the previous 8 minutes or so in Whitechapel, so that’s a massive drop in usage on my end, not helped by the fact I got myself a new foldie bike for my new commute, helped by the guys at CycleScheme.

Final-ish verdict

I don’t really seem myself using the scheme much more than I used it in the last year, particularly so if they don’t expand the covered area to where we live.

Medal of honour

[Please be aware donations are still open. If you want to support my effort please do so.]

Running, or maybe better to say jogging in Hyde Park on a beautiful sunny day in late summer with 15,000 other women, when all we’ve been waiting for was rain all day was priceless. 5 km in 39 minutes. The rain at the end arrived, but once we had already left for the pub.

I started from the end of the end of the tail along with many other girls who ran for Endometriosis UK having no attempt to make any records, I ran for the experience and for those who supported me and the most important thing to me was to get to the end without stopping, and it went very well.

I tried to concentrate on this day, I did not recognise any of the girls around me from their Facebook messages and to be honest I was not keen to ruin the experience of that time talking, as many of them, about scars, operations, and other bad times for some past and for others to come.

The training in the months prior to the race was a real disaster to be honest, I have not trained three times a week and I went on holiday twice, where no training was considered seriously. But once back, I went straight on the treadmill to get the legs going.

To run with me at the race there were women of all ages from three years old to more than 90 years old, each at their own pace and each dressed as they pleased even in sandals. They ran with husbands at their side or immediately off the path, or with children in their arms ready to greet their wives with text messages of love on home-made placards.

Endometriosis UK was just one of the 1,600 charities present on the day.

Before the race we had a warm up of Zumba and aerobics on the grass, that was great to boost the excitement.

Once the race started I realised that I could do a better time than I thought, listening to music on the Brazilian and South American bands along the track made you want to stop dancing, and the cheering on the sides was very important too, but even more the whispering about how far the finishing line was.

At the end of the race the adrenaline was super high, I received my adidas goody bag with lots of goodies sponsors (including a bag of Kellogg’s Special K, Nivea cream, toothpaste, mints and a bag of tea) and couldn’t wait to celebrate this achievement with friends.

It was a wonderful experience that I would repeat perhaps with the goal of making it in a better time, and I invite all of you to do it again with me.

Many thanks to all my friends who have supported Endometriosis UK with me! For those who have not yet done so and still wanted to help I’m happy to remind you that the Financial Times will match the amount raised, which at the moment is a great £140!

If you still want to contribute please do so.

Image by palmamod via Flickr

We just got back from Cagliari, Sardinia, where we spent some time enjoying the Summer sunshine. I only got round to taking a week off, while Gioia had an extra week before I joined her (which was good, so she could bake and get tanned before I arrived so that we could go to the beach at pensioners’ hours to avoid sunburns on my end).

The only negative thing of this break was the Serie A players’ strike which cancelled all games of the first game-day, including of course Cagliari – AC Milan which we had planned to go and see. But other than that, it was thoroughly awesome.

Most of the time was spent on the beach, eating, or a combination of the two. That is to say, proper holiday. It was nice of course to go to the main city beach, the Poetto, but we also travelled a bit more this time, visiting the beach at Mari Pintau (“painted sea”) and (whilst visiting some friends for a proper Italian lunch) at Torre delle Stelle with some awesome friends.

The best bit, however, was the boat trip we took on the second to last day before leaving. A friend of Gioia’s brother’s is a diving instructor, and is based just off Costa Rei, and was extremely kind and saved his entire afternoon to get us around the South-East tip of Sardinia. We got some bread, cheese and salumi at the San Benedetto market, where Gioia’s dad’s butcher shop is, as well as a few drinks, just in case we got thirsty while cruising.

The day was spent jumping in and out of the boat, diving to grab some sea urchins and to spot triggerfish in one of the only places where these can be found in the Mediterranean (seriously, there’s a marked buoy and you can “park the boat nearby and go down and they’re around there!). All of this after we got the only few drops of rain of the whole holiday: we got a bit worried but then soldiered on and had an amazing day.

Before getting back home on the day we stopped at the caddozzo by the Ossigeno football pitches, to have a nice sandwich (sandwich is an understatement), but weren’t left overly impressed.

Some very nice food was enjoyed, however, at Sciue’ Sciue’, a proper pizzeria napoletana in the heart of Cagliari. I like my pizza but usually I’m not a big fan of the way they do the napoletana one (it’s mostly to do with the crust) but was very happy with my calzone.

I was also very happy with the Plasmon ice-cream I had at the Isola del Gelato in Piazza Yenne: it had the exact taste of my favourite biscuits from when I was a kid, exactly that one. They have all sorts of flavours, from Galak to Bounty. You should go.

Shame it was only (for me) a week.

Image by palmamod via Flickr

Among the several groups I’m part of on Facebook and the pages I’m a fan of, there are a few (both Italian and English) that belong to associations of women who have in common a little-known chronic illness, endometriosis.

I don’t want to explain it into too much detail, but it must be said that feeling pain during your period is NOT normal, it doesn’t heal itself with pregnancy and no, you’re not mad if every month you feel really bad, so my recommendation to everyone in this position is to go and get yourself checked by a good doctor to identify the causes.

In Italy, over 3 million women are affected by endometriosis, the number rises to 14 million in Eurpe and over 150 million worldwide, and I am one of them.

This brief introduction aside, the reason I talk about it and I’m not ashamed of doing so is because I would love for people to know about it, and help friends and their families to have a diagnosis as early as possible, to help preventing the condition affect as many organs as possible in the abdominal area. I am really happy to see some recent coverage on Italian TV!

I talk about it because I am tired about the ignorance around this condition, tired of often explaining why I had surgery, going into delicate detail. I saw doctors in Cagliari, Milan, Oxford, London and finally Negrar, near Verona.

A few days back I saw the association Endometriosis UK mention the adidas Women’s 5K Challenge. It takes place on the 11th of September in London’s Hyde Park, with a great number of women, all together, running (or walking!) for 5km to support a charity close to their heart.

It will be a “different” day, surely fun, and indeed an opportunity to know new people, and there’ll be cakes and drinks at the finish line! But above all, it will be a great day to support fantastic charities. Why not?!

I must admit I’m not a big fan of running, it’s something I find tiresome and boring, so I’m not really into it. But at the end of the day, I’ve been walking to work for years and, well, I can train, so to get to 5km when you’ve been walking in London is achievable. And there’ll be people much older than I am so why sould I not be able to do it? I’ve got great motivation to help me cross the finish line.

Another great aspect is that the Financial Times, my employer, is goingto match the finds I will be able to raise up to a maximum of £500, so I really have no excuses.

To run on the day (but who needs excuses to do some shopping!?) I got a nice adidas kit, with 10% of my purchase going to breast cancer research. So I’ll have a nice black and pink kit and I will have made not one but two good deeds!

If you’d like to support Endometriosis UK with me, you can donate here! Even a single pound will make a huge difference.

In the past with some friends we organised a couple of AperiTweets, bringing the proper Italian aperitivo to London. For one of the events we invited Endometriosis UK and we helped raise over £300.

The charity sent me a pack with tips on how to properly train in 8 weeks, with a schedule of about 30 minutes runs, 3 times a week. I do it for myself but above all for all the fantastic people I met on the AIE forum, in hospital in Negrar last Summer, and all the great people I only got round to meet “virtually” thanks to Facebook and other websites. A special thought goes to the girls in the Cagliari and Sardegna group.

I’ll try to make my best to keep you up to date in the coming weeks.

Exactly one year ago I was in hospital, I had a 5-hours surgery, a full day in intensive therapy and it took almost 2 months for a full recover. Now I get myself ready to run for charity to help support and research so that women can avoid going through what I did.

A special thank you goes to the fantastic men who are supporting me with their donations! And to Matteo who’s now my official personal trainer and will be supporting me on the day as well, with dry clothes and more cupcakes at the end;)

Wish me good luck, I’ll need it!

Image via Wikipedia

And just like this, we happily left the magical nothing that is Stepney Green. Not much to be said about the area really, it’s quiet and not much is happening, and the flat itself was nothing incredible, so we decided to move out at the end of the contract. There was nothing keeping us in the area, too, so we had a nice look for a few different options.

Our search brought us to the likes of Shadwell, Wapping, Stoke Newington, All Saints, as well as some “closer” optons such as Aldgate and Mile End. Nothing really struck us or impressed us particularly, but thankfully we allowed ourselves quite a bit of time to find the right place for us.

At the end, we decided for an area we hadn’t originally even had a look at, the Isle of Dogs.

Now of course don’t quote us on that, but we felt prices went up quite a bit in the last 18 months, and from what we’ve seen in those 3-4 months we were hunting we felt for the prices we’d seen the average quality of the flats was actually better in the Isle of Dogs.

After the usual stress that is moving out and into a new flat (although I have to say it all went pretty smoothly) we’ve now been here for a good 6 weeks an have enjoyed it so far. The area is quite nice: the DLR is about 10 minutes away (it drives itself!), we see the river from our little balcony, we have a little park literally 2 minutes away and Mudchute and Millwall parks a bit further away but still within walking distance.

We’ve had our first guests in the form of a few friends who came round visiting, and we went around exploring a bit the area. We’ve identified a couple of local pubs and bars (our favourites so far being the Lord Nelson and The George in Glengall Grove), visited the uber-posh Asda in Crossharbour and enjoyed a nice enough pizza from the local Firezza place. We’ve even been brave enough to cross the River to Sarf London courtesy of the tunnel connecting Island Gardens to Greenwich.

We still have a lot to see and many places to visit. For starters, we should be found at the DLR Tweetup (yep, pretty geek…) on Wednesday next week, but we’ll also be updating this map:

as well as this photo stream

Still, I won’t become a Millwall fan.

Andalusia with fields full of grain
I have to see you again and again

So you’ve heard about the wonders of our trip to Andalucia (here you can read about Sevilla, Cordoba, Jaen, Granada, Malaga and Sevilla again), but we’d like to share with you some random bits and tips that helped us a lot.

The preparation

We chose the stops on our trip thanks to the lovely people of the interwebs, with a special mention to @Federchicca and her post on, you might have guessed, Andalusia. We only went to 3 of the 6 places she suggested, but until the very last minute we were thinking of visiting Guadix and Gibraltar too.

Once we had our flights booked, we sorted our accommodation via Hotels.com (which, disclosure, is a client at work) for our stay in Granada and HostelBookers for the other destinations. We booked a car from Sixt, which we’ve used in the past (when we went to Portugal) and never had any problem with, making sure the navigator was there. The one thing we should have done earlier and we didn’t was booking the visit to the Alhambra in Granada: we did manage to visit in the end, but only thanks to an Italian couple who sold us their tickets. So if you’re planning to visit Granada, book the tickets as soon as you know you’re going.

Getting around

To avoid getting lost and also astronomical roaming charges, I downloaded OffMaps 2 before leaving. It’s a nice little app that is well worth the one-off cost of the app itself and the extra map packages. It basically allows you to store offline maps (but you might have guessed it by now) and use them with your GPS (which does not use roaming data). It uses OpenStreetMap maps, which are great, and has layers of information from the likes of Wikipedia and Toptable.

Before leaving we also settled for The Rough Guide to Andalucia. The decision was made against the Lonely Planet guide, mostly because of the Rough Guide being more up to date, as well as having slightly better reviews on Amazon.

Other bits and pieces

Despite having used OffMaps to avoid getting lost in the mostly tiny streets of the main provinces in Andalucia, I still managed to have less than decent roaming charges thanks to the likes of Foursquare and Instagram, which I used relatively extensively to avoid forgetting the names of the places we’ve been to. I even managed to become mayor of a couple of places by being there twice!

And that’s pretty much it for our trip to Andalucia. We hope you’ve enjoyed it and that our trip could help you plan and enjoy yours!

Image via Wikipedia

Yep, we’ve come to the end of the journey. After the first stop in Sevilla, Cordoba, Jaen, Granada and Malaga, we returned to Sevilla for just over a day.

Ronda

We left Malaga in the morning with the same miserable weather that graced us the previous day, and took the road through the hills toward Sevilla, with the plan of stopping by at Ronda for lunch. The journey there wasn’t of the most pleasant, as the constant rain and all the twists and turns up and down the hills forced me to pass the wheel on to Gioa for her not to feel sick. The drive, on a nice day, must be fantastic, but that was just not the case.

By lunchtime we had reached Ronda, where, upon recommendation of our Rough Guide, we had a meal at El Porton, the local bullfighters’ favourite tapas bar, where we decided not to go for tapas but instead had nice meat platters. El Porton is only a few yards away from the Plaza de Toros, generally considered one of the most important in Spain for its history and contribution to the art of bullfighting. We didn’t go visit unfortunately, as the weather was really impossible. We made te mistake of having a coffee in the nearby bar: we asked for a “solo” but were presented with a “cafe con leche” instead. A huge one, which basically ruined the whole lunch. Unlucky, really, cause we had very nice coffee throughout the entire trip.

Back to Sevilla

We continued toward Sevilla, and set our GPS to the Triana quarter of town, where we checked-in (physically, and digitally) at the hostel and then handed the car back to the guys at Sixt. We kind of decided to relax and take our time until the flight on the next evening, so we just had a few tapas stops in the Triana area, before heading back to the hostel where, in the meanwhile, some forty 20-year-old Dutch students arrived for the weekend, but we managed to beat them with our precious ar plugs that pretty much saved us on the night.

The following day we attempted to visit the War Museum by Plaza de Espana, but #failed to find it for some reason, or maybe it was misplaced on the guide. No one around the Plaza was able to guide us on where we could find it, so we just left. We headed toward the Museo del Baile Flamenco, which we had attempted to visit the previous week but when we did go they had a show taking place so we could not visit. The museum is very interactive and explains a lot and very clearly, so even if you’re not really into it you can still appreciate it.

We headed back to the hostel, stopping for a last tapa, grabbed the bags and jumped on the bus to the airport, homebound. One last bit of advice: if you are waiting for the very last minute to send your postcards, you will be glad to know that yes you can buy stamps at the airport, and yes you can send them from there. The only thing is, you need to go through security as they sell the stamps there, but then the post box is outside it, so you need to head back and go through security again once you got the stamps. Retarded, maybe?

Image by palmamod via Flickr

We left Granada (after stopping in Sevilla, Corboba and Jaen) and headed toward Malaga. Malaga is the capital of the province by the same name, and was our only planned stop by the sea, which Gioia was particularly looking forward to.

Unlike the previous drives so far in the trip, we decided to avoid the main roads  and motorways and headed toward the mountains and the Zafarraya pass. On the way there we stopped by the stunning Embalse Los Bermejales, a reservoir just by Arenas del Rey, a small town in the south-western corner of the Granada province.

We stopped after a short continuation on our journey and had some tapas for lunch in the main square in Alhama de Granada, a spa town 50km from Granada. Historically it played an important strategic role for the Moors as it was on the main route between Malaga and Granada, overlooking the connection between the Spanish territories and the main port connecting the African homelands.

We proceded towards the Zafarraya pass and took the downhill road towards Velez-Malaga, then returning on the motorway along the seaside towards Malaga.

Malaga

We arrived in Malaga on Thurdsay in the early afternoon, and stopped briefly at the Hostel, Villa Alicia. The weather forecast suggested we were by far better off running at the beach as quickly as possible to make the most of the April sunshine, given the following day was supposed to be raining. So we headed to Pedregalejo, the main beach within the city, and just relaxed under the sunshine. We had a fantastic dinner at one of the many bars on the paseo del Pedregal, and just had a nice walk down the beach before heading back for a nice rest.

Needless to say, the following day was indeed raining. We took our time and decided to visit Picasso’s birthplace and the Museo Picasso. It was interesting to see how the Picasso Foundation described Picasso’s early years in Malaga, when he actually left for Madrid and never quite wanted to go back to his home town.

We stopped for lunch at El Pimpi, one of the best known bodega-bar in town, full of celebrity pictures on the wall. We weren’t overly impressed, however, and headed back to the hostel to (of course) check on the Royal Wedding. The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent lazying around, going out again in the centre of town and generally relaxing.

Overall, we can’t really say we liked or disliked the city, we probably spent too little time there and the weather didn’t help. After less than 48 hours, in fact, we were back on the move and headed back to Sevilla.