I love Company!!

Guys, once wedding madness has passed and your normal friends Sharon and Fabien are returned to you, please feel free to drop by Turin.

Hans and his lovely sister are over here now, and it is nice to have them staying in our house and proposing architectural solutions! They are probably going to see more of Turin then we will...

We are located at

Via San Massimo, 53
Torino 10123 Turin

(Let me double check that postal code, now that I have typed it, it looks wierd!)

Wedding Madness Part 2

Hi everyone I will go quiet now because I am running around with wedding madness (Part 2) !!! The planning in France is nuts.

My phone number is (39) 3489158187

Call me to say hello, and remind me to take Deep Breaths...

The Grand Conspiracy

We had this interesting lecture on FIDIC contracts. For those of you that don't know, this is the French Acronym for Federation Internationale De Ingenieurs - Conseils, which came up with the Bible of International Construction Contract - the FIDIC conditions.

How did these contract conditions become so popular? Well, it has to do with the tender process of all 3rd world countries who take development aid from the World Bank and other similar organisations. Apparently, in order to qualify for such construction grants, the recipient country has to agree to use the FIDIC tender conditions, which are recognised as a fair mechanism in the competitive tender process. Hahaha by no small coincidence, the global commercial arbitration industry (excluding ICSID and other investment arbitrations) is ruled by about 70 percent construction arbitration, and guess who are the resident FIDIC experts? the European arbitrators of course!

It is a grand conspiracy I tell you..

Summer is in the air

One thing that I do NOT miss about Singapore is the constancy in weather. You can feel the anticipation in the air at each change in season. Now the days are getting longer in Turin, the flowers start to appear on trees and shrubs and days are getting longer. You start waking up really early in the morning, thinking that you are late, because the sun is so high in the sky. And you start eating dinner increasingly later because you keep thinking that it is still afternoon! I love being a student, but as this course starts to draw to a close, everyone is wondering what they will do next. I really want to continue to be friends with the people I have met on this course, but realistically I will consider myself lucky if I can keep in touch with a handful of these people in a year's time. On verra...

Ikea should sponsor this blog

Okay I have already asked Hans for his architectural opinion on this issue, and we will now straw poll the rest of the readers of this blog (yes all 3 of them!!)

The guest "room" and the master "room" are actually the same large room, and we need to figure out how to partition the two "rooms" in a way that will enhance privacy (visual, audio, we will take whatever we can get!).

Any proposed solution must be subject to the same sloping roof so the partition cannot be the same uniform height. The two "rooms" are at the attic-loft level, which means that it is all of 40cm tall at the lowest point, and about 3m at the highest point. Oh yes, and there is also cost constraints, so this means that the solution will probably involve purchases from ikea... Soo Any bright ideas?

Box-Land

It is official we have moved into our new home. Which is Via San Massimo number 53. It is the land of boxes and unpacking! It is not so bad. Yesterday Mira and Cri came to help me to unpack stuff whilst Fab built shelves and finally our BED (all courtesy of IKEA). Then we all went out for Pizza dinner at our favourite pizza restaurant, where the waiter spent all night trying to figure out where Mira and I came from. It must have been tough for him because Mira and I look kind of similar (sort of Asian) but she is from Kazhakstan and I am from Singapore, so it was really funny to see him struggling! Each time he brought a course, we would give him another clue!