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I spent last week in Vaasa (Finland). It was not the first time I was there. Wartsila HQ are located in Vaasa, so there are quite many business reasons that can take you there.
Wartsila Vaasa factory is located on the waterfront and every time I looked outside I coundn’t believe it wasn’t Sudbury Ramsey Lake I was staring at.
I’ve been in Sudbury (Ontario, Canada) for almost 9 months. It is and it will always be a major landmark in my life, one of those that simply make you different. I remember the first -30 °C morning of my life, the black rocks, the thin trees, the huge amount of coloured leafs, the lakes. I remember the yellow school bus who took us (Papo, Ale, Matteo and I) to New Sudbury center, which did represent one of the most awaited events of the week. I remember crossing an iced lake during a snow storm to go grocery shopping at Four Corners Indipendent’s. Well, I remember so many things, too many even for a blog!

But, even if memories can be bad friends when it’s time for decisions, I could still not believe that Vaasa and Sudbudy nature looked so similar.
This morning I googled a couple of words and I found the answer: the soil age is about the same. It’s called “Precambrian shield“, which of course in Canada becomes “Canadian shield“. It’s widely present in North America, while in Europe it can be found only in the Scandinavian area. It’s present in many different areas of the world (even Saudia Arabia) and corresponds to what in the very past used to be areas of vulcanic activity and very large mountains. Millenia of severe erosion and the last ice age left the areas as they are now: a strong thin layer rich of mineral ores. Furthermore, I’ve found that both Sudbury and Vaasa areas are thought to be the site of an asteroid impact milions of years ago.

Isn’t that funny, to get to know things about a place where you lived for months just looking out of the window thousands of kilometers away from that place?

No cheap rooms in Bologna when important fairs occur. It’s a simple rule I had to learn.
Indeed yesterday night I stayed in Ferrara, only 30 minutes by train from Bologna. I took the 18:55 local train: packed, smelly, hot and late. In other words the usual Trenitalia experience. I took my seat and started waiting for the train to leave. I didn’t have anything to read, so I started looking around. In the end, trains are better than books or movies: they are among those few places where privacy is still an option… and it’s always so funny to look at the others!
Turning my head counter-clockwise:
young girl, studying; BORING; french girl, studying; BORING; young girl, doing nothing, nervous, shy; BORING; woman reading the newspaper, “FIAT profits benefit of boom in car sales” “Prodi claims he’s a victim”; INTERESTING headlines… but she got jealous, she did not like seeing me reading her newspaper; so I look down. Gosh! What a horrible pair of shoes! Fake leather meets Grandma style; I continued; man sending a SMS on a 4-years old Nokia phone. I remember when Papo bought that model. We worked at Dagard at that time. I continued; guy watching a movie on his wonderful 17″ macbook with iPod earphones; must be an Apple geek; one of those seeking in the brand the coolness he cannot express by himself; it remembers me something…
Then the train started slowing down… it was Ferrara station. The show was about to end.
I will always like trains!

Why is it so hard to find the first chapter of “A farewell to arms” on internet? It’s a novel published on 1929. I would expect to find at least a page, if not the book. I know, it’s because of the copyright, maybe. But does it make any sense to hide a literature masterpiece from the eyes of the readers after almost 70 years?
I listened to a Wharton Business School podcast today, where they said that in the long term contents will have to be free. No way to prevent that from happening. No Digital Content Rights management system will work. And this is not about comunism or some other ideological thing. It’s just about moving over, looking for new business models. The source has to be open. Services, ads, whatever thing will be used to gain money from opensource products I don’t know. But it’s clear that people want contents to be freely available. And even if I don’t give a damn about a free release of the latest Madonna single, I think it is a shame that literature masterpieces are not just there, waiting for the people to love them.