I knew this would happen… it was just a matter of time.

I am talking about my father joining Facebook and commenting on my posts.

Over the weekend, he and a former high-school friend of mine were congratulating me on an article I wrote… and this is so surreal.

Interacting with my family and old friends in the same space as we used to do 27 years ago (before I left Italy) is just so strange.

It feels like continuing the conversations we were having every time my father would pick me up from school… on hot June days… before we would all part for the glorious Italian summer.

Is someone out there studying the space-time dimension of Facebook?

This social networking site is certainly doing something to the psyche of people like me… who, after being gone for years, all of a sudden, are invited to sit again at a table they thought no longer existed.

Reconnecting with my high-school friends has been like being washed by a wave of emotions. It’s like having my little private group of cheerleaders. The other day before giving a speech, I closed by eyes and thought of my friend Paola, who used to be my best friend back then and who wrote on my wall that she had always known I would do great things (whatever those might be…).

May be what’s happening to me is just one of the many examples behind the success of Facebook, which has now grown to 500 million users worldwide (up from 200 million 15 months ago).

70% of them are outside the United States. While the number of users in the US doubled in 09 (to 123 million), it more than quadrupled in Germany (to 19 million).

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg expects the company to reach one billion users. It is the stories behind this figure that I long to hear some day.

I have times like this… when my blogging streak seems to run dry.

May be it’s because it’s June. When I was growing up in Italy, June was the month when school would end and it would soon get too hot to think…

Or may be it is because the 5th anniversary of my move to London is coming up…

This city and I have a very intimate way of getting along. I have written before about the sheer anonymity London sometimes projects. Like a cold, unforgiving wind. The secret is to stay in the moment… long enough until you become stronger than this sensation.

London is like my British friends whom I love so much. Strong emotions don’t come natural to this city, but you can always rely on its reassuring presence. It can endure anything and it will go on for ever.

Sometimes I wonder just how local I have become, if at all…
I still detest the rain… so no hope there. However, I catch myself saying the word “lovely” a lot … and I am for ever apologizing…
You would agree… these must be clear signs.

I had my first Twinterview the other day.

Angelo Fernando of Hoi Polloi interviewed me and Yang-May on Twitter about the book.

What an interesting experience…. You feel suspended in cyberspace. You know there are people out there following you… but all you can see are your interviewer’s Tweets.

The fact that you have to limit your answers to 140 characters is a great discipline. It helps to organise your thoughts.

I have been converted…. I believe Twinterviews are great training for podcast and video interviews. Think of a 140-character answer first and then elaborate on that.

The toughest question, as ever, was about the reasons that lead me to write the book: “Was there a book inside your head?”

In order to answer that, you need to put your life in perspective.

Luckily, I am reading a book that has helped me to do just that.

If you began your career in journalism, you have to read Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler.

It’s a wonderful example of how journalism and writing helps you to understand complex realities and relate to people in cultures so different from your own.

It was a sentence in the book that brought it all home to me. Hessler describes his years in Beijing like a “floating life in a floating city”.

When I lived in Prague in the early 1990s, I often had the feeling of floating…. Oracle Bones made me realise that I wasn’t lost… Prague was floating towards a new future and was taking me along. While doing this, it was also writing my future book in my head.

Never underestimate the power of floating…

“China knocks the ego out of you.”

I love this quote by Christine Lu.

Her talk last week was very inspiring. Christine is not only the founder of The China Business Show. She is also involved in a number of exciting internet ventures in China.

Recently she took a group of venture capitalists and internet entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to China to meet their local counterparts. She named the tour Geeks on a Plane.

Although she worked in Shanghai and has travelled many times to China, Christine doesn’t want to be called a “China expert”.

She believes that “the more you deal with China, the humbler you become”. She says that the longer you stay in China, the more you begin to recognise just how huge and diverse the country is.

Christine gets a charge out of those people who spend a couple of years in the country and call themselves China experts. She calls it the “Marco Polo complex”.

I can certainly relate to this phenomenon from my days in Eastern Europe. And something else Christine mentioned made me laugh and took me back to my first months in Prague. She said that she doesn’t do second-tier cities in China because she doesn’t “thrive by carrying around her own toilet paper”.

There was a time in the autumn of 1990, when shops in Prague were out of toilet paper. So… (and here I have a confession to make…) we would go to international hotels…and stock up on toilet paper!

Amazing … how adventures seem to be about the smallest things!

I came across a quote by former East German dissident Rudolf Bahro the other day that made me think.

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by those people who are not afraid to be insecure”.

If you follow the pace of the interactive web and the way in which it is connecting people around the world, you are left with little doubt that we are currently experiencing a major acceleration.

The old forms of relating to other cultures are dying.

Sharing interests on social networking platforms creates new forms of bonding. We begin to relate to people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds in a new way.

They are much closer to us. Somehow our passion for new connections makes us forget the fear.

When you move out of your culture and venture into a new one, insecurity becomes a constant travel companion.

It is there every time you realise that people around you share traditions you are not part of or memories from a school system you are unable to relate to.

What do you do?

You dwell in the experience and let insecurity become a key for exploring that particular culture.

The lessons you learn are unique. I promise.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not writing this because I think I am special.

It is just an obsession of mine. I want to find out what living abroad for the past 26 years has done to my brain.

Apparently, I am more likely than other people to be able to use a box of tacks as a candle holder.

According to studies conducted by William Maddux, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and Adam Galinsky, Professor of Ethics and Management at the Kellogg School, living abroad and creativity are tightly connected.

MBA students at the Kellogg School were asked to solve the famous Duncker candle problem. Results showed that the longer students had spent living abroad the more likely they were to find a creative solution.

The university also ran a second test on them involving the mock sale of a gas station. Again, those students who had lived abroad were more likely to reach a deal that demanded a creative approach.

Vacations don’t count. Only living abroad leads to creativity.

Maddux and Galinsky found out that the more students had adapted to foreign cultures when they lived abroad, the more creative they turned out to be.

So, you see, it is worth enduring being called a foreigner a million times or having to eat the worst food ever (this was in Eastern Europe a long time ago).

Pay-back time eventually comes.

Tacks and candles are high on my shopping list for the weekend.

My dream came true on Valentine’s Day.

I went to see a live performance of my favourite comedian, Russell Peters.

Russell’s energy is amazing.

When I heard that he would be performing at the o2 Arena, I couldn’t picture him reaching out to 18,000 people and engaging them in his fuzzy embrace the way he does on tape with a much smaller audience.

But he did. There is something about him that makes you feel included in everything he says. Forget presentation skills training! You want to learn how to reach out to an audience and bond with them? Go and listen to Russell Peters.

Russell is the most downloaded comedian ever. He owes his success to the power of the internet.

And it’s that power I felt the moment I entered the o2 Arena. I couldn’t believe that all those people were there just because they had seen one of his routines that began circulating on the web 5 or 6 years ago. It was so overwhelming….

I was also overwhelmed by the fact that, for some strange reason, I felt close to the other people there… Do we all identify with Russell’s jokes because we live abroad and at some point someone made fun of us? Is Russell’s humour a way to exorcise these experiences?

Who knows?!? I certainly love his routines. I know so many by heart. On Saturday, I even got the T-shirt that says $ 34.50 in Chinese-like characters. And I am going to wear it to the gym (yes…I will blog about the reactions…).

We went backstage and met Russell (in the photo with me and my husband Doug).

And look at us! Don’t we look related? As he says, it’s because his parents come from the Italian part of India…. Calcutta!!

I was watching Ariana Huffington on The Daily Show last night.

She was presenting her new book “The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging”.

I was listening along and enjoying the show until…horror… she mentioned it… the A-word.

She was talking about the advantages of blogging and said that a blog works for her because she can hide her Greek accent behind it and express herself much better.

Can you believe it?!?

It was so sad.

Ariana Huffington has such a beautiful accent that makes listening to her fascinating… Why would she need to hide it?

When will Diversity finally come of age and include accents???

Photo: thanks to wired.com

I was never sure of the meaning of the expression “comfort zone”.

Having lived abroad for most of my life, it is a concept I never liked to dwell much upon.

But last week, I heard a great definition.

Someone was saying that, if you leave home to go and live in another country, you don’t leave your comfort zone, you enlarge it.

I love it!

So, I began thinking about my “comfort zone” and all the factors that, over the years, have made me realise just how much I have enlarged it.

Here are some:

• Having different homes. One where I grew up (Italy), one where I live (London) and one where my spirit feels most comfortable (Prague).

• A large extended family made up of all my friends in London and other parts of the world. Being with them always gives me a sense of home.

• The dizziness I feel when walking through London. I have finally accepted it! It is like a dance. The dizzier you feel, the closer you come to feeling at home in this never-ending city.

• My love-hate relationship with airports and planes. I hate airline food…. but I love being on a plane at night over the ocean… It is like being looked after by a giant cosmic force.

Photo: thanks to experiencefestival.com

I almost forgot…but it has really been 25 years.

I was negotiating Blackfriars bridge on my high hills last night on the way to a function when it dawned on me… I have been living abroad for a quarter of a century.

On September 19th, 1983, my father packed his old Citroën with my boxes and drove me to Austria where I was to begin my studies at the University of Innsbruck.

I remember falling asleep immediately after we left the house and waking up when we were already deep into the Alps.

That’s when I realised that I was living home and my old life for good.

The thought didn’t frighten me. I felt the mountains embracing me and lifting me up. I knew they would be looking after me.

Innsbruck is so beautiful in the spring.

A fellow student from Nigeria used to say that when you walk by the river Inn, the beauty of the mountains overwhelms you and you feel your heart bursting.

It is pictures like this that were going through my mind last night on Blackfriars bridge.

An overwhelming collection of faces, words, sunsets, snowfall, books, planes, hugs, etc. that have made up the past 25 years. They have all morphed into a body of memories and ultimately into who I am today.

The interesting thing is that even the less happy memories (like all the times I have been called a foreigner….) have been swallowed by that body and transformed into something I would have never wanted to miss.

And guess what… the sun is shining today in London, same as that day in the Alps.