Carnevale

Yesterday we went to Carnevale in Aci Reale- the 2nd largest mardi gras festival in Italy, the most famous is Carnevale in Venice. It was crazy!! Everyone carries confetti and silly string and throw it in the faces of random strangers. Most of the adults will toss it at you and smile, but some of those damn kids with chuck handfuls of confetti right in your face! Most of the children are dressed in costumes, and some of the adults. Almost everyone wore masks or hats or something silly. The main attractions are the giant floats. Half are made of fresh flowers, and the others paper mache. They spend the night circling the main streets in a parade. Each float has it's own DJ and most have performers or dancers that perform on it or in front of it. We though the music was so funny- some Italian pop music, but a lot of American music!











The streets were lined with vendors selling toys, balloons, masks, and all kinds of food and sweets. We enjoyed some delicious Italian street meat sandwiches with crispelli- Italian fried dough with honey and pistachio's for desert.







Look at my facebook album to see all the pictures from the day: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2249079&id=11002081

Hey nice ride!

Dinner with the neighbors

Ciao everyone,

No pictures to post this time, but we should have lots to post after this weekend, we are headed to Carnevale ( the Italian celebration of Mardi Gras). We hear it is pretty awesome so hopefully we will have lots of pictures to post!

We've been laying pretty low the past 2 weeks, Gabe has been very busy at work with his annual 2 week inspection, but passed today with flying colors!

We attended a wine tasting night at a little wine store in our town a few weeks ago. It was advertised as 'Wine tasting with food complements". Turned out that not only did we taste each wine, we had a glasses topped off as much as we like! I was the driver that night and had to keep telling the heavy pour sommelier that I didn't want anymore! Gabe drank himself silly and it was all delicious! The food pairings, were brought in by the owners and some of their friends. Everyone had home-made a dish to pair with the wines. Everything was so tasty, I was stuffed by the time we left. Not bad for 10 euro!

Sunday our landlords invited us up for lunch. Always an experience. I've decided that they remind me of a sweeter Costanza couple. Both short, and almost look alike, and CONSTANTLY talking over one another. Giuseppe will speak to me a mile a minute, and when Lucia gets the sense that I'm getting lost, she will tell him NO no no Giuseppe, No capito!! And then she will begin to tell me the exact same thing at the exact same speed, adding in hand gestures to increase my understanding. I do think my Italian language class is helping, I'm starting to understand most of what they are telling us in context, and can even manage to get out a few sentences and ask a few questions myself. I learned that Lucia will not fly for longer than an hour and a half because she is afraid, so won't visit her friends in America. She sits like a mummy with her arms crossed over her chest rocking back and forth and her eyes rolled back in her head while she flies, I suppose in prayer? Not sure but it was quite a scene while she was explaining and her and Giuseppe both assumed the "airplane" position.

I asked them where they buy their olive oil, because I noticed their's was in an unmarked bottle. They told me they buy it in large quantities once a year from friends who own a farm, and then gave us a bottle!! It's so delicious, much better than store bought. This November we are going to buy a truckload too!

So things are still going well, I will post pictures of our weekend at Carnevale in a couple of days- Happy Valentines Day!