Roman Holiday!

This weekend we took my cousins up to Rome for a night before they flew out on Monday, it was so much fun we saw all the major sights and walked A LOT! 

MINI in Chelsea!!!

The area that we were staying in London just happened to be the hot spot for every mini cooper driver or range rover driver in town! So I started taking pictures of all the different minis that I saw (I chose the mini because, of course, it’s cuter than the range rover!). The scary thing is that I have more pictures than those here and I only started taking pictures of these cars three days before we left! It's official . The mini cooper takeover of the world has started and its started in Chelsea!

1st part of '09 vacation ( Skiing in Austria

Merry Christmas!!! And A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!! We just got back from AN AMAZING 3 week vacation and I have decided that I am going to move to London because that is the BEST city on this side of the world (that I have seen). But first we spent a week in Austria learning how to ski!! Well actually I really only learned how to snow plow down the mountain (but I am a master at it!) and Olivia and Dad became world class snowboarders.

The beautiful mountains covered in clouds so you can't see them!

Olivia! She looks sooo cool!

The skateboarding helped him alot- thats my excuse for why he was so good!

You see that small person in the corner, yeah that was mom- she skied when she was younger and didn’t have the patience to stop and pose for a picture!!!! No it was more like our terrible photography!!oh but she does look good!! She was the only one who didn't fall at all!

Olivia calls this my deer in the head lights picture, but I think it’s just a great example of my awesome snow plowing ability – it should really be an Olympic sport!!

Pompeii!!! part 1

On Sunday we went to Pompeii (north of Naples). I just, after a lot of work that was deleted by mistake a couple of times, finished this slide show… don't worry I will add captions and a description of what everything is but until then just have fun trying to guess was the pictures are!

Day 7- Olives, oil and much much talk of italy!

If you've ever been to southern Italy, especially the east part of Italy where we live you might have noticed that outside of the towns there are fields and fields of olive trees stretching as far ( and I mean as FAR) as the eye can see. Well the months October to January are olive harvesting months… yay!!! So some of our friends from the next town over have found this great family owned olive press, and on Sunday they were having a small harvest festival. So like total Americans who have to get to everywhere on time we showed up about 2 hours before the actual festivities started, but we got a special tour of the oil pressing process , from the son of owner who told us all about his philosophy of life… very insightful!

Here’s all the olives piled together ready to be de-leafed

This is the de-leafing machine, kinda hard to see the leaves flying out, but they're there.

Pile of leaves!!!

Crushed pits! This place uses all of the olive!

While we were having the tour there was the most beautiful sunset!

Ok I know what this looks like but I swear this is a pile of left over’s (pulp, skin, residue and

so on).

Ok it was pretty dark, and it turns out our camera is really sucky at night but this was a truck that drove by us during the tour and dumped a whole pile of freshley picked olives- the smell was amazing!

Then we went inside to see the great big olive crushing stones!

This is how it works, you add the olives

grind them up real good

so it looks like guacamole!

then turn them into  even finer mush.

There are some more steps but practically this is what comes out, this is virgin olive oil, which means that it is pure olive juice and what we tried was the youngest one!

Here's dad trying to taste it without havin his throat burn, he takes his work so seriously!

We were also shown some of the Puglian ( region of Italy where we live) wine and got to celebrate with some Nocino which is a nut liquor, not as good as lemoncino in my view but definitely hardy!

For the fest the news was there and they wanted to interview the non-Italian visitors ( so I promptly ran away as fast as I could) instead our brave friend Amory went and did the interview in Italian, she's was so cool about the whole thing, I thought she did Great!!!

December 6th HAPPY SAINT NIKOLAUS DAY!!

The German holiday Nicholas Day (Nikolaustag) just happens to be based on an old tradition that was celebrated in the 16th century. Back then, children would carve marks in pieces of wood to show what good deeds they had done that year and then give them to St. Nicholas. Depending on whether they had been "naughty or nice", they would either get treats or a piece of birch.



Today in modern Germany, Nicholas Day is celebrated a little differently! On the night of the 5th of December kids put their shoes outside their bedroom door. At night supposedly Saint Nicklaus comes and fills their shoes with treats like chocolate, candy, cookies, fruits, nuts, or little presents. BUT if you were a bad kid that year in your shoe in the morning you would find a birch twig (I think for your parents to hit you with) although funny enough NOBODY ever gets the birch!!!


On top of all that excitement, it's tradition that on the 6th men dress up as Saint Nick and his little helper: sometimes known as the Ruprecht or Knecht Ruprecht or even Krampus. He travels with St. Nicholas and punishes kids who have been bad. Any way the men will go into schools and do the whole Santa thing!

So, carrying on the long tradition that we picked up from living in Germany, every 6th of December we enjoy a small present left in our stinky shoes! Even Rachael last year got a chocolate Santa when she was rooming with a house of Germans, at university!

Now I just love the idea of putting high heels out!

 Traditional german boots.

Now this is what I got!

All the Saint Nicks with their trusty helpers!

Oktoberfest

THE OKTORBERFEST the Oktoberfest!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well its that time of year… which means that the Oktoberfest has started! This has made me very very nostalgic for that hops making beer drinking slap knee dancing land of BAVARIA!! So I decided to get some info about it and put it up!
The Oktoberfest for those of you who don’t know,is a 16 day festival, held in Munich, where you go to eat, drink , shop and go on roller coaster rides ( sounds like a great combination- in that order) . Over 6 million people attend the festival each year! It all started back on October 18, 1810 – it was originally a celebration for the marriage of Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese (the Bavarian princess). It first started out as a horse race (which I can testify to be tons of fun) up until 1960 when it turned into the worlds’ largest festival!
The festival starts off with the traditional 12 gun salute and the tapping of the very first keg (at 12:00) by the major with a cry of “ O’zapft is”- means it’s tapped in Bavarian! Then the party begins: rides start up and the kitchens fire up the oven of the next 15 days! Classic foods served at Oktoberfest are ; schweinsbrate, haxn ( knuckle of pork), steckerfisch ( fried fish on a stick), wurstel, kasepatzel, brezeln ( pretzel) and my personal favorite … curry wurst!
If you’ve ever been to this “big” event you probably noticed all the people walking around wearing the traditional Bavarian attire… the dirndl (that usually consists of a full skirt, tight bodice and gathered shirt) and of course the men’s LEDERHOSEN!!! Which are practically leather shorts and suspenders … soooooo stylish!!
Fun facts: Around 6 million people attend, of that 72% of the people are Bavarians
The festival takes up 103.72 acres of land in the middle of the city!
About 6,940,600 liters of beer are drunken, 142,253 pairs of sausages and about 4000 items are lost by people including: 260 glasses, 200 phones and even wedding rings!

MY NEW GUITAR!!!!

WELL... last week we drove up to foggia ( and that is weird for us because trust me there is nothing really that interesting in that place) were we met a friend of ours who works with my dad, who sold me his electric guitar and amp!!!!!! its soooooo much FUN!!!!!!!!!!! Its a blue yamaha electric guitar... i've already broke a string so i consider that a big step!! Now i just need to learn how to play it... ya and that should be easy... well maybe not sooo easy!! I've been trying to think of a name for it - someone told me that you need to name your guitar!!- so i've been thinking a guys name like Larry or somthing like that!!

- if your seen these on my facebook sorry... thats what you get when your mom is addicted to facebook!!