Posts Tagged ‘Gizmo’
{ February 5, 2009 @ 7:35 PM }
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{ Deja Moi Comme Ca }
{ Tags: 15 years old, badges, bag, balloons, best friend, Bianca, birthday, breakfast, buttons, cake, ceramic hair straightners, chocolate cake, chocolate milkshake, dad, frizzy, gift, Gizmo, golden necklace, Kirsty, laptop, misfits, mom, mp4 player, ninja, parents, perfect day, presents, punk, punk-y, ribbons, shining sun, shirt, snowstorms, the nightmare before christmas, U.K., Venetia, wrapping paper, zippers }
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Good afternoon everyone!
The weather is gorgeous! The sun is shining and the sky is a baby blue, the perfect day 
… It’s so bizarre for me to think that in the UK right now there are snowstorms and it’s too cold to step outside :/. Weird! 
Anyway, so yes! I’m finally 15 years old as of the 1st of February! I spent the whole day with my parents and Venetia, so it was quiet but absolutely brilliant! I went to bed pretty late on Saturday night so was pleased that I had a nice lie in on Sunday. I woke up by the sound of hushed voices whispering in the hallway but was far too lazy to get up… So I just lay there until Dun Duh Dun DUN! In came Venetia and my mom and dad with… an incredibly delicious looking chocolate smothered cake! Mmm, yummy! As I sat up in my bed I noticed all of these colourful balloons spread across my bedroom floor, yay!!
It was such a nice surprise 
. I did it for Venetia’s birthday and hinted in the toy shop that she should blow up 100 balloons like I did for her… But still was totally not expecting her too. Aww .
I blew out the candles shaped as a 1 and a 5 and made my wish. Cake for breakfast with chocolate milkshake… is… not… good… Well actually, it tastes incredible! But not good for the fact that it makes you completely hyper :/ – Overload on the sugar!
Oh actually! On Saturday night Venetia and I went ice-skating but before we went my parents asked me if I’d like an early birthday present, so of course, like any SANE person, I replied with an extremely enthusiastic, almost maniac type response of “YESSS!”… And so, after a few impatient minutes I was handed a gift wrapped bag with ribbons and whatnot displayed across the front . I tried to figure out how to open it without ripping the bag but eventually gave up and handed it to my mom…
After a few seconds the little box was in my excited hands, eager to see what was inside. I pulled the top up and my jaw dropped… It was the most stunning necklace ever! I absolutely love it! It’s a golden chain with the letter B in gold with little X’s up the straight side of the B. I’ve always wanted a necklace with something about me on it ^.^. It rocks!
Following that, Venetia decided to give me one of the presents that she’d gotten for me… :O… The most COOLEST shirt in the whole history and nation of cool shirts! It’s extremely punk-y with zippers and skulls and slashes and safety pins and stripes and disconnecting arm pieces! Woooo! I love it… And it’s the perfect fit ! Yay!
So on my birthday I was more than overwhelmed with my presents… And I thought Venetia wasn’t subtle! Hee hee! I ripped the shiny blue wrapping paper knowing what lay beneath… Or at least I thought I did! As the bag emerged I was so ecstatic to finally have it in my grasp but what’s this bulge inside :O!
Lying silently inside – like a ninja! – was (after hastily unwrapped) what seemed to be a mobile phone cover but what I soon found out was not… As I opened the second box suffocating under the weight of the selotape and impossible to rip wrapping paper, I was utterly shocked! It was an MP4 player . The colours rock (black and sparkly pink) and it’s just so nice to just hold ^.^. Also, the sound is amazing :O ^.^! And now it wont ever be scratched thanks to the cover thing . Awesome!!
Following that I unwrapped another present from my parents being ceramic hair straighteners <3! I loooooove them, they make my hair so soft and unfrizzifys the frizziness! Unfrizzify’s IS now a word… According to me!
Venetia was straightening my hair for the first time but my back was towards the mirror while she did my fringe so as I turned around I gasped because I didn’t think it would be THAT good! Yay!
And then I also received tonnes of “Misfits” / “The Nightmare Before Christmas” badges to be creative with . Awesome birthday! And today I got a surprise in the post . From Kirsty, one of my best friends, since I was six years old, sent me the most awesome pajamas! I love them and they’re so comfortable <3!
Venetia stayed up until 4:30AM on Saturday night baking my birthday cake, putting tonnes of icing on it, decorating it with chocolate edible things galore and blowing up balloons! Now that is just so sweet! The cake was quickly devoured, heehee but the balloons are still making my room a very colourful place to be in!
I would just like to say that my laptop rocks! My mom found these laptop stickers and got me some really awesome ones! They have a black background and a red scary dragon face thing on it… Talk about awesome ^.^!
I’m going to leave it at that because it’s necessary for me to go find milkshake now…
Hoping to hear from you guys soon! Catch you all later .
- Bianca =)
{ December 29, 2008 @ 9:45 AM }
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{ Deja Moi Comme Ca }
{ Tags: Bianca, Venetia, outside, Gizmo, fluffy, morning, miniature, bear, head, baby, snow, snowman, shutter, shock, cold, wet, snowball fight, snowball, asthma, attack, asthma attack, recording purposes, chilly, village, zip up pocket, cute, cheek, base, ground, cartoons, garage, Maujaq, eskimo, brainy, snow polar bear, polar, face, nut, eye, leaves }
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Hey people ^_^!
So three days ago was as a normal morning usually is : P. My dad woke me up and I went to let Gizmo outside… but as the wooden shutter flew open… : O The blaring white gave me quite a shock… And so did the cold /: |… SNOOOW! And lots of it ^_^.
It was absolutly brillliant! Practically the whole day it poured… bucketed /: |… blizzard-ed snow! So after the first time out in it and all Venetia and I did was have a snowball fight, get cold and wet… and me ending up having a bad asthma attack we came inside and I decided that I didn’t want to have to go out into it again… Unless for recording purposes of course!
We did end up outside in the chilly weather again though to make a snowman… Venetia was determined to and since we hadn’t made a proper one before – Why not? Apparently snow is rare in our little village so I got my warm clothes back on and headed outside.
Venetia did all of the rolling. I just stood and complained about getting my camera wet if I touched the snow . Of course Venetia was well prepared with a zip up pocket so I had to shush and help.
Snow is heavy /: |… The movies that depict snow as “cute” and “fluffy” LIE!!! It’s evil and heavy and spends its life wanting to give you asthma attacks and make you wet… Sometimes it even has the cheek to trip you up ! See, Venetia had just made a mother of a snowball for the base and as she was turning it around to come closer to the garage door, VWOOF! She had just… rolled over the snowball and was lying on the ground… Like one of those cartoons o.O.
Oh! And then we tried lifting the middle section of our “Maujaq Monster” (That took me forever to find!! Maujaq is an eskimo word for soft, deep snow… I only needed to find a word for snow that started with M to go with monster ) It was just far too heavy, so after many attempts, Venetia being her brainy self… Dug her hands into the snow as did I and voila! Liftable ^_^. Yet, I still jump up and down and get excited by snow >.< – That’S NO(W) joke! Haha! No, I’m sorry… I just had to put one of those corny jokes in there -_-. While Venetia was decorating her dude I decided to go off to the other part of the garden where the clean snow still lay, untouched by the hands of us… Yet!
Whilst there I chose to make a snow cat… Which soon turned into the making of a miniature baby snow polar bear . I could lift him and put him anywhere and he was just so cute… Although I broke his face a few times trying to get a nut eye into his head /: |. In the end though, he rocked!
Venetia’s snowman was more leaves than snow really… But we tried to make his outside all white and happy looking… It took far too long to try relayer him with clean snow though and the warmth of my gloves had soon worn out and so my hands were numb and felt that they were almost beyond non-numb-ifying /: |… Not good… So in an attempt to make the snowman look pretty AND get my hands back to their normal senses, we just tried whacking out of the leaves off in a kung-fu sort of way ^_^.
Guess what!! I don’t know why I just write that because I have nothing >.<… Anyway! I’m going to go now. I actually have more news but since I have to keep these short I’m going to leave it at that. I feel bad that I haven’t written in three days though, so might post another post today . Keep checking . Catch you guys later! Hoping to hear from you soon.
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 2:01 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: baby, Bianca, escape, flip-flops, Gizmo, grasshoppers, hornets, incident, nest, sister, summer, thumb }
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Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Hey all!
See I told you I’d try writing more this week! I reckon this is just going to be pretty random, but random’s always best !
Well in the first French house, Gizmo made quite a few local friends… or at least he had some fun with them anyway… I wouldn’t quite call it friendly. Since we’d moved into that house at the beginning of summer, if you walked through the grass, literally hundreds of baby grasshoppers would jump around your feet.
I loved it… Gizmo was more for chasing them. It was really funny! Usually though he’d actually catch one in his mouth, spit it out, watch it jump for a while and then catch it again… he did this until the grasshopper made it back to the grass and then he’d find another one, it was hilarious when he lost one though, he’d just make his head go around in circles mainly looking up at the sky… .
Gizmo had an incident at that last house though, I almost had a heart attack when I saw him! Remember that large concrete type thing I’d told you about on the blog “Snakes On A Path… Get it?… Like the movie! Never mind ” that I’d picked up to bring to my dad? Yeah, well later on I found out how heavy it really was, I just couldn’t seem to lift it anymore and I also found out that it had a hornets’ nest inside it!
Next time I think I’ll check! I found these things out when I let Gizmo out one day, went back inside to make tea, came back to the door to check on him and this is where I almost had a heart attack! He must had peed on the nest or something but the hornets weren’t happy and there were more than a dozen swooping around him so I ran outside, squealed at Gizmo to get inside, he ran with these things chasing him, I got inside first and once he was in, slammed the door shut… well it seemed a lot more action packed at the time!
This explained something that happened to me when I was standing around about there a week or two earlier… I can’t really remember what I was doing, but whilst I was in the middle of doing it I got ATTACKED!!! Well something stung my hand, I looked down and just got to see a blur of yellow and black through my tear filled eyes. I just had to glance and then began running to the door.
Once I was inside and settled down I noticed that I wasn’t wearing my sister’s flip-flops anymore, which were far too big for me. My mom and sister looked outside and yes, there were the shoes, one, a foot from where I got stung the other one was lying upside-down by the door. They must have flown off me whilst I was running, it was really funny!
Oh yeah another one of Gizmo’s “mouthfuls” was a fully grown lizard! I had found it in a plastic bucket sort of thing that I’d used for fishing the night before. I left it outside and the next day when I went to lift it… yes another “almost heart attack”, no really, I thought it was a snake, but then realised it had legs…
The poor thing must have got stuck and it was boiling temperatures that day, so my mom let it out by the grass and of course Gizmo decided to trot by and have a little look. The lizard didn’t really move but once it got it’s bearings it began to skulk away… this is where the chase began. Gizmo started moved toward it and so the lizard ran away faster. Eventually though, Gizmo actually caught it and then wouldn’t drop it! After a loud “Gizmo! Drop it now!” the lizard quickly got some time to escape and was off into the grass.
We saw a lot of animals in that house, another was this little baby rabbit that my dad noticed out the bathroom window. My dad quickly woke us up to come see, but then it hopped away, the next day though he was there again and we got there soon enough. Aww! Now he was cute! Later my sister and I left out some lettuce for it by the burrow that lead into the barn that it was always by, the next day it had been nibbled on, so that was nice to see.
I don’t think that I’ll be going ice-skating tomorrow with my mom. Last week she fell and hurt her thumb, I also think that my feet need to have a little bit more of recovery time. The back of them are absolutely killing me! Even when I just wear normal shoes, and I have a lot of healing blisters ;-P… insert extremely long, drawn out, sarcastic “lovely” here !
So might do something different, I vote for clothes shopping! Woo ;-P! On Saturday when we were getting ready to leave the ice-rink, Venetia handed me her gloves and the mobile. I know I was carrying them but then I must have set them down, because once we got home, Venetia had a moaning attack about how I’d had the mobile last, of course I agreed and yet she still kept moaning… *rolls eyes* sisters!
No, it was okay though, they’d phoned my dad and said that they were holding it for us and we could collect it when the ice-rink was open tomorrow (which was Sunday). So on Sunday off we went, to my surprise it was absolutely jam packed! The queue was from the register all the way to the door (I know you can’t see how long this is but on Saturday usually there’s no queue or at the most three people)! Now if I’d known this I would’ve preferred to go on Sunday… but I’m not too sure if I like loads of people. So this weekend (if my feet are up for it) I’m going on Saturday and Sunday ;-P.
Okay I think that I’m going to leave it at that. I have to go do some other work now… Hope to hear from you all soon!
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 2:00 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: African grey parrot, allergies, Belfast's Blue Fish, Billy, breath, double-glazing, French, French shutters, Gizmo, goat, ice-skating, language, limits, Michel, mosaic, Nando, sneeze, socks, speed, squirrel, toilet roll }
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Monday, November 26, 2007
Hey everyone!
I know it’s been a while since I last wrote, okay about 3 weeks (I’m really sorry I didn’t realise it’d been so long!)… and I have no excuse . But since I’ve been going ice-skating I’ve been meeting French people so I’ve been whiling away my week days by learning French. I know a lot of words, thousands, it’s just the difficulty I’m having with understanding everyone!
I think it’s the speed they can talk at or the accent because I can understand my dad perfectly when he speaks French to me… then again it could be because my dad and I know generally about the same amount of words so we know each others limits on the language .
So back to posting properly now . I will try write more this week, but I just
can’t really see much point in it since I’m having no responses /:- … Aww well it’ll do for my own reference. You know you guys just don’t have to kiss a real fish I’ll also be pleased with… Okay for instance my dad’s friend is going to go kiss Belfast’s Blue Fish for me and take a picture when he has the time to do it. It’s a giant sculpture of a mosaic sort of fish in… would you ever guess, Belfast ! I’ll put an image up of it.
Now back to blogging, I last left off on my story of how I became to be in this exact place in south west France where we’d just moved into our first, temporary house in France. Yes it had a lot of downsides but also nice upsides too. The landlady was… well she was very nice, but not so organised with things. A few weeks before we were going to move she decided to get some builders to make the windows in the house double-glazing. Now first off it was summer time so what exactly was the point of double-glazing now and secondly why choose now when we were just going to move out before winter and she could have had them do it then!
They didn’t even finish the job and so for a week Venetia and I were left windowless, thank goodness for French shutters ! Eventually though they did finish it but a week later we moved .
On the 26th of August it was my dad’s birthday. We just had a lazy day but went for a walk later on in the evening. We said hi to Billy the Billy goat, oh yes, back to how original my naming system is . Billy was very sweet, he lived in the sanctuary close by and you could see him when you walked along the road, he’d come running over and if you went to scratch him he would push his head against the bars so that you could get to him! Gizmo wasn’t much of a fan of Billy. Every time we put Gizmo on the wall to see him, Billy would bash the bars and give Gizmo a heart-attack.
This particular evening a guy was feeding Billy some berries in his little area and so he came over and spoke to us (the guy, not Billy )… yes, of course in French. Apparently though Billy is actually called Michel, meh I still prefer Billy .
The guy asked us if we wanted to have a look around and of course we accepted. He introduced us to his wife and began the tour, their property was absolutely gorgeous. They had horses and cats and dogs and goats and donkeys and Shetland ponies and pigs and even an African grey Parrot (my all-time favourite bird that I’ve wanted since we had to leave Nando (my first parrot) behind in South Africa when we moved to Ireland). Nando was a green ring neck though and he’d just began talking as well 
! The picture below is of me when I was two years old with Nando at our property in Zimbabw
e.
So anyway they showed us around and then brought us into Billy’s little area… he began to bite my jeans and head butt me. The guy said he was just playing and wanted me to push him away. It was really funny, when I did Billy stood up on his hind legs, acted as if he was about to ram me and then just fell back down again. The pig was sleeping under a pile of hay so I only really saw one of his ears that was sticking out and nothing more…
The horse stables were built into their house, like they had the stables that if you went up a few stairs there was a dining room and then up more stairs was a door to the rest of their house. At the stable area they let out an absolute monster of a horse, I mean he was extremely stunning, he had a platinum mane and a dark golden body but was far too big for my liking to be around. What made it worse was that he just wouldn’t go back in, so I kept my distance until he was safely locked up again .
When we were in the field with two black horses outside, a cat wandered up and the woman began telling us how the cat loved to come here and rub herself up against the horses legs… crazy cat I’d say but they were very friendly horses, that liked to sneeze, maybe they have cat allergies like me .
Oh! A cat adopted my sister and I the other day when we were taking Gizmo for a walk. She appeared out of nowhere and then just began to follow us. After two minutes we played with her for a while with a piece of grass and then kept on walking. She kept following us then began climbing the neighbour’s rocks so we brought Gizmo inside, I went out the back and called “Ici, chat, chat, chat! Ici chat, chat, chat!” (Here kitty, kitty, kitty! Here kitty, kitty, kitty ) just incase it wasn’t obvious . I made a few cat noises and she came running, we played with her in the garden for an hour or so, she even spotted a little red squirrel in the tree, so that was nice to see.
Later on we went walked her back to the road she’d followed us on, and went back inside. Later that night though when I let Gizmo out, guess who was waiting there! Yes, the cat. So we let her in, she wandered around for a bit and the was off again.
An hour or so later she came in through the basement window! So we gave her some milk, let Gizmo downstairs, which was actually really funny! Gizmo has this thing about toilet roll tubes… and socks… but anyway I threw one for him when he was downstairs and because the cat was there and he wanted to show off he fetched it looked to see if she was watching, brought it back and did it quite a few times. Usually he would just run off and hide .
Anyway after a while of playing like this the cat began stalking him so he began stalking her, they went around in a circle watching each other for a few minutes and then she decided she’d had enough and began looking up at the windows so we let her out but haven’t seen her since
I’m sure she’ll be around though, she was absolutely gorgeous like honey coloured. The only problem is though that I have allergies and the whole night I couldn’t sleep properly because I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t even touch her!
Oh right, back to the sanctuary place . Yes, so it was very nice of them to just let us in and have a look around. We said our goodbyes and then were off home again. To be moving into the new house the next week ! I’m going to leave it at that… back to French now!
Hoping to hear from you all soon!!!
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 1:25 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: ad, allergic, aunt, Bianca, bite, bullet, cake, converse, copper, cousins, crystal, damage, Daniel, Darius, daughter-in-law, David, ear to ear, England, English, experiences, Farringdon, France, galleries, Gizmo, good da, grandmother, grin, Jett, karen, laces, Luke, luminous, Matthew, milkshake, mueseums, Nespresso, penny, raining, shopping, Simone, son, speakers, stick, T.V., tempted, till, uncle, vinegar, winter }
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Thursday, November 8, 2007
Hey Everyone!
So yesterday we arrived in England… well I wrote about it yesterday anyway . Seeing my mom, Gizmo and Karen was great. But then there were MORE great things to come on the second day of being in England. My sleep wasn’t the best because I was staying at my grandmother’s (Karen) house… and her son and daughter-in-law live with her too… they have a cat. I absolutely love cats but there’s a tiny problem I have with them… I’m allergic :-O!
But never mind that because after four days of suffering, oh woe me , no it wasn’t that bad, we moved into my cousins, uncle and aunt’s house which is literally across the road… okay around one road, down another, around one more and then there it was .
Oh yes, the MORE to come on the second day was that I went to the super store with my mom and (:-O. You have no idea how happy I was to be understood and that I could understand people there! They speak English… I know, no duh you are in England but that’s not the point!
I had missed it so much… I just couldn’t stop smiling, it was when the guy at the till said the price and bid us a good day that I realised how much I had missed it… he seemed pretty confused at why I had a grin from ear to ear on but, I didn’t care, at least he spoke English! It is something that I still miss even living in France where there’s more English speakers here than Sicily but it was amazing. I never knew how easy I had it and I actually can’t remember any other “shopping experiences” (like talking to people at a store…) before I’d moved to a non-English speaking country. So it’s so true! You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
Then again… I did miss the weather in Sicily too… I mean I really, really missed it…. And I had really, really appreciated it there as well ! It was absolutely freezing in Farringdon… but my two little cousins loved playing outside and so I had to bite the bullet and stick there with them, in the end I tempted them to come back inside with milkshake! Mmm milkshake, it fixes everything .
Anyway on the forth day, this is now the seventh of May (Ha! I was a poet and I didn’t even know it… until I re-read the sentence anyway ) I saw the rest of the crew – Luke (16), Matthew (13… Matt was born on the same day as me! He’s only 12 hours older. He was 6am I was 6pm ), Darius (11), I know there’s an awful lot here ;-P, Daniel and Jett (who’s 4 and 3, aw how cute )!
Just read over the Matthew thing, in case you don’t know our birthday’s the 1st of February… now you have no excuse to forget it and can’t not send me in a nice picture of you kissing a fish . Pucker up!
On the 8th of May, it was my sister’s birthday! My aunt, Simone, baked a… actually two chocolate cakes for Venetia, you heard the list of names! One would’ve just been finished in an instant of it being brought out . Oh yummy, those cakes were just… so yummy!
We took tonnes of pictures but most of them are of Venetia and I stuffing our faces with chocolate cake… or the one’s that were taken too early and we were trying to fix our hair! Quite a few random ones of a vase of flowers… I think these where taken by my one cousin when he got his hands on the camera .
Most of the days that we were in England it was raining, so we didn’t really get up to much. I made sure I watched a good amount of English T.V. whilst I was there though . In France it’s a very odd occasion that there’s English on the television. Except for the Nespresso, what else? ad, they don’t dub it .
We stayed in England for a month, on the last Sunday Simone, David (my uncle), the boys, Karen, my parents, Venetia and I, wow quite a list there , went to a few museums and galleries. In one of the museums there were little stuffed chickens, that was really sad but my little cousins didn’t seem to mind… I guess they’re boys also fake dodo birds, dinosaur, giraffe, elephant and rhino skeletons and my favourite, the luminous crystal room! I was wearing converse so the laces looked so cool in the light. Of course we got pictures on my moms camera phone .
Oh yeah before I forget! It’s winter now, no duh , but that means that bees and wasps and looking for warm places to keep snuggled up. Yesterday my mom got stung by the wasp or a hornet on her leg twice and her hand at least four times! It was hiding in her trousers and then quickly flew away to the other side of the room once it had done the damage.
We didn’t know what to do so I put got the cream out, then my dad said to put vinegar on, the vinegar soothed the sting but today a few hours later it swelled up and today it’s still all swollen. Today I found out though that once you’re stung if you put a copper penny on it and hold the penny on the sting for 15 minutes it should take the sting away and it won’t even swell up!
Great to know, but a bit late now . Well I’m going to leave it at that! Hope to hear from you all soon!
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 1:14 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: abnormal, airport, atchoo, aunt, bags, bear, binoculars, car, check-in, coca-cola, coffee, duvets, England, enormous, explained, fire, fist, flight, freezing, front, gesture, giggles, Giovanni, Gizmo, glass, hug, ice, ireland, jack-change-it, jackets, jumpers, karen, lake, laughter, lemons, lifetime, milkshake, MP3, Natalie, night, packed, Palermo, Palermo Univercit, passports, pathetic, powerless, quarter, queue, refrigerator, Robert, Scotland, shine, shiver, shoes, side-tracked, SIM card, squashed, street, suitcases, sun, swing, teenagers, tickets, traipsing, trampled, tree, trolley, U.K., Venetia, washing-machine, wife }
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Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Hey everyone!
Well yes, it was the night before we left we were all packed up and ready to go. It was really strange leaving that house. Now that I think about it I didn’t actually leave that much behind in Sicily. It was strange not doing anything with the refrigerator and the washing-machine. We just left them in the house for Giovanni to have.
I left a few “warm” (… not light) clothes, thinking that I wouldn’t need them in south-west France… wow, I was wrong! That giant, jumper thing really could’ve come in handy today. It’s been absolutely FREEZING *shivers*! But it can’t get much worse because all of the French are already in giant jackets and jumpers… unless they just stay wrapped up in duvets next to a cosy fire in winter… and even if they do, I’m up for that !
So anyway we were all packed with the things we actually needed. Now going back we only had 3 suitcases… I wanted to bring the swing that we’d got in Sicily… it was such a cool swing; see what I mean about not being so great with leaving things behind! But in the end the swing was still swinging silently on its own, hanging from the tree that I had tied it to .
Yeah, we only had three suitcases because my mom was in England and therefore wasn’t flying with us. The flight we’d taken was only one suitcase per person… my mom had to leave most of her things behind (my dad was packing )… but it was mainly just her jumpers and shoes.
The lemons in Sicily were absolutely enormous (I just remembered how much I miss them)! If you make a fist with your hand that’s the size they were! Okay, if you make a fist with my hand … The first day in England I walked into Karen’s dining room where my sister and my aunt (Natalie) were.
There was this… thing on the table. It was like a Sicilian lemon… but a million times smaller. I burst into fits of laughter and asked “What is that thing?!”… yes that was a lemon, Natalie seemed pretty confused, but Venetia joined in with my fits of giggles and then explained to Natalie. We’d only been away from the U.K. for two months, but really… this is what I used to think was a lemon! Ha! You’d get at least a quarter of a tall glass filled with lemon juice from one! Four would make a whole jug of lemon juice… here you’d have to use like twenty! Pathetic !
Right, yes back to Sicily. Sorry keep getting side-tracked! On the last night in Sicily, we drank an abnormal amount of milkshake (since we had a lot of milk in the fridge… and coincidently a lot of chocolate powder) and played jack-change-it to pass the time. We got to bed pretty early, then I was woken up at… okay I can’t remember the exact time, but it was much earlier than early for me. It was around about two am-ish… maybe four.
Once we were all ready we packed up the car and off we went. I was cramped in the back with suitcases sticking into my sides and a heavy carry-on-case on my lap. After an hour of being stuck like this we arrived at the airport, had a nice long stretch and then brought our bags inside.
So you’re wondering what we did with the car? Well even if you’re not I’m going to tell you anyway . Do you remember that guy I told you about I think it was eight blogs ago, the one that we met in the small electrical shop on the first day of being in Sicily, where we wanted to buy a SIM card from? He had moved to Sicily 11 years ago from Scotland and was teaching in Palermo University. Yeah, him! Well let’s just say Robert. Well Robert’s son had just turned 18 and Robert had wanted to buy a car for him. My dad had found this out when he’d phoned him to ask if he wanted our car. What are the odds, eh?
So Robert met us up in the airport, had coffee (what else?… Sicilians drink far too much coffee… but being in Sicily it’s difficult not to get hooked on the strong stuff with a coffee bar on every single street… I even did) with his wife and my dad, signed the papers then drove off in the car. Now it was just a waiting game for the check-in and then the flight to finally see my mom, who I hadn’t seen for almost a month now and then there was also Gizmo!!!
We had our last Sicilian coffee and breakfast then went off to check-in. Not again! Our bags were the correct weight combined but not separately… it was like so what’s the difference… apparently there is a difference . So we spread out the weights into the different bags, and then finally checked in… I had to leave my binoculars behind, which I’d been traipsing around with me since Ireland .
After an hour of waiting in the waiting area, the woman announced that it was “All Aboard Time” okay she didn’t actually say this but it was something in Italian and then everyone started moving quickly towards the doors… so this was sort of a gesture that we could start lining up to show our passports and tickets.
If you every go to Sicily be warned! Most Sicilians do not like waiting in a queue, so either stand your ground or move to the back before you get trampled on… or ultimately squashed between people.
We buckled ourselves in and with a smooth start (and no ear popping) we were off. My mom told us to look out for an ice lake shaped like a bears head somewhere to the north of Italy or south of France during the flight, but it was too cloudy… or it could have just been when I was busy concentrating on my coca cola and I didn’t notice it .
The flight was actually a lot of fun. There were a few teenagers more to the front that got down their electric guitars and started playing (not plugged in of course). Later on I turned my MP3 player up really loud, over the voices of the cabin, then I heard this ATCHOO! Turned to Venetia knowing it would’ve been her and said “I heard that even OVER my loud music!”… we burst into fits of giggles.
Later on we landed, stood around like everyone else waiting for the bags to come through. When they did we grabbed them. Adjusted them so that they’d stop slipping off the trolley and off we went to see my mom! As we came around the corner I couldn’t see her no matter how many times Venetia said, “There she is, no Bianca over there! That way!” Then I spotter her… right in front of everyone else, ran up to her and gave her a gianormous hug… or rather she gave me the gianormous hug… I was left powerless .
We went over to the car and drove south for a good hour or so, stopping at a fast food place on the way. Since I’d only been once in Sicily and was craving milkshake… you’d think I would’ve had enough on the last night in Sicily for me to never want any more for a lifetime … I hadn’t.
We finally arrived in a nice little village, then went to Karen’s house, I could hear Gizmo barking before the car had even stopped. I jumped out and Gizmo was already out to greet me. I had missed him so much!
Gizmo wants to play now and the sun’s starting to shine again. So going to leave it at that and will be back soon . Hope to hear from you all.
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 12:51 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: amber, bed, Bianca, box, centipede, crazy, creature, devestated, disturbed, England, fainted, fiat uno, fly, funny, furnishing, garden, gecko, Giovanni, Gizmo, great escape, heart attack, house, inches, increased, jack-change-it, jewellery, karen, kitchen, legs, lemon, lightning, millions, moaning, mom, mom's mom, orange, overgrown, packing, pastimes, prickly pear cacti, rip, room, rules, shocked, sicily, small, smile, snake, swept, tea cup, thunder, tile, ushered, utterly, Venetia, wall, white }
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Monday, November 5, 2007
Hey everyone!
Before I start remember that you have to start reading from the next page and work your way backwards …
In Sicily at Giovanni’s place we didn’t really do much. For three days there, there were bad thunder and lightning storms, but it was really cool to watch because you could see the ocean from the room my parents were in.
Since we still didn’t have a car, Giovanni found one for us and brought my parents to go see it… when they came back I was utterly shocked at what they had bought… it was one of those little, white fiat-unos… it did the job though and was very handy for our great escape of Sicily !
Giovanni also said that he’d help find us a house… what he found is not quite what I’d call a house…
We stayed at his bed and breakfast for three weeks, our pastimes usually long, late barbeques. After we got the car though we did go out and about seeing places a lot. Giovanni’s fiancé’s mother was fixing up a “house” for rent and we just happened to be in need of a house. So Giovanni, like any sales person would put two and two together and brought us around to this so-called “house”…
We went around it… this took a very short time as to how small it was. Apparently it was furnished, which consisted of 4 beds, the bathroom, a dining table… and a stove. WOW, great going with the furnishing .
It had five rooms (in total, yes in total, not just the bedrooms). Three bedrooms, the bathroom and the kitchen/dining room which she promised she’d tile and never got around to it. It did have a good sized garden though and a grape vineyard 2 minutes walk from the house. The garden was full of orange and lemon trees and even prickly pear cacti… the rest of the garden though was absolutely overgrown… everywhere.
We took the house since it was the only thing we could find, I know it was a stupid decision but awk well too late now .
We were in soon enough (the picture dates tell me that it was 16th of April, and we’d only taken these at least a week of being in the house) and had settled down. My mom decided to fly back to England to her mom and Gizmo since Karen (my mom’s mom) was taking so long in packing to get herself over to Sicily with us.
My mom kissed us goodbye, she got on the plane and off she went. The next three weeks droned on and on and on for the three of us. We were sick of sitting in the house, or playing jack-change-it (a card game, the rules continuously increased as we got more bored… in the end it was hard to keep up ).
To understand Giovanni you’d have to have known him… he was like a snake with a smile. He’d become your friend and rip you off at the same time in fact one of his favourite phrases to use on us was “my friend”… it’s very frustrated to think that we fell for him. Then again the more that I think about I don’t think he realised. Some Sicilians (mainly Giovanni ) are the type like I help you, now you must help me… or in Giovanni’s case it was more like I help you… now you must pay me .
The first few days in the house were… there’s actually no real word to describe it. I just sat here for 5 minutes trying to think of one and… none! Well… in the third day or so I was about to go run a bath for myself and ended up running to my parents room yelling “There’s an ALIEN in the bath!!!”… it was not funny at the time .
It was seriously an alien-like creature. It was light amber-brown, had a long-spindly body with… literally millions of LONG legs and antennas. I know you’re thinking oh that’s just a centipede… that was NOT a centipede!
We found tonnes in that Sicilian house, so since I found the first one it has adopted the name of “alien” so from now on don’t be alarmed if I refer to something like, “there was an alien in the tea-cup!” … this did happen once. My sister almost had a heat attack when she was making tea … now that was funny!
Actually one night in our room (we were sharing one in that house) there was an alien on the wall and a gecko on the other. Venetia refused to sleep unless I got at least the gecko out. So I got my jewellery box, dumped everything on my bed, made the gecko come down of the wall. By about a few inches of the ground the poor thing fainted and fell to the floor. I was so devastated and just wanted to leave it alone. Venetia on the other hand kept moaning and wouldn’t go to sleep >:-(! So I ushered the gecko into the box and put the lid on top. Now Venetia wanted me to put the gecko outside. No way that I was going out there at this time of night! So I let it loose in the kitchen .
Of course Venetia was not happy about this but I was too tired. I climbed into bed and was almost asleep when I was disturbed by a crazy creature… known as, yes that’s right, Venetia. Apparently now I had to get the alien out. I got up dragged Venetia’s bed with her still on it to my side of the room and tried to go to sleep again. Nope this wasn’t good enough . I said that I’d get the alien down but she’d have to put it in a box.
I put Venetia’s bed back, got the broom and swept the alien off the wall, then climbed back into bed…now the alien had gone under the wall… after Venetia doing what she needed to do, even though I said if she did it I’d never talk to her again, we went to sleep. The next morning I was talking again >.<.
As I’m sure you can see I talk far too much . So I’m going to leave it at that and get back on track with it tomorrow.
Still hoping to hear from you all soon !
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 12:34 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: attic, beach, bell, Bianca, boxes, Christmas, cousins, decorations, devil, ghosts, gift, Giovanni, Gizmo, gorgeous, grandmother, hardl, headband, horde, ireland, Louisville, measure, memories, miniature, nice, ocean, octopus, Ohio, Ohio River, orange, picnic, pumpkins, rocks, school, sending, seven, six foot, snorkelling, spear, sweet, ten, tree, twin, werewolves, witches, woo }
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Thursday, November 1, 2007
Hey there!
Well yesterday I said about Halloween and the French calling before they came, so my impression was that they had to know you to trick or treat. Last night I found out that trick or treating here is like anywhere . Except they all just go in big groups with a few parents. They were all so CUTE! It was like a horde of … deadly things . None of them rang the bell… they might have been too small to reach… there were miniature ghosts, werewolves, bright, orange pumpkins and even twin witches! . So that was nice .
Well now that Halloween is over it’s time to look forward to CHRISTMAS! Woo! The only thing that’s worrying me is my grandmother. She’s in Ireland at the moment and was supposed to be sending us our Christmas decorations from my cousins’ house. She still hasn’t and keeps putting it off >.<. It’s not too difficult, one of my cousins just has to go up get the decorations down from their attic, measure the boxes and send them… we’ve had them since we arrived in Ireland, so it’s ten years of memories.
There’s even a clay Christmas tree and bright florescent pink present decoration that I made in school when I was seven! Oh and these little gift boxes made out of old Christmas cards. I just wanted to get a hold of one to see how I made it . They’re really cute, we made little sweet things at school to put inside… of course the sweet thing was long gone before the box arrived home . I’m really looking forward to Christmas, but this is the first year that my sister’s been working. She’s applied for Christmas week off so I really hope she gets it . Back to now though. I made Gizmo a devil headband thing for Halloween but forgot to put it on him when the trick or treat-ers came >.<, oh well. I’ll get a picture of him for all of you guys to see ! Back to Sicily now! (I just can’t seem to make up my mind )
Well we stayed with Giovanni for three weeks. His bed and breakfast was a 5 minute walk from the ocean… on his website it said from a beach. But in Sicily you can hardly ever find any beaches that are clean enough or… well generally beach-y enough… by beach-y I mean sandy. Usually it’s just all rocks.
We did find a few gorgeous beaches though, on one we had a picnic and watched a guy go fishing for octopus! That was so cool, he actually caught one as well! He was just snorkelling around and was holding a cage. I didn’t see any spear so I get the impression that he just grabbed it… didn’t get too close to see what colour it was though.
I was just reading some stories about people going fishing and I found quite an interesting one. A man was going fishing for catfish in the Ohio River near Louisville but instead of catching the catfish that he wanted, he caught a six foot octopus!
Well I’m going to leave it at that. Hope to hear from you all soon!
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 11:46 AM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: ankle, Bianca, breakfast, dead, dinner, distracted, Easter, English, everyone, final, fish, flapping, fluffy, frantically, gently, gianormous, Gizmo, grape, gutter, guys, heart breaking, hid, highlight, holiday, Holy, jackets, keeper, kissed, laughed, light, love, Mazara del Vallo, Mondello, Mondello beach, motorway, mountain, never, Palermo, perfect, phone, playing, pointer, puppy, rambled, reading, remind, ROCK, Saint Rosalia, scarves, Scotland, sicily, SIM, sky, start, statues, stubbron, Sunday, temperature, train, tree, type, vigorous, vines, walking, wearing, wind, winter }
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Friday, October 26, 2007
Hi everyone!
I don’t get it but because it’s a blog you have to start reading from the bottom and make your way up :-S. Noticed this a while ago just never thought to remind you guys .
Right… now where was I with my last post… I’m not going to go by everyday in Sicily… mainly because I’ve forgotten a lot and I’ll only type up the interesting stuff .
Sicilian’s (not all of them, but most) are very stubborn, they keep wearing their gianormous winter jackets and scarves, no matter what temperature the day is all the way up until June! Then they’re free to wear what they like … of course I didn’t know this on my very first day of being in Sicily. I woke up and it was gorgeous outside, so as any sane person would do, after getting ready I put on LIGHT clothes.
Then again me coming straight from cold Ireland, it may actually have been cold for the locals and I just wasn’t used to it because I was so used to freezing temperatures… literally if Gizmo wanted to go outside in Ireland, I’d open the door just slightly let him out, struggle against the wind to close the door again, then run to a window and watch him… I was always afraid he’d get blown away … we lived on a hill in the middle of the country side so… it COULD have been possible !
Once we’d had breakfast we went for a walk around the area we were in. After 5 minutes of looking around I got stopped by an elderly man, who started rambling on in Sicilian, making vigorous arm movements towards me and then the sky, then him… me and the sky a final time… quite confusing… then he tapped my bare arms and said in Italian this time “cold?”, I laughed and said “No, I’m from Ireland”. He kissed me on the cheek and wandered off… it was very strange but then again, I didn’t know the Sicilian culture…
On the first day we had to get a phone SIM card, so we went into a small electrical shop… it is the most obvious thing to do . Anyway we really couldn’t get our message across but strangely enough a guy walked into the shop at this exact time, the shop keeper greeted him and then said something in Italian… he immediately started speaking perfect English… what are the odds! It turns out he’d moved to Sicily 11 years ago from Scotland, and was now teaching at the university near by. Anyhow we got his number and the SIM card and left. This left my spirits slightly higher, but they were later crushed again when I found out that an English speaker who’s not a tourist in Sicily is very odd … AHHH!
Palermo is an absolutely gorgeous city… it just has a lot of stray dogs which you know what that leads (HA! Leads!!! Do you get it? . I’m SO funny!!! … if you could hear me now, you’d know this is said in a sarcastic way… so just read it like that ) to on the ground . Yeah! Some Sicilians don’t seem to love their animals as much as the French do. Over Easter there, some of them go on holiday and just set their dogs free to look after themselves, when they come back if their dog’s still there they’ll take it back… most aren’t though… on the motorway we say tonnes of little, fluffy, dead…dogs… it was absolutely heart breaking!
Our house that we found (I’ll get to this later), the garden of it, used to be the home of the guard dog of the house, before we moved in. Now the owners were supposed to take him away… they did. They just threw the poor thing into the boot, slammed it shut, drove down the lane and we thought that was the last we were going to hear of him. A few days later my sister and I took a walk down the lane only to find the poor thing tied to a tree on a short chain by the grape vines. We ran down to him and found that he had no water and today was absolutely blistering heat! We quickly walked back up to the house, got a few bottles of water brought them down to him and later that night we even brought him the left over from dinner.
The owners of the house, we noticed, came back and gave him some of those dog pebbles, but we still fed him sometimes… in the end my parents and I were even taking him for walks, we weren’t allowed to give him a name though because then we’d become too attatched… he was part pointer it was really funny to watch him chase a lizard, then run around the rock digging at where he thought it had gone even though it had long run away through the grass.
But not all Sicilians are like this with their animals, one day, actually when we were leaving Palermo to go to Mazara del vallo, which is to the south west of Sicily (I’ll also get to that later).We were waiting for a train and we saw an elderly man with a puppy that would literally fit in your hand! He would push the puppy gently away with his foot then keep on walking, but the puppy kept coming back and jumping all over him… okay all over his ankle… it couldn’t really reach much higher . Anyway he sat down on a bench doubled over with his arms flapping about playing with it. At the end he walked around the fountain and the puppy got distracted and was looking down at something through the gutter. The owner saw, then ran and “hid” behind a pole watching the puppy like a little boy.
Soon the puppy realised that it’s owner had gone missing and began running around, looking frantically for him, eventually it spotted his owner, ran over then went crazy! It was the last highlight of my time in Palermo.
Yes the statues in Palermo city were absolutely gorgeous! In Palermo we met some of my father’s family. The first time we met them we went to lunch… they can eat A LOT of fish… actually Sicilians can just eat A LOT . They invited us to their house a few Sundays and wow, we could hardly move!!! They also took us around quite a few times (I promise I’ll get back to all of these things in more posts to come!). A few places was Mondello beach… I have to say I hadn’t ever seen so many people out and about, playing football, walking, or just sitting around… and it was almost dark!… and very cold … even for me !
Another one was the cave were Saint Rosalia was found. It was very pretty, built into the mountain and had a big, open area where the rain water came in and was captured into little pipes along the walls which ended at the Holy water area. Pretty scary being inside though because of the way the rocks just jut out in random places so you don’t quite know how safe it is !
I’m sure I’ll go into more detail about these places and put up a few images soon. Going to leave it at that, don’t want to make you all TOO bored . Hope to hear from you all soon!
- Bianca
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