Posts Tagged ‘summer’
{ March 6, 2009 @ 4:33 PM }
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{ Art, Deja Moi Comme Ca, Lingo Lyrics, Youtube }
{ Tags: = ), Bianca, clothes, descriptive French summer, designer, fashion, first bus ride, free buses, French bus, habadashery, ireland, learn french, lingo, Lingo Lyrics, LL, lyrics, sewing, summer, The Veronicas, Venetia, youtube channel }
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Hello all awesome people!
I’m so sorry that I’ve neglected to write anything on my blog over the past few weeks… But I have so much news, so I will make it up to you guys! 
A few weeks ago, an enormous change came about my life… My parents let my sister and I take the bus… on our own! This may seem like an extremely insignificant thing to most of you but seeing as I’m homeschooled and Venetia works from home, we never need daily transport and therefore had not taken public transport in over two years.
So seeing as we’re actually allowed to catch the bus into town or to the ice-rink is very exciting for me… As I walked home after an incredibly tiring day with “The Veronicas” booming in my ears from my MP3 player… I just thought “Damn! I got around today without bugging my parents!”. It was pretty awesome…
What is even cooler though! In some parts of France (us living in one of these districts), buses have become free! It’s only a test trial for 2009 but if it works by the end of this year they’re going to keep it that way 
. In my opinion it’s brilliant, you just hop on and get comfortable ^.^.
I can’t wait until I can drive! Or at least until Venetia gets her French drivers license and she can drive me around… Now THAT is going to be pretty awesome !
Hooray! I’m so happy. That weather outside is absolutely gorgeous, it was a little bit blustery the past few days but before that it was as good as summer has ever been in Ireland 
. And now it’s back to being like that.
I just love France and the weather SO much. I anticipate summer coming . Being able to stand outside in shorts and a T-shirt at 7AM – even if I always fail to wake up at this time .
Or staying up late, outside surrounded by the warmth that the sun has left behind, several hours after it’s gone down. With the sky being so clear, without a single ghost of a cloud blurring the way of seeing the brightly shining stars specked all over the varied colour of the sky from light pink to a rich navy blue. I love it so much!
And the way the air tastes so much better when it has spent the day being caressed by the sunshine… And how as you see the thunder and lightning coming towards you in the distance, the smell of the parched earth being quenched of its thirst fills your senses. Ahhh! I just can’t wait!
About one week ago I found out how much fun making extravagant hair bows are… Hooray! Honestly though, since being able to fix my own things and create so many new and awesome looking accesories… I think that it must be so cool to be a clothes designer ^.^.
I began the hair bow making frenzy when my mom took me to a “haberdashery” for the very first time. A little local one that is tucked away comfortably between two shops that I frequently visit when I’m in town. So I was quite amazed that I had never noticed it before… As I stepped through the doors of the tiny, “neatly cluttered” store I was taken aback… The silky ribbons! The colourful buttons! Everything in that shop is awesome! Yes, I was extremely excited to be there .
By the end of the day I had figured out how to sew, use fabric glue and in the end had a good few incredible hair bows… It’s brilliant ^.^!
The reason that I have not been writing any new posts recently is that:
I’ve been extremely busy working on a website and a Youtube channel with my sister. I’m so impressed with the end result… It was created to learn French the most fun way – by song…
We uploaded so many awesome French music videos, spent much, much more time -.-’ than a few hours creating the literal translations of all the lyrics and even the MOST INCREDIBLE – Oh how humble am I – website ever!
We’ve also been adding amazing stories on the featured artists and groups so – and here comes the blatant publicising – check it out! It’s at www.lingolyrics.com .
Okay, so I’m going to leave it at that and I shall try write the next time that I have any news!
Hoping to hear from you guys 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 @ 1:58 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: backwards, Belfast, better, Bianca, Disney Land, Dun Donald Ice-Bowl, elbow, electro, electronic, empty, fell, flopped, foot, France, freezing, French, friends, go-around-the-rink, heel, hockey, ice-skating, ireland, lifted, loud, muscles, next, outside ice-rink, pain, photos, pity, rave, recording, recreational, saturday, severe, side, siren, skate, slippery, sticking, summer, Sunday, surprised, T stop, time-table, toe, Tuesday, unlock, unstable-ised, Wednesday, wobbling }
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Thursday, November 15, 2007
Hey everyone!
I know I haven’t written anything lately, but it’s because I’ve been busy learning French and …. ICE-SKATING! I absolutely love it! On Saturday we went to the one in my little town for the first time mainly because we couldn’t find it and it had been closed the for summer months.
The first time we got there we were a bit too early so went driving for half and hour and then came back. At 13:30 it was time to go. We didn’t really know what to do, since the only time any of us had been ice-skating in France was in Disney Land’s outside ice-rink.
So anyway I went up to the woman behind the counter said “Patinoire?”. She replied “Oui, oui pour deux?”. Once we got our tickets we walked around to the doors, there was one of those twirling barriers that you walk though and it clicks, so like you would Venetia just walked into it… yeah, you actually had to click this button before so it would unlock. Venetia quickly clicked it and off she went. Once we were in we asked the two girls in there what to do, they pointed and we sort of got the jest.
After a while of unstable-ised walking we finally got used to them opened the swinging door and were met by the freezing temperature inside and the empty atmosphere. There was absolutely no-one there yet. This wasn’t a bad thing, it meant that we could skate and get our bearings before anyone else came out. I was actually extremely surprised! The last time I’d been on ice was nine months ago in Ireland, saying good bye to my friends. But I just got on the ice and went.
More people came and by the end of the day there were at least 40 . Big difference to the amount of people there would have been in Dun Donald Ice-Bowl. It was the ice-rink in Belfast. Like you’d get there and there’d be literally hundreds of people crowded the rink!
The best part was that at 15:40 there was a LOUD siren and the shutters began to come down over the large windows, then loud “electro” (rave) music began to play and the disco lights came on. Lots of fun! About 20-30 minutes later though, the shutters came up again and the lights switched back to normal. I was like Aww!
It’s okay half an hour or so later it happened again . In Dun Donald it stayed with the lights and the rave music the whole time. We skated for four hours straight, I only fell once ! It wasn’t really like falling, Venetia was pushing me from behind then I skidded but quickly lifted myself up again .
Once the session was over, we got off the ice, wobbling because of the numbness and because of how painful our muscles were! We changed back into our shoes, had some difficulty walking, and then went home. It was so nice to sit down! For three whole days I was in severe pain with my legs and arms. Guess I’m not used to doing so much exercise . On the third day I thought it would be so much better but it was worse! I literally just flopped out of bed.
On Tuesday, I was much better and so my mom and I decided to go ice-skating! Wooo! We went to the place, but we were an hour early, so we went shopping, came back and then it was still closed! I looked at the large time-table again and realised I had been looking at the wrong day! The patinoire (ice-rink) was only open three days a week, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday. Wednesday does seem like a pretty random day but in France, schools finish early and primary schools don’t even go on a Wednesday. So we reluctantly went home but decided that we’d come back the next day.
Yes, so yesterday we got there at 13:30, skated for three hours, went shopping and then picked my sister up from work. It was loads of fun, despite the fact that I fell three times. The first time I fell it was because I was trying to show my mom something .
The other two times were near the end and were very painful! I hurt my knee, elbow and my side. I actually grazed my elbow and just sat where I fell and said “… Ow”. Really funny after the pain had gone away….
Last night I couldn’t even sleep on my side! I also fell on my hands, so that was very sore with them being numb from the cold already! Other than that I had an awesome day! My mom’s figure skates were sticking into her toe so we asked if we could change them and the guy said we could use the hockey skates if we wanted. We did! It was so much easier, for the first 10 minutes or so it felt very slippery but I got the hang of them.
I can even do the leg movements like a continuous figure eight, the snake, turn and skate on one foot and do a stop on my right heel whilst gliding on my left foot. So I’ve made up my mind about which ice-skates I want to get, just for recreational “go-around-the-rink” ice-skating. Hockey skates!
Pity Venetia didn’t get to try them out but I’ll just ask if we can use them this Saturday again. Oh! We also found out how to use the lockers! It’s all electronical and the instructions were easy enough to follow except for one that I couldn’t understand. We just got the guy to come and show us . So now I know .
Really looking forward to Saturday, Venetia’s going to teach me how to skate backwards and do a T stop . So I’ll tell you how that goes and I’ll also try and get some pictures or even recordings for you.
I think that I’ll leave it at that and I’m still waiting on those photos .
Hope to hear from you all soon!
- Bianca
{ December 18, 2008 @ 1:02 PM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: Alfonso, Bageria, barbeque, Bianca, birthday, brother-in-law, domani, England, experience, father, fiance, foreigner, France, Giovanni, gorgeous, green, high, hmmm, incorrect, internet, job, Jovanna, kill, lines, lucky, lunch, May, Mazara del Vallo, offer, patio, phone, phone booth, planted, poisonous, ramshackle, refresh, serpente, slithering, sly, snake, south, south-west, South-west Sicily, spade, spirits, summer, telephone, tile-less, tomorrow, unorignial, west, wheelbarrow, words }
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Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Hey everyone!
Trying to think of where we were last … oh right yeah! Okay well once my mom left for England, a week or two later my dad got a job offer. I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this before but I’ll just refresh your memories… and mine !
In our Sicilian house since we were in what they called the country side and too far away from any phone lines so we didn’t even have a telephone or the internet in that house! Giovanni promised it would be within the first week… then domani, domani, domani (tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow). Per sempre domani (always tomorrow)!
The telephone guys came, looked and said “Yes, too far away for a telephone line”. We’ll need to put more in. The next time they came, they measured the distance, then after 15 minutes of being at the house went for a two hour lunch break!
They never came again, so the whole time in Sicily we didn’t have internet or telephone. Except for when we went to an internet café or telephone place. So anyway to get on with my original story, my dad received the job offer in a tiny, ramshackle-like telephone booth place since it was the closest to our house… and generally like most of the telephone places in Mazara del Vallo.
And of course in case you haven’t noticed or read in previous posts it was in south-west France . My dad accepted, and then my mom booked us tickets out of Sicily for the forth of May. You see my mom had to be in Sicily or we had to be in England before the eighth of May because it would have been my sister’s 18th birthday.
I was barely able to bring myself to stay in that house for the last three weeks. It was so boring!
We did have a little bit of fun though, even though we were stuck in the middle of a family fight between Jovanna, Giovanni’s fiancé, also given a random name made up by, yours truly… me! Okay, okay I got it off an Italian girls name site … and it’s just the girl version of Giovanni… I know I’m so unoriginal… and Jovanna’s brother-in-law. They wanted the house for summer… don’t ask me why they’d want that house, but whatever their reason was, they wanted it.
I’m using the word “they” because it was Jovanna’s brother-in-law’s father as well as the brother-in-law. Those two were really sly things. First off they made Jovanna’s mother pay them to fix up the house for us… which they did NOT do such a great job of… in my opinion. Is there actually a point to painting the outside of the house… and then just leaving the kitchen floor tile-less because they’d done “their work” . Secondly they planted a snake in our garden! Yes it was them… I reckon so anyway.
They came to paint the walls on the patio one day and went into the garden to get the wheelbarrow, but when they left they just stood around waiting for my dad to come up and they left the wheelbarrow outside the garden instead of putting it back.
That day, my dad and Giovanni were sitting in the garden. My dad spotted a giant green snake slithering across the ground, calmly told Giovanni… Giovanni jumped up looked around then ran to my dad’s side… I hope you know the descriptive word for Giovanni that I’m thinking because I’d really rather not write it out .
My dad asked him if he should kill it, if it was poisonous. Giovanni said yes. So my dad got the spade…. And you can imagine what happened next I’m sure.
Later that day Giovanni said that the last time he saw a snake was at a barbeque seven years ago… and THEN told my dad that green snakes aren’t poisonous… this from the guy that ran to my dad when he saw the snake and told my dad to kill it!
A few days later Jovanna’s brother-in-law… I can’t even remember his real name… so let’s say Alfonso. So Alfonso came around with his wife. My dad said in Italian “I found your snake!” he said “Mio serpente?!” (my snake) “Yes, your snake”, was my dad’s reply. So now Alfonso didn’t know if it was just a foreigner to the Italian language with the incorrect words… or of course that we knew it was him who placed it there . Mind boggling!
After he got over the confusing-ness of my dad’s comment he asked what colour it was. And then proved that it must have been them because his wife and he said “Oooh green, it is very, very poisonous! Brown is okay but GREEN!”… So who to believe now… hmmm.
My dad told Giovanni about them saying this and he said… yes… but no it was not green it was brown! Since it was clearly green . We went down to the farmer by us and asked him. Green is not poisonous. We decided to believe him .
So now you can see that we had good enough reasons to leave Sicily. Even though it was gorgeous… some of the people that we met weren’t. So I guess if we had had a better experience and had found a nice house, we would never have left and I wouldn’t be writing this… lucky I had that experience then, eh?
(South-west Sicily, Bageria)
Tomorrow I’ll write about leaving Sicily . See you all then. Hope to hear from you soon (spirits still high ).
- Bianca
ojp
{ December 18, 2008 @ 10:56 AM }
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{ Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: Africa, Bianca, comments, dad, destination, drive, England, experiences, flop, France, gite, house, ireland, Italy, lake, long, Mafia, March, Matabeleland, Mediterranean, mom, moving, myself, Northern Ireland, october, permanent, Pyrenees, rainy, September, shower, sicily, sister, soap, south, summer, symptoms, three, time, weeks, withdrawal, wondering, Zimbabwe }
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Thursday, October 4, 2007
Hey everyone!
Well on the first of September, we moved to our permanent house in France. About time too, you see… moving about all began a VERY long time ago (well.. 6 months on the first… but that seems like a very long time to me, so just let me have my rant!)… So on the 1st of March 2007, we departed Ireland only after deciding 6 weeks earlier that we were going to move to Sicily. Yep, that’s right not France, Sicily (confused, eh? )! My dad’s dad had lived there, and Ireland was so cold, EVERY single day it was like “What’s the day like?” “Umm… rainy and cold…” on and on and on.
We’re not used to cold weather (I’ll get to that part later). So we all made a decision to give it a go, (for those of you that never concentrated in Geography classes, Sicily is the football of the boot (the boot being Italy), it’s also know as “The Land of the Mafia”… actually I just made that last bit up, but it is where “The Mafia” originated from, with only ever visiting it once.
So you’re wondering how we ended up in south-west France? After having a lot of bad experiences there, my dad got a job offer in France and so he accepted. I left Sicily after living in it for two months and flew all the way up North, just stopping short of Northern Ireland in South England. We came here first because my cousins live there and it would give us more time to find a decent place in France.
One month later we left and after only finding a “gite” – like a summer house (that’s where the lake was and where the pictures below were taken at) – we arrived in our hopefully last destination… for a while! Then of course we moved to this new house. Sadly it has no lake near it 
, but it is very nice and only five minutes from town, an hour from skiing in the Pyrenees and an hour and a half’s drive from the Mediterranean !
We’ve been living here for a month and the fishing withdrawal symptoms are starting to set in! I find that when a bar of soap drops in the shower, I’m mildly surprised it doesn’t flop around for a bit, before becoming still!
Oh right yeah, just read through above and realised that I forgot to tell you why we’re not used to the cold weather, well we (my mom, dad, sister and of course myself) were all born in Zimbabwe, Africa, I was three when the country became too corrupt to live in and we had to leave for Ireland. Right well, I’m away until next write up .
Hope to hear comments SOON !
- Bianca
How we came to be so far across the pond! (Ireland to France)
{ December 18, 2008 @ 10:56 AM } · { Kiss My Fishy }
{ Tags: Africa, Bianca, comments, dad, destination, drive, England, experiences, flop, France, gite, house, ireland, Italy, lake, long, Mafia, March, Matabeleland, Mediterranean, mom, moving, myself, Northern Ireland, october, permanent, Pyrenees, rainy, September, shower, sicily, sister, soap, south, summer, symptoms, three, time, weeks, withdrawal, wondering, Zimbabwe } · { Leave a Comment }
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Hey everyone!
Well on the first of September, we moved to our permanent house in France. About time too, you see… moving about all began a VERY long time ago (well.. 6 months on the first… but that seems like a very long time to me, so just let me have my rant!)… So on the 1st of March 2007, we departed Ireland only after deciding 6 weeks earlier that we were going to move to Sicily. Yep, that’s right not France, Sicily (confused, eh?
)! My dad’s dad had lived there, and Ireland was so cold, EVERY single day it was like “What’s the day like?” “Umm… rainy and cold…” on and on and on.
We’re not used to cold weather (I’ll get to that part later). So we all made a decision to give it a go, (for those of you that never concentrated in Geography classes, Sicily is the football of the boot (the boot being Italy), it’s also know as “The Land of the Mafia”… actually I just made that last bit up, but it is where “The Mafia” originated from, with only ever visiting it once.
So you’re wondering how we ended up in south-west France? After having a lot of bad experiences there, my dad got a job offer in France and so he accepted. I left Sicily after living in it for two months and flew all the way up North, just stopping short of Northern Ireland in South England. We came here first because my cousins live there and it would give us more time to find a decent place in France.
One month later we left and after only finding a “gite” – like a summer house (that’s where the lake was and where the pictures below were taken at) – we arrived in our hopefully last destination… for a while! Then of course we moved to this new house. Sadly it has no lake near it
, but it is very nice and only five minutes from town, an hour from skiing in the Pyrenees and an hour and a half’s drive from the Mediterranean 
!
We’ve been living here for a month and the fishing withdrawal symptoms are starting to set in! I find that when a bar of soap drops in the shower, I’m mildly surprised it doesn’t flop around for a bit, before becoming still!
Oh right yeah, just read through above and realised that I forgot to tell you why we’re not used to the cold weather, well we (my mom, dad, sister and of course myself) were all born in Zimbabwe, Africa, I was three when the country became too corrupt to live in and we had to leave for Ireland. Right well, I’m away until next write up
.
Hope to hear comments SOON
!
- Bianca