Mad Monday

We awoke bright and early for our first day of “real work” in Torino. Not that we had to do a great deal, swanning around and being presented to by various companies. First up we experienced “Experientia”, a couple of Dutch/Belgian guys who were bringing the revolutionary concept of ‘designing for the users’ to Italy.

They had scored themselves a very nice little piece of Torino. An old apartment overlooking one of the endless beautiful courtyards in the heart of the city. Lavishing in the cheaper rental prices that Italy allows after the overcrowded Benelux. Unfortunately this lovely view meant four flights of stairs… we arrived sweating. Schmick and polished in his suit, in stark contrast to us, Mr. Nederlands began the presentation, while his audience tried desperately not to be lulled to sleep by his dulcet tones. Fortunately My Belgium came in after a while and hi-jacked the presentation with his scatterbrained but more effervescent manner of speech.

For some reason, Experientia was hungry for interns. “Please come and be our interns! We pay! We’ll help you find a house in Torino! We’ll massage your feet”. Secretly I wondered if perhaps they were design vampires, who relied on interns as their only food source. I tried to warn the Italianophile Dutch students… “No, it’s a trap!”, but still they seemed attracted by the prospect
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The problem about having such a swanky piece of real estate was that they only had room for half of us at once. So after we left, the other half battled the stairs while we cooled our heels for an hour. I made it my mission to find a bathroom. We were drinking coffee in a rather pleasant café in a rather pleasant arcade, but for some reason bathrooms seemed to be entirely lacking. I asked the pleasant tuxedoed young man through a series of noises and gestures that I hoped sounded vaguely Italian. He appeared to respond that the bathroom was around the corner and to the right. Following these directions brought me, bewildered, into a small handbag shop.

I tried again, and this time returned with the essential ingredient: the key. First I had to find the giant riot-proof wooden door, cleverly hidden between two shops. Inside was a staircase which I hopefully climbed until directed back down by an irate tenant. The only option left was a rubbish filled alleyway, which I circled grandly until I eventually found another secret door. They key fitted! Success! My treasure hunt over, I had arrived at yet another delightful hole-in-the-ground toilet.

Our hour long wait stretched into an hour and a half. There is only so long you can sit and drink coffee, so instead Agnes and I wandered off and found, completely unheralded, a huge and opulent museum courtyard. It was apparently deserted and disregarded by the overly history-saturated Italians. So we had a few snap-happy minutes until at last the rest of our group emerged.

For the afternoon a forum with IAAD, the Italian school of design was scheduled. The secret agenda of course, was to wring the Italian students for all they were worth in terms of knowledge about the local bars. In this much it was a success, in many other aspects, painful. Together we did some workshops, designing new solutions based on different food products and how to incorporate them into the ‘slow food’ movement. Our group was me, Nico, Kirsten and two Italians. One was so horrifically bored by the entire proceedings that he chose instead to spend the whole time texting other Italians. The other one had very strong ideas, and passion about his design. Unfortunately he didn’t speak a word of English. It was not the most functional design team, alas.

Mercifully the torture was short, and soon we were happily eating aperitifs in one of the bars that had previously been so mysteriously hidden away. This was followed by a rather chaotic dinner, as we were joined by a group of Italian students… who we had not entirely planned for, including the Italian version of Ali G. The committee and the waiters of course had a mild conniption, but in the end things sorted themselves out and we were all happily eating pizza and drinking fizzy red wine (well….putting up with fizzy red wine). The evening culminated with a waiter spilling coffee all over Maarten, for which he got another glass of free red wine, which I quite happily relieved him of.

We trundled off after the Italians to yet another secret Quadrilatero Romano bar; 5KM, that mysteriously appeared out of its external dimension in the presence of the gatekeeper Italians. The bar was endearing in terms of its vast cocktail menu and Turkish style seating of cushions on the floor, but also boasted another of the world’s worst toilets. They had neglected to put locks on the door, but compensated for this by making the doors transparent, so you could see if there was someone inside of not. Brilliant! I believe this was designed to sell more drinks as you had to have enough Mojitos so that you no longer cared if anyone saw you or not.