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We shall revitalise this blog, shan't we?

After a long time, the last December I managed to organise a real down-on-the-road trip (by train) getting to the Netherlands and northern Germany, in places I have never visited before, except one: Berlin, where I've been once 15 years ago.

It was that kind of journey I always long for, just travelling on local trains, watching people and places. And what a nice feeling to meet also people I know living in many different places. That was what gave me the most of the whole trip, that was a real fun everyday everywhere I have been!

I got to Amsterdam by plane and then started to travel by train making my way through most of the main towns in Holland, and then I shifted to to visit the winter markets (and not only) of many German towns. All the way to Berlin, which I have to mention separately.

I've been just once in Berlin before, in the summer of 1995, and I really have to say i couldn't recognise it, so much it has changed after all these years. Still, the atmosphere is so particular, I couldn't avoid to get involved in the night life, full of people at any time. Without much chaos, it looked also quite safe, a big town where maybe life is not that bad, after all.

Here below the full route of my Dutch-German trip, and I've also taken some pictures.

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I don’t like to talk about politics. I’ll try to stick with the facts, then.

There has been a lot of moaning about the bill on publications announced by the Italian Government (no English there, sorry) on requiring any blog and Internet journal (in law language, “any website with a purpose of information, education, dissemination or entertainment“, Art. 2, Par. 1 of the above mentioned law) to subscribe to a national register (Art. 6 and 7 of the same law), as well as to name an editor in chief responsible for the information published.

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As I was talking about different ways of getting a hangover, I decided to have a look at the real consumption of alcohol in some European countries. Here are the results.

Alcohol consumption per capita
Units: Liters of pure alcohol per adult (15 years and older)

Source: Global Alcohol Database, World Health Organization (WHO).
Rationale for the statistics

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I was lately wondering how worth it is for the UK to keep their own currency instead of switching to the euro. That is, apart from patriotic reasons, is it really worth it?

I’ll leave this as an open question, since I’m not expert in economy. But I’m a good nerd: so I got the currency exchange rates from 1.1.2002 to 18.5.2007 and plotted the values in euro of 1 British pound during this period:

Source: http://www.oanda.com/convert/fxhistory

Update 10.7.2007: The European Central Bank has a wonderful page to plot the historical exchange rates.

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Since I haven’t written anything since March, and the last post was a sort of long live to Europe, I decided to start to talk about European affairs in a more interesting way.

This time I’ll talk about unemployment. Here are the figures at March 2007 (if not otherwise stated), from the lower to the higher (Denmark and Holland rule, nothing to say).

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Vive l’Europe! Vive la République!

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