The European tour

This week Colombian president Alvaro Uribe is visiting Europe, in what it's been called "the European tour". This "tour" actually only comprises two countries, Spain and Italy. Yes, it's kinda crappy a tour. That's what happens when you are a president and you do very little about the human rights violations in your country: nobody wants you as a visitor.

So, you might be wondering: how come Uribe is going to be a guest of honor in Spain? Spain is an obvious choice given that Spanish groups own pretty much what is worthy in Colombia: communications, banks, natural resources. President Uribe will be hosted by President Zapatero and the Kings of Spain. But those gatherings are only a formality. The important meeting will be next Wednesday, in a breakfast with all the CEOs of managerial groups in Spain which own (or are planning to own) a piece of Colombia.

The choice of Italy seems less obvious. The diplomatic relationships between the countries are practically inexistent. There are no big Italian companies in Colombia and unlike other southamerican countries, Colombia did not have a large mass of Italian immigration. I see two reasons for Uribe's visit to Italy: the Vatican and Berlusconi. Indeed, Uribe will spend most of his two days in Italy visiting Vatican city and the Colombian priests who happen to be influential there. Not a surprise, given his ultraconservative profile.

Uribe and Berlusconi share so many things that the topic well deserves a series of posts. I don't know what it's worse: a Southamerican president that reminds us of the most incompetent European leader, or an European president that behaves as the most populist third-world president. Both are right-wing guys, extremely popular and populist. They have little respect for the courts and judges in charge of the corruption cases related to them. In fact, an ideal scenario for them would be a world without courts. Both Uribe and Berlusconi were disappointed when Obama got into office.

This is Uribe proudly showing the latest achievement of Colombian diplomacy: Barack Obama's autograph. (Not a joke, really.)

I think Urbe's visit will be largely ignored in Italy, a country in which news from Southamerica are scarce and uninteresting. Here only Chávez appears into main headlines. Perhaps Italian media will only comment on President Uribe's weird habit of giving away Colombian citizenship certificates as he travels around the world. (Yes, Uribe has a very strange definition of 'souvenir') As of next Friday, I will share citizenship with Letizia Moratti, mayor of Milan. How about that?

Dubbed Films in Italy

It is well-known that in European countries having dubbed TV shows and movies is customary. It can be quite difficult to find cinemas with movies in the original language. There are social and cultural reasons for that. In the case of Italy, however, there is a disturbing widespread misconception regarding dubbed films. The misconception is complex and comprises several factors:

• The loss of details associated to every dubbing process is largely underestimated. So for instance, not only losing the chance of understanding a subtle joke in the original language is disregarded, but it is believed that the dubbing faithfully captures such jokes.
  
• Some people think that watching dubbed films is actually the right thing to do. They seem to think, for instance, that in that way they won't get lost with local jokes/slang. (They ignore they might be laughing about very different jokes than the intended in the film.) Moreover, there are actors who are popular for dubbing particular Hollywood actors. So, when thinking of, say, Woody Allen, they immediately remember the actor who does his voice in Italian. (This guy, called Oreste Lionello, recently passed away. I guess that there are some who think that Woody Allen died with him).
• To complete this (already dramatic) misconception, many people in Italy think that the concept of "high quality dubbing" exists. So, it has happened that when I complain about the fact that most movies are available only dubbed, people reply to me: "but we have outstanding dubbing artists, and the overall quality of the dubbing is quite good".

As for the third item, it is convenient to state, in the strongest possible terms, the following. Similarly as concepts such as "5 minute naps", "honest politicians", "punctual Italian trains", the concept of "high quality dubbed movies" only resides in the human imagination. It must be understood that every dubbed movie comes with an irreparable loss of what one could term as "original language content". This of course varies from movie to movie, and there could be some of them in which the loss is negligible. (This is the case of, I think, animated movies and TV shows.)

This loss also applies, naturally, to the subtitles they add so to avoid dubbed movies. In the case of subtitles, however, you still can perceive the original tone and intention of the actor. That is, a significant part of the actual acting is preserved. Some can complain about the concurrent action of watching a movie and reading some subtitle. I can admit that this can be annoying if you're not used to it, but I think the effort it's worth doing.

There is also the fact that movie theaters in Colombia most of the movies come with Spanish subtitles (some of them crappy ones). So I am very much used to it. This (and the fact that I've found watching films and TV in English quite useful for my language skills) could explain my aversion to dubbed films.

Now you, my dear Italian reader, would like to comment on this, and create controversy, if possible?

On Earthquakes

As you probably know, last week an earthquake destroyed a significant number of towns in Abruzzo, in the center of Italy. Around 300 died and thousands were affected in different ways.

The earthquake brought out several issues that I find interesting. I will only comment on two of them. First, even if Italy is a country known to be prone to earthquakes, the concept of earthquake engineering is not widely used. Not even modern constructions are built considering the possibility of an earthquake. Truly unbelievable. Coming from Colombia, where most buildings have been built or adapted so as to resist earthquakes, I found that very intriguing.

The second thing that surprised me was that the public reaction to a natural disaster was exactly like in Colombia. Not only: there is a widespread tendency to donate money. But, does a "first-world" country such as Italy really need money to overcome this?

One would expect an European country to be financially prepared to face unexpected events, including (and especially) natural disasters. Not only regular people pay taxes for that (money that funds civil associations such as the fireman and the Red Cross) but also insurance companies should take care of the bulk of the reconstruction costs. Perhaps the state should inject some fresh money and activate suitable logistics to ensure a timely reaction, but that should be a fraction of the entire reconstruction costs. Not even donating stuff makes sense: that should be covered by any reasonable emergency plan. The only thing worth donating in these cases is blood.

I am afraid that donating money is only useful for the donor: some sort of personal satisfaction by means of an SMS, I suppose. The (rather ephemeral) satisfaction of doing something. So perhaps the only benefited from those donations is the corrupt political system that rules Italy. The same political system that should have enforced strict policies for earthquake-resistant buildings. The same system that has publicly stated that reconstruction will take "many years".

Poor Italy. (I was tempted to conclude with "poor Italians" but, as they say, each country has the government it deserves.)

The little tray

Of the many differences between Europe and Colombia, there are a few that make no sense to me, regardless of how many elaborate explanations I try to devise. Today I want to complain about one of them: the little money tray.

It turns out that when you want to pay something (in the supermarket, a little shop, the university canteen) you're not supposed to hand in the money to the cashier: you're supposed to leave it in a little tray for him/her to take it. If you are to receive some change, the person will put it in the tray and you're supposed to pick it from there.

In Colombia using such a tray would be surely out of the question: if I want to pay something and I simply leave the money next to the cashier, he or she would have every reason to be upset. Indeed: in our culture anyone would find offensive (or disrespectful) the act of forcing the other to pick up the money from some surface when you could have given it to his/hand with a similar effort.

I guess that the main motivation of the tray is to keep money transactions as impersonal and cold as possible. Perhaps accidentally touching the customer when giving back the change is a bad corporate habit. Or perhaps the little tray is to represent the fact that the cashier respects the customer so much that he/she is not allowed to hand in the money. Who knows.

My main problem lies on the fact that I am extremely clumsy when picking up little coins in a rush. So, if the little tray's purpose was to speed up transactions, they failed with me. And I am pretty sure I am not the only clumsy one around.

A tropical Bilderberg

You might have heard of the Bilderberg Group, an exclusive club of politicians, kings, queens, bankers and businessman that gathers together annually to discuss the general situation of the world. Their meetings --which have taken place since 1954-- are held in top-secret circumstances to encourage open discussion, or so the organizers say. The mystery associated to the group have made conspiracy lovers believe that every aspect of the destiny of the world is decided in those meetings. The group, they say, represents pure capitalism plotting world domination. Domination in the form of a "New Order" in which we all are slaves of big corporations and banks. More moderate analysts consider the Bilderberg group a special academic exercise, a "harmless forum" where many issues are discussed.

You might be surprised to learn that Southamerica has its own version of the Bilderberg group. Indeed, some weeks a selected group of Southamerican billionaires got together for some sort of summit in Cartagena, Colombia. The official purpose of the meeting was to discuss the best management strategies in times of global crisis. It seems the thing was more like a tropical Bilderberg: there was much less mystery and much more press coverage. No surprise here: Southamerican rich people surely understand that having money makes little sense if you don't make sure everyone knows you're rich.

And that's what our tropical billionaires did. Complete rich families from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela attended. Rich from Colombia also attended: they made the sacrifice of leaving their lofts in NYC to spend some days in Colombia and host their friends. They all arrived in their private jets; Cartagena's little airport couldn't host all of them. The selection of Cartagena was certainly not random: a historic city, with nice weather and exotic private islands was the perfect setting. You must know that Cartagena is probably one of the most Colombian cities in Colombia: a city where extremely poor people challenge everyday the definition of misery. In Cartagena the poor and rich live so close to each other that is shocking. Poor and rich have learned to survive by systematically denying the existence of the other: after all, from the rich perspective poor ones are disgusting, scare the tourists, and live out of the law; from the poor perspective, rich ones represent the frustration of a decent life their eyes will never see.

So, Cartagena was the perfect place for restoring the millionaire self-esteem of those who lost some positions in the Forbes ranking precisely that week. Southamerican millionaires walked along the historical center of the city, which was suitably cleaned, emptied and secured for their relax. At the end of the event, Colombian millionaire Luis C. Sarmiento read a rather ridiculous statement on behalf of all attendees: they had concluded that the best way of dealing with the crisis was not firing people from their companies. Nonsense: they are already doing it! It was then clear than the tropical Bildenberg has still much to learn from the original Bilderberg: the secrecy of the event is essential to avoid stupidity leaks.