I finally have access to my blog. I promised lots of people that I would start up my blog again from China but I haven’t been able to access wordpress until today.

My idea is to try out the kinds of reflections I make about gardens, food, photography and culture in My Tiny Italian Garden blog while visiting China. Perhaps this sounds a little crazy but our little family is made up of me, an Italian Australian, my partner, a Croatian Australian and our son, a Chinese Australian. We make up a little assemblage with connections in all sorts of directions. So my life is already a mix of cultures, languages and images; and my experiences, thoughts and ways of seeing the world are a product of these various connections.

In any case I always felt there are many crossovers between Italian culture and Chinese culture. Both cultures are family oriented, food obsessed, child focused, prioritise education, save carefully for their future and have a culture of losing and saving face. In Italian its called ‘brutta figura’; to show oneself in a poor light or to present a bad image of oneself and ‘bella figura’ to present oneself in a good light. Anyway I’m not discounting the many differences but I am looking for points of connections to see if anything new and interesting comes out of them. And I’ll try to add some interesting photos along the way.