Postius I made Honey Cracklesius

Yesterday was Tuesday which meant my 2 hours at home by myself. Instead of cooking some noisey and/or highly complicated thing that required an extended trip to the shops I Skyped with my Nanna. It was lovely. Dad and Liberty were in Geraldton visiting so we used Tibs's laptop and webcam for the ultimate Skype experience. It was great to both see and be able to chat with Nanna, the only complaint I have is about the quality of image from a webcam which obviously you just have to put up with.

I still wanted to cook something for after dinner with the grandies but I wasn't really in a complicated cooking mood and didn't want to disturb Giu so I decided to make Honey Crackles (one of my ultimate favorite things ever). The only thing that I had to get from the shops was corn flakes and the overall cooking time was minimal. There was however on minor gitch in my planning... I could not find a translation for or and Italian equvalent of patty pans (or cupcake cases or muffin cups depending on what you call them). Tibs had suggested that I just plop the mix onto a baking tray but I was skeptical about whether it would actually clump together or not.

Last Tuesday Nonna Scaletti brought budino for dessert, this translates to puddings and as far as I could tell it was moose and very tasty. Thats not the point however, the point is that she made them in individual disposable metal cups (like small pie cases with high sides) that for some reason we had cleaned to use again. I thought I would experiment with using these to make my own patty pans and lined them with baking paper. Turns out that this actually works better than patty pans! If you've ever made Honey Crackles (or Honey Joys as they are know by persons that are not a 5 year old me) you'd know that you normally have a little bit of the toffee mix that sticked to the bottom of the paper and you've either got to be skilled to get it off, eat some paper, or ditch it. when you use baking paper nothing sticks its amazing you end up just being able to pull out the cornflake clumps and eat it like and apple! amazing revelation that I shall keep in mind. Plus I like the pretentiousness they extrude... truly cafe worthy =P

Pictures in of my creation in all their pretentiousness:

Postius I've got lots of (bad) Excuseiuses

Things I've been doing instead of posting:

- Reading, allot. Giu is studying after school most days. Her study consists of reciting the contents of her textbooks, after spending a whole day trying to decipher Italian my brain generally hurts so I avoid both the noise of her talking and the possibility of disturbing her by heading to my room and mainly reading

- Facebooking. So before you jump into telling me how this isn’t going to help my Italian you must bear in mind that most of the people who are using facebook at the same time as me are also in the same time zone and thus most of them are writing in Italian... I've actually found that I’m starting to recognise a lot more words when I’m trying to work out what they've written. I’m still using google translator (which by the way is amazing) but I’m not using it for everything

- Walking Cleo. Giu seems to have an amazing inability to be on time EVER (and not just the general lack of time me and my friends have where we are sometimes late... I can remember ONE time we've left on time which is saying something since we walk to school every day) and as such I get up, get changed, and eat breakfast before she has generally even appeared and thus for the purpose of giving Giu time to eat breakfast (which still never happens) I walk Cleo in the mornings. When we arrive back from school I then generally walk Cleo again so that Giu can study or prepare lunch (except on the occasions that she feels like having a smoke in which I prepare lunch). And then before dinner when Giu is studying I walk Cleo again, generally just for the purpose of she likes trying to make me fall over in the mud (the weather is currently in a perpetual state of drizzle and thus the ground is slimy)

- Talked to people on Skype... on the weekends (when I eventually get out of bed) I sit down to my laptop and think 'right time to write an updatius' and then someone interesting will come on Skype and call me. Which is fine. I like talking to them... but I've only had one Skype call that lasted less than an hour and a half and that was just because it was a ridiculous time for the other person.

- Yoga. For some reason (that is currently unknown to me) I decided to make one of my new years resolutions to do yoga two or three times a week. I initially planned to do this when I got up in the mornings but two things have discouraged me from this; 1) its rather cold in the mornings when I get out from under my down dooner (the heater for some reason turns of during the night) and 2) the one time I decided to give it a try I nearly fell on my head. Twice. Which is impressive considering in only did 5 mins in the end. Turns out that despite the fact I’m a morning person inverting ones self and pointing ones to head towards to ground after emerging from bed 2 mins earlier requires a level of coordination that is not possesable at that time =S

- and more recently watching A Very Potter Musical. This is a fan made musical parody of Harry Potter and can be found on youtube here . I blame the Ritters for the fact that I am watching this; they have all watched it and recite segments at random which continually reminds me that I've not got around to watching it and that I really should do so.

Now as an intensive to try and post more I’m going to try and write shorter posts but more of them. There for I cannot use 'oooh I don’t have time to write one' as an excuse because if I write them frequently then there can't be much to update you on. This is completely against my initial pre-departure plan of posting once every few weeks but while I’m not doing a lot of terribly interesting things I seems to be able to talk about them for an extended period of time. This is a good example; I’m giving stupid reasons for not posting more frequently and its already gone over a page =S

right so short posts. That means that I’m going to stop this one now and then after dinner I might write another short one with what I did several weeks ago and hopefully I'll eventually catch up to now.

Postius I made Pieius

I made Pie. It was tasty. I cannot actually remember making apple pie and it not tasting bad... varying degrees of tastyness... thats one hellava recipe for ya!
I spent 4 hours straight conjugating verbs today an for some reason this was absolutely exhausting so unfortunatly you get a very tiny updatius on my pieius.
Gabri took Giu to dance and I was just getting ready to make pastry when she came home and asked if I could take Cleo out (if you've looked at the picspam of the house then you will see there is no yard so we have to take Cleo to the park allll the time). Thus followed my attempt to hold an actual conversation in Italian that went beyond 'how are you?' or 'are you ok?". I think it went quite well; I used the adjective dopo(later), the verb fare(to do/make) (which i conjugated) and the (I think its a) noun dolce(sweets) oooh and I think I got the personal pronoun Io (I) in there somewhere too... in a sentence that went something like "dopo io faccio dolce" I thought it was going quite well until Gabri sceptically corrected dolce to doccia and made water pouring on head/washing hair motions (doccia means shower). I ended up managing to get 'dolce con mele' (sweets with apple) in there and she worked out I did in fact (at least somewhat) know what I was talking about!


We then had a little arm waving session in which she declared that I wouldn't have time to make cake (as we decided upon calling it) if I was making the pastry too and that I should wait until tomorrow. I replied using   dolce con famiglia and she seemed to cotton on that I was at least going to try and do it. there was also a few mins of waving about the fact we only had a few apples left, I ignored this, relatively sure that more would appear with the fam.


to my surprise making the pastry only took 20 mins which was waaaay less that I expected because I had to combine it all by hand and not use a food processor like normal. I was rolling out the second piece when the fam arrived with Giulia at 7.20ish, I set to cutting apples and adding the secret ingredients (which are not so secret if you read my last post). It was apparently impressive that I made the pastry myself (as far as I could tell we were calling it pasta?). and at one point I believe Gabri was scolding Giu for not baking sweets (oooops my bad).


now comes the interesting bit;
i dont generally use gas ovens, so when a bit of pastry crust falls off the pie it normally just sits on the bottom of the oven and goes a lovely brown colour. it appears in a gas oven this is not the case... one side goes black and it starts billowing smoke.... fortunatly Gabri noticed this early on (as in like 5 mins after i put it in) so i started fishing bits of pastry of the bottom of the oven...the even more interesting bit is that it set of the smoke alarm... i'm highly amused that they have these considering they smoke inside but it went off. and the smoke alarm is connected to the house alarm which likes to talk alllll the time (when doors etc. get opened it tells you which ones) and it proceeded to (i assume) announce that the smoke alarm was going off (which we obvs knew about because we were in the same room as it). Giu got annoyed at it talking and went outside and Gabri got annoyed at her for I don't know why and then every time i tried to apologise for setting the alarm of they kept telling me it was fine... it was one of those moments that was highly amusing but you couldn't laugh at it...


anyway pie tasted uber nommy which was a surprise because I've never not used green apples before (i halved the sugar to compensate). but we only ate like 1/4 of it (there were 5 of us) because we had all eaten waaaay to much yummy dindins... (Gabri is saying that tomorrow she is going to spend 8 hours on the treadmill to make up for eating so much).
urgh! i'm starting to use too many words like uber, nommy, yummy and dindins =S i think its time for me to go nighnighs (urgh another one!)


Piiiiee Piiiics (this alliteration is somehow highly amusing to my tired brain):

with and with out flash (i'm not really happy with either pic but anyway)... also if you've had my pie before you can see i went with 3 leaves as opposed to the customary 4... that was really because i didn't have any other flat pastry left and i didn't feel like rolling the left overs out so i just went with three

Postius I Just Survived the Shopsius

So I know that its past last Friday when I said I wanted to have put up my next postius and that this in fact is not the updatius that you are looking for but I thought that I would let you know that I am alive, that a proper updatius is coming, oh and that just conquered the shops... well sort of.

Today is a Tuesday and it appears that every Tuesday we have family over for dinner its also the day that I finish school 2 hours before Giulia and thus I get time to potter around without getting in the way of her study. It also happens that one or more bags of apples appear along with the Grandparents, the majority of which sit there for a week until we decide that they are too squishy for eating and throw them out. To me apples and boredom say 'apple pie' (yes I’m strange and a procrasti-baker) so I thought that I would nice to make apple pie today. For those of you who have tried my apple pie you probs know that its the addition of apple cider vinegar that makes it different from other apple pies (for those of you who haven’t tried it remind me of this fact next time you see me and I'll see what I can do to remedy it) and my extensive house searching last week for measuring devices didn't turn up any aceto di mele (the vinegar in question) so to make pie I was going to have to venture to the shops. I also needed to pick up some cinnamon (another of the key ingredients), butter and alfoil pie tins because despite the impressive range of baking dishes none were really of the right proportion for pie (which if you are ever wondering is a round base of aprox. 18cm and a, preferably, slightly sloped wall of 3ishcm). Going to the shop to fetch these things was waaaay less daunting that fetching stuff for pav because I'd actually bought all of these ingredients in an Italian supermarket before (when we were in Varenna on Lake Como last year for Dad's birthday).

Right so after spending like 20mins looking for the shopping bags (in Italy you use your plastic shopping bags over and over or have to work out how to ask for some before any of your items get scanned) I headed out to the shop which is just around the corner. Having only been to the shop once before and trailing around after Giu instead of paying attention to where things where I went with the 'walk past the end of all the isles and head down ones that look useful' approach. As it turns out this was a good plan as it took me past the stationary and I was able to pick up mechanical pencil leads and some gomme (erasers), both of which I was almost out of. After this success I decided that I would look for some other things on my 'I don’t need it yet but I will soon' list which included shampoo, conditioner and Johnson's soap. Finding the shampoo/conditioner section was easy but Sunsilk (the brand I use) is in the middle of changing its packaging (meaning that if I grabbed the green bottle I would end up with either 'for curls' or 'for straight hair' depending on if I got old or new packaging). Having needed more conditioner when we were in Italy last year I recognised that (it was still the old bottle), but the shampoo next to it was in a bottle with the new shape but it was green (the old colour), so I didn’t know if it was 'for curls' and in Italy they just hadn't changed the colours or if it was 'for straight hair' and the person who stocked the shelves just liked matching colours. I eventually decided that they could wait until I'd done more research into which ones I needed so I headed off to look for soap.

Soap should be easy, we bought it last year and it was in the same bottles as at home. Well I've either completely ignored the fact that Johnson's have like quadrupled the number of products they stock in IDENTICAL packaging or Australia just only stocks some of them because I got there and there were 9 or 10 bottles in various colours, non of which looked like those I remember. Knowing that in Australia we'd managed once to end up with moisturiser instead of soap I whipped out my lonley planet phrase book to find the word for soap. Its sapone. Not one bottle said sapone so I figured that could wait too, I hadn't intended to get some today anyway.

Now I headed off to find the things I actually needed (still in front because I’d picked up the stationary). Aceto di mele was easy, same bottle as last time (can you see a recurring pattern in how I find things in shops?) however I ended up getting a different one (that was next to it) because it was cheaper, but anyway. If I had failed in finding burro (butter) then I really wasn't qualified to cook without supervision, so all I had left to find was cannella. I'd walked past a spice section on the way from aceto to burro (someone was stacking shelves) so I headed back there to get the last thing on my list (what about the alfoil containters you say? Yeah well I forgot to put them on my list). I found the cannella macinata section quite easily, it was next to the cinnamon sticks, it was however empty. I searched around in case there was a second brand that stocked it but found none. And that is why I 'sort of' conquered the shops; I managed to find everything on my list (and some things I would need in the future) but there was no cannella.

On my way to the checkout I did a quick scan around so see if anything caught my eye. Lucky I did otherwise I would have forgotten the foil pie trays...oops, despite going over my list several times I had apparently managed to forget about them completely. Grabbing the ones I needed and (letting the shop win with the cannella) the only obstacle I had left was the checkout. We'd done this plenty of times in Bellano (the closest town with a supermarket to Varenna), however I’d never done it by my self and we'd got in the swing of it pretty quickly ( I was allocated to bag packing). I managed fine except for the fact that I have enough trouble deciphering numbers when they are said slowly as opposed to uber-quick by the checkout-chick. This however was easily fixed by giving her a €50 note and making her deal with the change (it turned out to only cost 7 Euro something so I looked pretty silly but anyway).

YAY! I survived the shops! Nothing when horribly wrong, no one started speaking to me in Italian and I didn’t forget anything (well I haven’t discovered it if I have). The only problem I’m faced with now is what to do about the cannella... there is a little bit in a bottle (that I think Gabri puts in her coffee?) but it's not enough for making pie and I didn’t spy any in my kitchen wide search... maybe I can get Gabri to pick some up taking Giu to dancing or have Giu ask Nonna Scaletti to bring some... I’m relatively sure this recipe should hate me by now; more often than not I’m improv-ing some part of it!

Anyway I'll put up pics when its done, and hopefully and actually updatius soon too.

Postius I made Pavlovaius

Last Saturday was Gabri (my host mum)'s birthday and being the uber organised person that I am I totally had a present organised for her (that, by the way, was sarcasm in case you didn’t get it). So instead of my awesome (non-existent) pre-organised present I decided that I was going to cook/bake something of the dolce variety. I rather quickly how ever discovered that in order to do so I would have to venture to the shops by my self (Giulia was at school) to get the ingredients that I was missing. This was also made slightly more difficult by the fact that I had not decided what I was going to make.

I eventually came down to two options; apple pie or meringue... a friend of mine (the Kuostar) had resently successfully made meringues in the microwave so I thought this might be a simple way to create and Aussie (or possibly Kiwi) dessert without having to spent hours beating egg whites (the only beating devises I could find where an eletric mixer (hand held) and a whisk). Unfortunately however this required icing sugar of which I could find none... I didn’t end up going to the shop because I decided the chances of me being able to find icing sugar by myself where pretty slim. Giulia and I were going somewhere for dinner while Gabri went elsewhere meaning if I made meringue we weren’t going to eat it until the next day anyway so I decided to wait until Giulia could come with me. Shops are apparently closed on Sunday (something I’m not used to living on the same road as an IGA in Australia) and we ended up going out to diner (with an aunt and some cousins from Verona) that night anyway.

On Sunday I spied some Kiwifruit in the fruit bowl (it turns out that Nonna and Nonno Scaletti grow them) and decided that I definitely wanted to make Pav (apple pie isn’t really all the Aussie now is it?). Due to the fact that (ooooh look I got some FPS in here =P) I had procrastinated soooo long and the fact I was going to decorate with Kiwis I thought I might as well make proper pav and not microwave it (I’ve also had some rather … interesting experiences with eggs in the microwave... if you haven’t heard it involved an explosion... enough said right?). However this then involves beating eggs for a stupidly long amount of time and Giulia is studying for this massive exam thing on the weekend. On Tuesday's (that would be today) I finish school at 12 and Giulia finishes at 2 so I thought this would be the perfect time to do all the beating and thus decided to end my procrastination...

it turns out that we did In fact have all the ingredients for proper pav in the house so I didn’t need to venture to the shops. It is however worth noting that after throughly searching the entire house TWICE I did not find any devices for measuring other than 200cc plastic cups, a 1L liquid measuring jug and a set of electric scales (yay) that desplay 'err' when you turn them on (not yay, I think it has flat bats). It is probs also worth noting that I have never made pav before... meringues yes (from the same recipe In fact) but i've never had to deal with trying to make pav. Anyway I used the plastic cups to measure my amount of sugar (fortunately the only measurement other than a ½ tspn for which I used.... a teaspoon!) and set off on my 20min hand beater holding experience. Everything went quite smoothly but the beater only had speeds 'slow' and 'less slow' and looking back I really needed a 'not at all slow' and a 'rather fast' because I don’t think I managed to get it quite stiff enough (but that could also have been due to my inaccurate sugar measurements).

After email stressing to Mum while it was in the oven about all the things that was wrong with it, it seemed to turn out ok. And we both concluded that it would probs taste fine anyway (and plus I was the only one who would know if it was wrong). While it looked disappointingly un-pavlova-like I think it looked quite cool with cream and Kiwis on it. I also had a disagreement with the cream that I put on top. The cream we buy is UHT cream for putting on pasta and resembles thickened cream (which as I’m sure you'll know doesn’t whip). Gabri also made Giulia tell me several times that it wasn't cream for sweets, I did however manage to convince her it was all fine because I would add a little bit of icing sugar (there is a tiny little pot for sprinkling over tarts/cakes etc). Stubbornly I still tried to whip the cream just to see what would happen (not very much, other than making me cream flecked). Anyway; pavlova on plate, cream on pavlova, kiwis on cream, camera in hand, place pav in front of Gabri say 'per tuo compleanno' (for your birthday) end of Pavlova Pandemonium. I named it the Pandemonius Pavlova (in my head and on facebook at least) because it was rather stressful in the making (did I mention that the beater heads wouldn’t clip into the body and thus I had to be careful so as to not accidentally release spinning missiles? No I don’t think that I did...).

Final product was the shape of an oversized chocolate melt with a 2.5mm crust and lots of spongy filling; very tasty. Pictures to insue:

ARGH! I almost forgot to say that it DID tasty uber nommy! (in English that translates to very nice) Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy it and they were even fighting over who got the last bit (Gabri won; I believe her argument was that it was her birthday cake which is fair enough)

Postius I wore a Dressius

(name due to popular demand from my mum)

right so last weekend one of Giulia's friends (also conveniently named Giulia) was having a party for her 18^th birthday. If I remember correctly I have already told you that while I was going though the traumatic experience of blow-drying my hair Giulia (my sister Giulia not the other one) asked me if I wanted to come with her. Taking mum's 'take all the opportunities you can' speech (it wasn’t really a speech but anyway) to heart I said that I would come, despite the fact I was quite nervous about going. I didn’t know very many of the people that would be there (I didn’t even know who WAS going but the fact I had only met a few of Giulia (my Giulia not the other one)'s friends and of those I had met couldn’t remember many of their names I was relatively sure I wouldn’t know very many of the people there), I wouldn’t be able to converse very well with any of the people there and in Australia I never really did the whole 'normal' teen party thing so I wasn’t really sure what I would be expecting if it had been in Aus let alone in another country all together! (wow that was a long sentence! Sorry if you are reading this NutchMan/Tom I swear that I swear that I learnt things in English!). So upon asking Giulia where the party was she replied that it was at a pub... this didn’t really do much to ease my nervousness because to me the word 'pub' describes an overly crowded, loud musiced place where I was going to feel majorly out of place.

We had to be at this 'pub' at 7.30 so 6.15 was declared start pimping time (really why you need this long quite honestly escapes me... I believe it has something to do with allowing you extra time to apply and remover make up until you are happy with it). Ermi appeard around the start of pimping time to get ready with us so I was content with the fact that I would know now at least 2 people at this thing. From what I could gather from the arm waving that was occurring between Ermi and Giu (Giulia, my Giulia not the other one) the aim was to wear the shortest dress possible (or wear a shortish dress and a belt and then hoik it up so above the belt was loose and bellow it made the dress really short) and then sheer tights (apparently for the cold but I think it was really just to get away with such short dresses. Fortunately dress dramas had no effect on me; not intending to go to a party on my first weekend over seas and also not excepting to have a short dress competition in winter while it got down to bellow freezing at night, I only had two dresses and only one was suitable for wearing at night.

In the pimping process the door to my room (well technically it is Giulia's room but I’m in it at the moment) was open (it is normally closed if someone's not in it or I don’t feel like being on Cleo patrol or other wise things, mainly my slippers and socks, go missing) because obviously me, Ermi and Giu where going it and out of it. After waking up that morning I thought to my self 'maybe tucking Jace (my teddy more on her in a later post) into my bed is not the best plan in case Cleo gets into the room' so instead I put her in the furthest part of the bed in the corner, up against the wall. This however did not deter Cleo who some how managed to evade the three off us and get hold of Jace. Fortunately I noticed this fiendish act as she was leaving the room with her bounty in her mouth. Alerting Giulia we (Ermi doesn’t like dogs) chased Cleo around the house until she dropped Jace and I managed to scoop her off to safety. Jace, fortunately, was fine with only a few of slobber to accompany the psychological trauma she would have sustained from the unwanted adventure. Needless to say Cleo wasn’t getting any pats from me for a while.

At some point in the pimping process Ermi decided that I needed to wear make up proceeded to deal with that. Another of Giu's friends Silvi (Silvia) who I'd already met (more on that in a later post too) also appeared at some point planning to catch the metro with us. However by the point where Ermi, Silvi and Giu where ready it was like 7.25 (or some other stupidly late time that was still slightly before 7.30) so someone (I think it was Silvi because Ermi couldn’t make the phone work) called for a taxi and we ended up arriving only 15 mins late as opposed the the 25 we would have been if we'd metrod (we still arrived before most other people so I’m not sure what the major stress was). The venue was really nice (I'd say more of a bar than a pub) and we had a reserved area down stairs where the music wasn't too obnoxiously loud (well not to begin with anyway) and it way wasn't over crowded. There were more people that I knew there (however I didn’t know their names at the time) and so I just casually followed someone that I knew around as they floated and talked to people they knew. I generally got introduced as ' this is Breanna, she's from Australia and doesnt understand Italian' however this was eventually shorted to 'this is Breanna. Speak English!'.

Now the problem with people who smoke is that they always want to go out and smoke. This generally isn’t a problem at school when you have a break every two hours that it continently just long enough to smoke a cigarette in, but when you are at a party the time intervals between cigarettes seems to dramatically decrease and thus the person I was casually following would frequently disappear off outside to smoke. 'Not a problem' you say 'find someone else to follow' but you see no, you cant just go and smoke by yourself, you've got to take all your other smoker friends with you. And that there is a problem because most of the people I was shadowing smoked, which means they alllll disappeared off together. And so because it's winter and it's cold every time you want to go outside to smoke you've got to find you coat and find your scarf and no doubt if you're looking for them they’ll be at the bottom of the coat/scarf mountain. Yeah I refuse to go outside with the smokers and not just because of the coat/scarf issue, I’m kind of waaaay over passive smoke.

It's ok they know that I don't generally go with them and they try to find someone for me to hang with while they're gone. Generally its Silvi who (yay!) doesn’t smoke. So Giu, Ermi and Cri (who's name is Cristina but I didn't remember that or Cri at the time) sat me at a able with Silvi and went out so smoke. I got introduced around the table and told I should talk to this guy Matteo because he could speak English. This turned out to just be one of his friends trying to piss him off but it was still amusing; waving arms and saying random words we knew of the other language. In Matteo's case generally was 'canguro' 'bong', 'marijuana', 'crack', 'joint' and a whole bunch of swear words... he did manage to string together a couple of sentences though, I believe one was 'you look like Nicole Kidman who's such a milf' (if you don’t know what a milf is and are over the age of say 25 I really suggest you DON'T try googleing it and that's not intend as random reverse psychology) and another 'do you want to learn how to roll a joint?' (although technically that's a question and not a sentence but anyway my response was the same:) laugh, say no, laugh some more. That was generally my response to everything Matteo said 'no I don’t want to smoke a joint.', 'yes I know what a bong is', 'yes marijuana is illegal in Australia', 'no really its'.

At 11.45ish the coat/scarf mountain was disassembled and everyone headed out because we had to metro before it shut at whatever time it shuts at. It was snowing! And it was really cool (cool meaning awesome but it was also cool meaning bellow zero so I guess both work fine!). For some reason unbeknownst to me (I’m sure it would have made sense if I understood rapid fire Italian) Giulia and I got a lift with some of her friends who had a car while the others metrod... by this point I had managed to learn that Giu (my Giulia not the other one), GiuGiu (the other Giulia not mine), Ermi, Silvi and Cri were staying the night. However I had failed to understand that this was AFTER everyone else had crashed at Giulia (my Giulia not the other one)'s for a while. But we're not up to that yet because in this story we haven’t even got home yet! So there were five of us in the car, and it was a small car, and it was a highly amusing ride because the drive and the front passenger kept fighting over the stereo. We were listening to a CD but only 1 in 5 song where actually deemed listenable to by the driver, while the passenger thought it was 2 in 5... when they finally decided on a song that we could listen to they were then fighting about the volume of said song, this was made all the more hilarious by the fact they were fighting in a completely passive way; the passenger would wait until the driver was busy indicating or changing gears and then turn it down the driver would then slowly turn it up again over a period of time until it was waaaay to loud which meant that when it got turned down again it was still loud but not overy.

We arrived back at Giulia's just before the first wave of metroers, it became apparent that the reason there were two waves was because some peeps had gone of to a supermarket or bottleo or somewhere to get the Italian equivalent of champagne and some I believe the label said peach flavoured vodka, which judging by the faces of the people that drunk it was completely revulting. Over the course of the time at Giulia's I met another person who decided to do a similar thing to Matteo by saying all the things in English that he knew... did could actually speak quite a bit of English and decided to try teaching me Italian by giving me things to say when Gabri (my host mum) or a teacher asked me to do something. Fortunately other people spoke English also and told me he was In fact teaching me to tell them to fuck off, I had actually worked this out myself and I’m relatively sure everything he said to me went in one ear and out the other. I was quite pleased when everyone decided to eventually leave, I kidna like a liiiittle bit of personal space and having 14 people in a couch/floor space of a 1.5m square doesn’t really work for me for longer than like 20 mins.

I finally crashed into bed at around 3.30 after declining offers to sleep upstairs with Giu and her other friends and then slept through until 1pm... oh the joys of shutters, I woke up and my room was dark enough I could have not fallen asleep at all, it was wonderful (I’m one of those weird people that as soon as the light density in a room reaches a certain point I’m awake and not going to sleep again, its wonderful for getting rid of jet lag but horrible when you want a sleep in)

okey dokey, updatius finished and going online in time for Tibs in her morning (she was bothering me and I said there'd be one when she got up) although she probs will be getting up late enough that everyone will have read it before her =P. I didn't intend for it to be this long, In fact I think its my longest yet... I wanted to get written and so I could go to bed like and hour ago but anyway... I’m going to try and write another tomorrow or the next arvo about the past week and what I did this weekend (and yes you have permission to hound me about this one I want it up before Friday!)


oh yes and I guess you'll be wanting a picture of the dressius i woreius? here you go; (taken by the lovely Ermi who cannot use and SLR and thus ended up taking pics of me waving my arms explaining how it worked =P)