.. .: :: Francesca's delirium :: :. ..

People it's official. I am completely lost!
Even in the darkest night of my never-ending, depressing University years, in my heart I knew what I wanted ( = getting out of that place! ) and then in what direction I had to move.
Anyway, before I understand what's wrong, I will try and write looong emails to my faithful good old pen pals and I will spend 2 weeks with my family and friends in nicer and warmer countries.
I'm leaving on Tuesday 8th July. I hope I can leave my bad thoughts in this rainy place!
Wish me luck!!!

Yes, I am still in London and alive.
I am just constantly, extremely tired. I haven't changed job (I like this one at least) nor shared flat (but I promised myself to do it within the end of the so-called Summer) and I am looking forward to July because from the 8th to the 22nd I am on holiday in my home town. Actually I will spend one of the 2 weeks somewhere in Greece with my parents. I really can't wait!!! I couldn't ask for more. Sun, sea, good food and my loved ones. And a lot of people to talk to! Yeah!!!
Good night everyone and thanks to those who visit this blog every day :)

May the trash be with you!

Oh yeah. I needed to buy it after the (n+1)th rainy Sunday. My flatmate Mila and I went to Kiburn to do some shopping, and we both fell in love with this musical cushion (guess what song it plays). She bought one as well!
You wish you had one too huh?

Ok, not too much has happened recently... Apart from the fact that my sister came here 2 weeks ago and we spent a lovely week together!! But now I have no holidays until July... Argh!

Also, I must thank Stage Storm because thanks to them I could finally watch Garasu no Kamen Drama Special divinely subbed!!! Thank you girls! You rock!!!

I am looking for an other flat. What did London do to me? I never wanted to change anything, now I cannot find peace :p
Anyway, I am not in a hurry as I was before, so I will hopefully move only when I find a really suitable place for me :)
And if it keeps raining all Summer long, my new search for a house will be in Spain :)

Now something I bet you were waiting for!!
A book review! Yeah!



Daughter of China - The true story of forbidden love in modern China.

Actually, love is the least involving aspect of this page turner!
This doesn't mean to be a negative comment: the plot turned out to be completely different from what I expected - much, much better!
My interest for Chinese contemporary authors is reaching obsessive levels...

The story is settled in China during the years of the Cultural Revolution.
Meihong Xu is a strong-willed and determined young woman, born in a country village in a family of peasants. A passionate idealist and a dreamer, fascinated by the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army since her childhood, and with so many examples of heroic behaviour in her family to guide her, she becomes a member of the elite intelligent corps. And she is asked to spy on a professor of hers, the American Larry Engelmann.
The more Meihong gets to know him, the more she believes he is just a innocent, naive man. And she is attracted by him. Needless to say, the professor can't help being fascinated by this brilliant woman from such a different and charming country, who unlike her compatriots talks to him and even enjoys it...

This is just the beginning of a thoroughly enthralling true story, where a forbidden love affair is just the beginning of a chain reaction that will end up destroying Meihong's life in China and giving her a chance to start a new one.
In my humble opionion, things would have ended up the same way even without Larry Engelmann, at least as far as Meihong's faith in China and the Communist dictatorship. But well, the American element adds some Hollywood style and a sort of happy ending.
Happy ending... Larry calls it like that. I think he is trying to convince himself rather than us.
Personally, I found it very sad.
I mean, compared to the heart-wrenching real-life stories wonderfully described by Xinran in "The good women of China" and even in "Sky burial", Meihong's story has an happy ending indeed. Still, I feel so sorry for this woman.
I sympathize with her very much. She is clever and enthusiastic about learning something new.

She is a dreamer, an idealist; she is extremely ambitious and she needs to be independent.
It seems to me that she doesn't fit in anywhere, that she wants too much from life.
I believe that this is the destiny of any hopeless dreamer.
At the same time, I cannot help wondering if her life is just an other life stolen by the Communist dictatorship, just in a more subtle and less 'physical' way than the poor victims in the books mentioned above. Why was Meihong luckier than them? Probably because she was a high-ranking officer of the PLA and because she had very good connections.

What I like of this book is... Almost everything.
It gives a very interesting portrait of China during the cultural revolution, most interesting for me because from an high-ranking officer's point of view. You can follow step by step a detailed psychological analysis of an enthusiastic child and later cadet who grows up and finds it harder and harder to repress her feelings of distrust and disenchantment and who eventually just fights for her own life, against the country and the party she literally lived for.

Also, besides Meihong's life, we learn about her parents' and grandparents' lives, and
personally I was deeply touched by all of those stories, at least as much as I was by Meihong's story. There are also the other students of the academy, especially the other eleven Pandas (the only girl cadets), secretly bound by the same unrevealed feelings and loyal to each other like to nobody else. There are two men, Lin Cheng and then Larry Engelmann, deeply in love with their ex-wife. And there are a lot of other characters, the General, the Colonel, the man who gives Meihong a lift, the train conductors, even the nameless students of Tiananmen Square...
All of them give their contribute to make this story unforgettable.

There is something I have to say though. The story is told from Meihong's point of view, but Larry is the writer. The story is said to be a true story, but how much has been censored? How much filtered? How much embellished?
Meihong herself was trained to lie and proved that she could do it amazingly well.
Isn't there a chance she deliberately omitted or changed some parts of the story for some reason? Or that Larry himself wanted to make the story more romantic or dramatic or whatever?

Anyway, I guess this doesn't matter after all.
Whether fiction or not, this is a book you will not only enjoy but fall in love with.

A link to a very interesting review:
Weekend Reading: Daughter of China

Hello nice people, I am in PMS again. And there is no better time to find out what I have just found out...

Poll:

You have not recovered yet from a nervous breakdown due to a very difficult 6-month flat sharing when even your privacy and private property were denied, a dodgy man with a son your age put his filthy hands on you and the lovely girl who married that man's son tells you if you don't like hugs and kisses it's your problem.
And you didn't have to share the flat only with 6 other people, there were also an undefined number of lively bed bugs playing hide and seek.
You rushed to move out in the same day as the only 2 people you liked in the overcrowded flat moved out.

You decided that the quality of life is more important than money, and accepted to spend one third of your salary for a single(!) room in a house where an other girl and a young couple (landlords) were living. You were assured you will be provided everything you need.

The day you move in, you are told 'all included' doesn't include internet. You complain and landlady accepts to make internet included.
Then you find out you have to provide for your own toilet paper and that you are not allowed to enter the living room, but you cook in the kitchen and eat upstairs in your room with carpet on the floor.
Moreover, you have to breathe in all the smelly toxic gases coming from your wall, since they painted all just before you moved in (and your flat mate later will tell you this is to hide the humidity stains).
Later you realize that you don't have a DVD but a video cassette player (unlucikily, DVD is not mentioned in the ad in gumtree so this may be all your fault). Also, the TV is just a brand new but dead monitor, and after a month or more, landlord hasn't found the time to connect it to the freeview thing, whatever this crap is. Landlady insists that you can still watch video cassettes.
You try to see movies in horror-quality streaming video thanks to this marvellous thing called internet, but the internet connection drops every 10 minutes and you lose everything every time.
The TV is not the only thing you are still waiting for, there is also an airer for your laundry that landlady reluctantly promised to buy for you but apparently forgot. Your room looks like a gypsy camp and your clothes risk to smell like mould all the time you decide to wash them.

You are not allowed to have people sleeping in your room.
You had to ask for a special permission for your sister, who is coming visit you next week. But well, you knew that since the beginning and you accepted anyway since you were desperate.

You find out one night that there is no hot water when the heater is off. So if you try and take a shower at midnight but probably also earlier, you'll make friends with penguins and polar bears.

Now, the last nice surprise. The third room, that they wanted to rent, is apparently much bigger than yours, with a big wardrobe and cupboard and a double bed. You wanted a double bed but they said to you that it was 20% more expensive than yours.
You couldn't afford it.
You recently checked gumtree and saw landlady's ad. She used an other email address but the same telephone number (haha). So you know it's her. And guess what. The girl who is coming here will pay exactly what you pay but she will have more space, 2 cupboards and a double bed.

The question is.

What do you do?

1. Harakiri
2. You start laughing so loud that your family in Italy can hear you
3. You take a picture of yourself smiling like an idiot and holding a piece of cardboard that reads: 'Yeah!' (Acknowledgement people know)
4. You don't care about your 1-month deposit and you run away with the penguins and the polar bear
5. You eat a giant vegetarian pizza, a magnum white, a cereal bar and you forgot the rest.

Let me know your answers!!!

Any insult is appreciated and deserved :p

I am curious about my sister's opinion about the house and everything. Can't wait to have her here! I haven't had a proper chat to someone for ages!!! Luckily there are some Italians in London to hang out with some weekends :)

Have to go for a walk. Needless to say, I chose option 5...

This so-called British Summer Time (we are talking about hours, not weather!!!) knocked me out!
I used to wake up before my alarm clock went off, but now I have a heart attack every morning when I hear it...
Yesterday morning I left my pyjamas in the bathroom, some tins for the recycling bin in the corridor, and when I came back in the evening I withdrew and gave my landlady double the weekly rent. I even counted it twice and thought it was OK.
Luckily she gave me back half of it, and she also asked me if I was in a hurry in the morning since I left all my stuff around the house. She suggested that I sleep more... Haha as if I didn't want to!

I bought a scale last week. Easter week was horrible: I was in London, homesick, and the weather was so miserable! We had 3 days in a row with a very cold temperature, rain, snow and hailstones. Luckily there were many Italians around, so we had a proper Italian big lunch. Which is good.
But thanks to the weather I didn't have a chance to have proper long walks, and I can see the results.
I am supposed to start a strict diet, but honestly little voices tell me I will not be able to do it. My cupboard is still packed with cereal bars, cakes and chocolate :p
Anyway, even if I knew I was too fat, the number displayed on the scale shocked me. I hope it will help me to give up eating so much junk food :p

A few days ago, a visitor of my own favourite site, (Maya no Garasu no Kamen) wrote me to ask to link to her forum. Then, she asked to use some images in that forum. Of course I gave her permission. Just to thank me, she congratulated on my site and she said that she always talks about it to other fans in the forum, since everybody thinks that Stage Storm is the best site ever. LOL That's a compliment.
If I had been in PMS I would have deleted my site from the net forever.
But I don't care any longer and I in the night am too tired even to open a ftp program :p
[NB. This is not meant to be a post against Stage Storm. The owners are nice friends of mine and I already knew that their site, younger than mine, became more popular. But I really don't care about that at all. I just thought the one mentioned above was a very original compliment]

Ok, it's time to start working...

I was asked by my most faithful reader about books I am reading, so be prepared for an other review with my next post! :)

Yes, I have moved out at last.
Not the room of my dream but hopefully what I need to recover from the 6-month difficult flat sharing. Ania and Miesko moved out too, in the same day, and they gave me a lift. Lovely lovely friends. ♥

I unpacked everything yesterday, and since the weather was awful during the whole weekend, I spent the day at home lazying around, doing the laundry, buying a lot of food as usual, and eating of course.
Photos of the room? Check Facebook or write me an email :)
I just hope to have a quiet life for a while. Let's see what happens when landlady prepares the contract. Wish me good luck!

One wonderful thing that happened earlier in the evening. I found in a Lidl store the Kinder Chocolate I used to love when I was a child. Exactly the same package, only written in an other language. I am not sure the photoshopped child is the same though. If so, he could probably be my grandfather now :p
Anyway, I felt nostalgic and now I have one more treat in my cupboard :p