"Now you have to ask yourself one question: do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"

If you ever wondered what is like to open your eyes in front of an african sunrise, or you dream about swimming with turtles at the Great Barrier Reef, then just keep dreaming, because I have never been there.

Instead, last year I moved from Florence (Tuscany) to Malta because of poker: I am not a player like you may have thought at first, I am a poker journalist who writes articles and records podcasts for an italian website.

Living here sometimes is strange and could be funny, "but not ha-ha funny": this is one of the reasons I decided to open this blog, to talk about what is like living here from my personal, irriverent and supposed-to-be-amusing point of view.

Maybe some of you guys are thinking about moving here, maybe some others are here already, are about to leave the island or will not move here even if this was the last place on Earth.

What I think about this place?

Apparently, this is not your lucky day: to have an answer, I am afraid you will have to keep reading.

I don't mind stealin bread

From the mouths of decadence.

It's nice not to be alone in this cruel 2014

How could you leave Florence?

Well, as I said I did it because of my job, but I think that you never really leave Florence, once you were born there and you lived there like I did.

The city just becomes parts of you, not only because you have your friends and memories there, but also because a certain way to face life which is typical of people coming from Florence becomes a part of your personality.

Also, if you like art, food and wine like I do it's difficult (even if still not impossible) to find a place like that, sometimes it feels just magical.

Of course people coming from Florence usually think that it's the most beautiful city in the world: I don't know if this is true, probably not, but I don't think it's too far from that

Finally, of course I don't plan to live in Malta forever, it's just an experience.

#1 You nailed it!

Some of you may think that there are not too many things worst than an ugly woman with a manly voice, but try to visualize the same girl with some horrible, long, fake nails, who is sure to be cool because of this.

If you hate yourself enough to do this kind of imagination effort, then you will exactly know one of the most inexplicable and common style nightmare that you have to face in Malta every time you walk into a bar, a supermarket, a restaurant, damn: just wherever.

I don't know who was so able to convince almost every maltese girl that they need to wear fake nails in order to look pretty: I already crossed out Scarlett Johansson and the Virgin Mary from the list, but you know, that may take a while to be figured out.

Don't get me wrong, If I meet a girl with black Chanel nail posh that's a huge bonus in my books, but pink with supposed-to-be-Swarovsky on it?
Everyone is a victim of his own perversions and I won't judge it, but just keep those things away from my sight.

Someone could say that when it comes to personal tastes is not possible to argue, but let's be honest: some choices look just wrong.

If you never listened to a Pearl Jam album, if you have never been in Europe, if you never watched "Natural Born Killers" or a George Carlin show, well: you may want to reconsider something.

Unfortunely, I don't expect my blog to be readed by a huge percentage of the maltese female population, so this words are likely to be useless.

Nevertheless, that could be also my safeway: if some of them get offended and decide to plant those colourful weapons in my back I may have an hard time not to swear 'cause I don't have a gun...

Malta's got those good milk balls.

#2 Man in the box

What if I say I will never surrender?

I strongly believe that, as a human being, you have to be curious to meet the person that you can become just by pushing yourself, letting your potential explode and surprising you, when you finally realize how different is the man that you used to be from the one that you are becoming.

I turned 30 this year. When I was 18, I remember thinking about people in their thirties like completely grown up men, and also wondering who cool it would have been to be just like Chris Cornell.

Then I grew-up, and realized not only that I was still far from ChrisCornellizingMe, but most importantly that the man that you want to be is not going to knock on your door on a spring morning in order to take your place, neither you are going to wake-up from the bed one morning and lefting the "old you" lied there as an empty shell, because now you are an adult and you just "evolved" during the night.

Being in Malta just because of my job was just not enough for me, I needed at least another reason: I needed to come closer to the man I still want to be.

At the end of the day, I think this is the main reason I began to do crossfit.

One year ago I discovered crossfit thanks to some friends, who told me to check it out, and it almost immediately looked fascinating to me. But I was going to leave Florence, and the only place where they practiced it in the whole city was at the opposit part of the town.

So I checked where I would be able to do it in Malta, but disappointingly it was still quite far from where I was going to live: I have no car here, and using the bus especially during the night could easily turn in a frustratring experience here.

So at the beginning I just went into a regular gym, but I was always finding excuses for not going, and you know that when it comes to lie to yourself you will be able to find always at least one good way to do it.

Then, it happened: a new place dedicated to crossfit opened near to my office.
They were running also a class for absolute beginners, and so I thought it would have been perfect for me: I have never been overweight neither too skinny, but I was not doing a serious workout from a long time. And men, that **** turned out to be definitely serious.

I went to that class, and all the people were better than me: running faster, weighting more and easily, they had a better balance and coordination. Basically, I wasn't able to follow them. But giving up was not even an option.

Instead, I decided to start a personal training with my coach, a swedish girl who turned out to have my same age but for some reasons seemed older to me, maybe because when you are an apprentice your "guide" always seems older than you.

If you never tried crossfit before, you should do yourself a favour and give it a shot. You will suffer, a lot. You will find yourself broken in two on the floor, sweating and questioning if your heart and body would be able to manage that this time.

You will repeat yourself that the only thing that you need is breathing. You will find impossible to complete all the rounds of your daily workout. Minutes will become just nails stabbing your chest, but surprisingly, in one way or another, you will be able to leave "the box" on your own legs every single time.

In my opinion there are quite a lot of things in common, between a crossfit session and life. In both, you will find yourself in hard situations, discovering quite soon that you are not ready to face them, but still having to handle it as good as you can, despite realizing that what you would like to do is beyond your current possibilities.

But again, most of the time you will be able to go through that, against odds that were against you just because you thought so.

#3 We had a blast!

Do you like explosions? I think I used to, at least before moving here.

The thing is, apparently in Malta people just go crazy about fireworks and that may sounds understandable, but trust me: it's not.

The first clue that you are not facing just a moderate how-cute-is-that-attitude is that here they have the Fireworks World Championship. Battling for the crown you can find maltese, chinese and italian people: the show is great honestly, but that is just the beginning of the real madness.

In fact, starting from may and until september, in Malta you will find fireworks almost everyday, even in the middle of july on a saturday morning: it doesn't sound that cool anymore, does it?

The question is, why on Earth someone would use fireworks in the middle of the day, when you just can hear the explosion without being able to see anything but some smoke? Because that is the goal: to make some mother****ing noise. The more it is, the more the fun.

It is just a tradition, linked to a lot of religious celebrations that they have during the summertime. If you just think about that for a minute, it may actually even make sense. I mean, maybe the problem is not that God does not exist, maybe we just didn't make enough noise to be noticed!

Maybe we were so close to the truth that we were not able to see it: we didn't need more cowbell, we just needed more fireworks.

So, this is basically the reason why you will possibily have an hard time sleeping properly during the weekends of the next four months, and when you will find yourself thinking about that friend who told you that he had a blast in Malta, well, you will finally understand what he meant to say.