Hmm...

Hey everybody!

First off, Happy Halloween! I hope you have a good one :-). I’m not doing anything today other than my usual home-schooling, but what about you guys? I’m not sure if they go trick or treat-ing in France, apparently they call before they come. So I get the impression that the kids would have to know the person they went trick or treating to. Much safer that way :-P.

French T.V. doesn’t even put scary movies on. Yesterday they were advertising Les Experts: Manhattan (which is basically CSI: Manhattan)… well I guess that can be scary sometimes :-P!

Okay well I don’t really want to write yet another blog consecutively on Sicily again, so we’ll make it a little more spicy this time… or at least slightly different…

FRANCE! Well as you all know I have absolutely no friends what so ever in France… STILL! Depressing, eh?

Well… I have had contact with people my age about a month ago, Venetia and I went into town. Today I didn’t want to go into town, I thought we were just going to pick something up quickly (so I hadn’t dressed appropriately) but then my mom and dad wanted to go to the bank and Venetia wanted to go into town.

So we made arrangements that when they were finished they’d meet up with us. I went with Venetia to town we walked around for a bit, and then Venetia noticed that two girls were following us…

We went into Game, came out, walked down the street and turned down one of the side streets that brought you to the main square centre. Here one of them called “Excuse moi!”, we stopped and she was making movements in a shape of a skirt, shaking her head then pointing at me.

Yes, the locals of all of the countries that I have moved to like to play charades :-P. Well we stopped, Venetia ran behind me looked to see if my skirt had gone… too far up :-P, it hadn’t.

Later on, through a lot of confusion and A LOT of “Did you understand that?” “No.” coming from both sides. In the end I said “Ah c’est trop court pour FRANCE! Je comprend maintenante! (Ah it’s too short for FRANCE! I understand now.” This was followed by a whole lot of “Oui”’s in French from them :-P.

It was true I hadn’t seen any other girls (… or boys) in France with skirts on with no leggings or tights. As they were telling me that the boys in France are folle (crazy) and making circular movements to their forehead, a bunch of teenagers came over and started cat-whistling… Grrrrreeeeeaaaaat timing!

The guys left after a while of me saying goodbye in … a good few languages (since I couldn’t think of much French) and Aurora and… okay didn’t quite catch the tallest one’s name saying… other things in French, let’s just leave it at that :-P.

We exchanged e-mail addresses and then parted. Venetia and I walked around for about an hour, met up with our parents, then bumped in Aurora and … the other one :-P, this time they were chatting to two friends, they introduced us. One had lived in Canada for four years so spoke amazing English… so that was a HUGE help :-P!

They asked our parents if they could take us around our little town and to a place called Tecktonik. Now every time they said “Tecktonik” they did a movement with their arms and legs… we figured it was a dance thing… our parents said yes and off we went.

As we walked around the corner at the top of the road, I realised it was the group of teenagers that I had dreaded ever bumping into… because you know how teenagers have their cliques and it’s like, you’re hardly just going to walk over to them and start speaking (in a completely different language)… it’d just be awkward!

Well I stopping mid-step, wide eyed and just stood there, they turned around and said “C’est bon!”, “Mai ma JUPE! Le juuuuupe!!!!” (But my SKIRT! The skiiiiirt!). They laughed then the Canadian one said “Don’t worry!” and so off I went… very reluctantly…

They were all actually very nice! One guy even said in perfect English “Hi, What’s up?”… of course this was the only English he knew :-P. I haven’t really seen Aurora or… the other one in town so as per usual I just steer away from that crowd :-P.

Oh right yeah I never told you what Tecktonik was. It’s a new type of dancing that originated in France, it’s cross between, techno, break dancing and hip hop… very strange looking at first, but it grows on you :-P…

Yikes! Just read a past blog and realised that I’ve told you about this… but in short term, aw well it’s writen out now :-P. Well I’m going to leave it at that and hope not to repeat myself anymore than I have.

Hope to hear from you all soon! (Oh look at that! Already repeating myself :-P)

- Bianca (And again (:-O what a shocker! :-P)

Save The Bees!

Hey Everyone!

Every Morning the first thing I do on my computer is check Yahoo! News. This morning I found some really interesting videos. The bees are slowly dying! A beehive owner found his beehives to be abandoned one day, no bees in sight, not even dead ones! Apparently it’s because of a relatively new nicotine based insecticide that slows the immune system of insects including cute, little bumblebees. Yes they can give quite a sting, but amazingly their venom is actually good for you. It strengthens your immune system… unless of course you are allergic then… well the bees aren’t good news for you :-P.

Lots of fruits rely on bees (wow, this sounds like one of those boring things that you have to read and then answer questions about in school, urgh!)… for instance blueberries because of their difficult to get into urn shaped flowers, they are very hard to populate.

Now what was the shape of the blueberry flower? Yes, that’s correct an URN shape. Well done! No I’m only joking, I’ll carry on with some (slightly) more interesting… stories now :-P.

On our last few days staying in Palermo, we looked around at a few houses… these didn’t interest us much… well the one was absolutely lovely … but the guy who wanted to rent it would only be ready in six months time! So this wouldn’t really work for us…

So we went into an internet café, since we were staying in a bed and breakfast by this stage and they didn’t have an open access to internet options. We were looking for another B&B and “something” just seemed to take my sisters fancy to the west of the country, on an interactive map. We clicked on it and it brought up a list of B&B’s.

We found one that took our liking. On the website it said he could speak Italian, English (Woo Hoo!) and Spanish… we called him up and yes he could speak English… later we found out that he just put Spanish on for the sake of it and that he couldn’t really speak that. But it didn’t matter because he spoke English :-P!

Now the question was how where we going to get there. It was quite far down and we didn’t have a car yet. So we just took a long trip on a… long trip bus, stopping at a hotel for the night before we were booked into (Okay I’m going to give him a fake name, because personally, he doesn’t know I’m writing this and if he ever googles himself, like we know we all do, come on admit it, then that won’t be so great) Giovanni’s place (Italian enough name there :-P).

The bus was supposed to drop us off, close enough to the hotel but we accidentally got off too early thinking that it had stopped for good and then off it went again we were like (:-O! So my dad and I went to find a taxi… later to find out that, what are the odds, this town only has one or two! Soon we found one; he was an old-ish guy sleeping in the front of his car. The newsagent man that told us that he was the taxi guy, yelled across the street and woke him up :-P. Then off we went to our hotel, phew!

Oh actually the first time we ever took the bus in Sicily we were kicked off it! Not because we were naughty or anything… mainly because we didn’t know we had to STAMP the ticket in the ticket machine. How mean of them! No-one actually does unless the inspector comes on the bus, because if you don’t you can just use it for a different bus journey.

Yes, so to carry on with what I was saying, we took the bus, stayed in a hotel for the night called Villa Favourita. It was really cool, instead of a big building with rooms… you had your own detached IGLOO! Yes an igloo… or close enough to one anyway. It was a giant white dome shaped thing… tonnes of them just plopped down in an open area with orange and lemon trees growing around, on the sides of the paths… Venetia and I also recorded there as well… we were just messing around though… no real footage :-P.

There was this thing on top of the netted football section by our igloo and we thought it was a slice of toast… don’t ask us how it got there it just did! So we tried to get it down by throwing our ball up and whacking it (how old are we :-P)… it just kept “rolling” back to the middle of the net though, in the end we realised that it was a just a stone… PRETENDING to be a slice of toast! It was so funny!

The next morning we were up nice and early, it wasn’t the best of days but it was nice enough. We had arranged for “Giovanni” to come pick us up from the hotel to take us to his place.

He arrived looking like any Sicilian does at this time of year. In an abnormally large black jacket and sunglasses. We packed up our suitcases and he took us to his place. Once we arrived he brought us upstairs, showed us our rooms then he dragged my dad downstairs and took him shopping for a barbeque that he wanted to have with us…

The one good thing that we learnt from Giovanni was that lemon juice on a sausage is… AMAZING! It has to be the nicest way to eat barbequed meat! Seriously you have to try it!

Giovanni was …. quite a character. He took us fishing once… it only lasted about 15 minutes… the worm that was destined to the hook BIT him as a desperate, final move! It was an evil looking thing (the worm was too :-P). No really. The worm looked like something out of the movie Men in Black, it’s whole mouth opened wide and a new… I don’t know what you’d call it… a tongue maybe with incisors on it… it was really nasty…! They are sea worms. We’d gotten so many in the box and because of the fact that we had only fished for 15 minutes, we still had all of those biting worms. So Giovanni threw them all into the water and off they swam or stuck to a piece of seaweed.. they were really weird!

Right, well I’ll leave it at that, don’t want to freak you out too much. See I eventually got back around to fishing!

Hope to hear from you soon.

- Bianca

Even more on Sicily... :-P

Hello again!

As you can see I don’t post blogs over the weekend… so I have to refresh my memory now…

We stayed in Sicily for two months, the first two weeks of that were spent in Palermo. Palermo’s the main city, like Paris is for France. The three weeks there we saw some absolutely amazing things! Like I said before the statues there were absolutely gorgeous, gargoyles on the buildings, and statues that the city has been built around, we were just wandering around and somehow managed to bump into Piazza Pretoria… a very… nude fountain :-P… it was finished being built in 1581 and since the Public square has still been called the Palermitani Public square of the Shame because of how… nude it is :-P.

Moving on… my dad’s family took us to lots of places around Palermo. One for instance was Saint Rosalia; I know that I’ve said before. Well if you ever go, I’m warning you now that it is a very, long, steep drive up the mountain and lemon scented air fresheners do not help at all! It made my stomach turn and gave me a headache, but once we reached the very, tippy top and breathed in the wonderfully fresh air, I was fine again :)!

We parked then had to climb quite a few steps until we finally made it. It was very pretty actually, with the mountain, looking as if it was leaning on the cathedral… really the cathedral had been built into the mountain.
Here’s a little bit of history for you now, come on it won’t kill you to read it :-P! Saint Rosalia was born in 1130 to a Norman noble family that were descendents of Charlemagne. Once she grew up she decided to go live as a “hermit” in the mountains. In 1166 she died, but nobody knew of it. Then in 1624 a plague took over Palermo, apparently Saint Rosalia “appeared” to a sick woman first. And then a hunter. She told the hunter to climb the mountain and described the cave in which he would find her remains in, so of course he did, finding the bones as she described. He brought them back down to Palermo and a cathedral was built in that cave.
Inside was gorgeous! If you read the post below you’ll see that I’ve already told you about the open area where the rain water came in, flowed down the pipes that were along the walls and then finished at the Holy water. As you walked past that bit, you came into the cathedral with the chairs and the altar but to the left was a large glass, tank sort of this with a marble and gold statue of Saint Rosalia and an angel inside, on top of that there was a box with everyone’s wishes that had visited it.
As you walk through the entrance there’s an absolute monster of an anchor just sitting there, quite confusing, eh? This isn’t a harbour… we’re on the top of a mountain :S… I was thinking.

Well the story goes that as a boat was sinking the people on it prayed to Saint Rosalia and voila ( <<< hey look at that! I’m really getting French here!!!) the boat stopped sinking. So the people that were on the boat carried the anchor all the way up the mountain!!! There’s a shrine with pictures and thank you messages with similar stories, for instance there’s a torn and scratched up motorbike helmet, no need in explaining this guy’s story :-P.

I was just trying to think of things to type and (:-O! I can’t believe that I haven’t told you about this thing yet!!! GELATO!!! I LOVE it SO much! It is Sicilian ice-cream (gelato is basically just the word ice-cream… except in Italian)…

My mouth’s watering just thinking of it! If you go to Sicily, you will come accustomed to seeing gelaterias on practically every street. A gelateria is an ice-cream parlour. You go in and there’s a counter filled with TONNES of different types of ice-cream. It is the most complex procedure EVER! Once you choose what you want then it’s simple enough :-P.

I was addicted to it. My favourite ever was Banane e frutti di bosco (I can’t believe I still remembered that… 5 months is a very long time to remember the name of an Italian ice-cream!), Banana and fruits of the forest. Oooh! *Drools* it was the nicest… even better than the cheesecake at Stansted airport :-P!

The nicest ice-cream that I’ve ever had in Ireland was Ben and Jerry’s Archaeological Dig from a tub or something like that. It was chocolate with chocolate shaped dinosaurs :-P! Mmmm yummy! The ice-cream from the ice-cream vans always gave me coughing attacks…

Well I think that’s enough about ice-cream now… next post I’ll tell you about more Sicilian adventures… that’s where the fun really begins :-P!

Hope to hear from you all soon.

- Bianca

How cool is this!!!

Hey everyone!

I just started a Fishing Forum! Please check it out here -

http://kissmyfishy.proboards91.com/index.cgi?

I hope this will help with the commenting problem, even though you'll still need to sign up, at least you can use this more often than Blogspot! Woo! :-P!

Hope to hear from you ALL soon!

- Bianca :-)

More on Sicily!

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 :-P.

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 :-P.

Sicilian’s (not all of them, but most) are very stubborn, they keep wearing their ginormous 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 :-P… 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 :-P… we lived on a hill in the middle of the country side so… it COULD have been possible :-P!

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 :-P. 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 :-P... 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? :-P. 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 :-P) to on the ground :-P. 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 attached… 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 :-P. 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 :-P. 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 :-P!

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 :-P!

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 :-P. Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

My Sicilian Adventure

Hey everyone!

First off, I’ve decided this website isn’t just going to be about fishing (although that’s a big part of it :-P). Since I haven’t gone fishing lately (I was supposed to be going over the weekend… don’t quite know what happened there /:[ ) I haven’t got any fishing stories, so I’ll just zoom all the way back to the 1st of March when my adventures around the world really began.

If any of you have ever moved country you’ll know how difficult packing is! I had to bring my WHOLE life in just one suitcase! I’m not so great with throwing things out, quite a few times I kept packing arbitrary items… for instance pink, flower, fairy lights kept managing to find its own way in the suitcase… okay it was me… aww how I loved those… eventually though I replaced them with more… useful things after being persuaded by the fact that the plug sockets in Sicily would be different… it’s okay though taking them out freed up like half my suitcase :-P!

I also had to leave my (absolutely GORGEOUS) electric guitar which I’d only gotten 2 months earlier!!! That was so depressing, I WAS going to attempt bringing it as hand luggage but didn’t really want the hassle and it was SOOO heavy.

To get on with the story, grrr as I’m sure you can see I have a tendency to move onto a different subject and get distracted… Anyway, a few days before the 1st (which is when we departed Ireland) my gran, (I just call her Karen, so from now on I’m saying Karen) was staying with us and gave us the FRIGHT of our lives (I’m using us and our because my parents, sister, second cousin and my uncle were in the house at the time, with me of course :)).

I was in a deep sleep because I wanted to get a relatively early night, when I heard shouts and yells and stuff of MOM, MOM!. I ran downstairs, into the lounge expecting my gran to be doing something stupid instead my uncle and my dad were giving her C.P.R., later I found out she’d collapsed and her heart had stopped beating! The rugby was on that night so Karen must of just been over excited or something :-P, a few hours earlier she was jumping around cheering on her favourite team :-P… why was I on this story…?

Oh right yeah well Karen was supposed to be taking Gizmo (our small dog, I’m sure I’ve told you about him before) on the ferry with her, across to England there she would look after him at her house until we were settled in Sicily (since we just got up and left and didn’t bother finding a house first since someone, not saying anybody’s name in particular … usually people would put the persons name here and I’m very tempted to… but I won’t since I’m so, very nice :-P… said that it was easy enough to find a house there. This later proved as wrong :-P. See there I go again, off a different direction to the story… although this has got something to do with the story so I guess it’s not that bad…!

(Gizmo!!! The post looked very boring so thought I'd give you a glimpse of him :)! He's on the window sill at my gran's house, I think Gizmo spent too much of his time watching my uncle and aunt's cat... He's in England hints the fact that he's wearing a shirt :-P!)

I’ll continue with what I was saying, Karen came around and my parents rushed her to hospital, she’s all fine now though :). But she was supposed to be taking Gizmo on Tuesday, we were going to be leaving on Thursday. Gizmo and Karen’s departure was postponed until Saturday so I had to say goodbye to Gizmo and leave him behind with Karen and my great-gran (Maisey). It was so upsetting! I knew I wouldn’t see him for at least a month, an actual fact it was TWO!

And off our taxi took us (since we’d left our car with a friend who was going to sell it for us). We slept at the hotel across the road from Belfast International Airport, because our flight was at 08:00 am… FAAAAAAAAR too early for me :-P.

Somehow I managed to get up and be ready in the morning for my flight. My sister actually has some footage of us that morning… which I’ll have to find, most of the recording I was slouched over my suitcase on the floor of the hotel bedroom, moaning at her not to film me :-P! Venetia (my sister) did get some of the planes taking off though and you can see how early it is because of how dark it is outside!

Once we were all ready and had had breakfast we all crossed the road and checked in. Our first flight was very short and was surprisingly painless! Usually my ears pop… with a lot of pain going up and then coming down, despite my efforts to chew gum, or suck lollipops… sometimes I’d even try sleeping. We flew to Stansted in England first, sat around for a few hours, had lunch at a really nice Italian place, oh my word, the CHEESECAKE was the NICEST there it was so yummy!!!!

Once we only had about an hour of waiting to do we found out that our luggage was too heavy for the next flight to Palermo, Sicily! Quickly we sorted it out, I had to leave the coolest nail set ever behind, which I’d also only got two months earlier, it had an electric nail buffing machine!!!

We checked in again, and got on the plane to Palermo, my ears didn’t pop too painfully this time either, something in the day to be thankful about :-D!

After a few hours, the pilot landed the plane safely and we all got out, grabbed our luggage and walked around to the exit which came out onto one of the most Sicilian scenes that I’d ever seen… mainly because I’d only ever been to Sicily once and it was just for a day trip from Malta to Mount. Etna, to get there we had to go on one of the fastest catamarans in the world! Well anyway it was tonnes of black cabs parked outside with all of the taxi drivers dressed up like people from the “Mafia” with their leather jackets on and cigars or cigarettes hanging out of their mouths… yet, they weren’t standing around looking cool, or sitting in their cabs, they were playing football and yelling at each other in Sicilian… it was quite late already so the lighting just seemed to make everything a whole lot scarier :-P.

We managed to drag one of the taxi drivers away from his football, packed up our suitcases, buckled ourselves in and off we went. They drive like… CRAZY there! I was sitting in the middle at the back and just keeping my eye on the speedometer. Once we arrived at The Holiday Inn, the cab driver made us pay 60 euros for a five minute journey, so if you ever go to Sicily, I think it’s best to just hire a car out. We went inside only to find a miserable looking woman slouched in her seat at the reception. My dad used his broken Sicilian and asked if she had any rooms, she was reluctant at first, finally she gave us our key, and we went up stairs. At this moment, I just wanted to go right back to our home in Ireland. I had a bath, was reassured by my dad that I just needed a good night's sleep and I’d enjoy it more in the morning, so I went to bed.

Will continue with my Sicilian adventure tomorrow :-). Sorry this post had nothing to do with fishing.
Hope to hear from you all soon, still waiting on those pictures :-P.
- Bianca

Thanks to Jake for letting me use this video of him kissing his pet fish! Hope you all enjoy it!

Randomly... random! O.o

Hellooo again everyone!

Since I have no new news, I’ll give you some … stories… I’m not sure what they are going to be yet, myself, but I’ll just write and see what happens :-P!

Well living in Ireland was a lot of fun… yet very cold :-P. Nah in the summer it reached at least 20 degrees. When I was three (yes I know I’ve already told you this but that doesn’t mean I can’t give a more detailed… description :-P)!

Well when I was three years old we moved from Zimbabwe to Ireland, we had to leave because it was far too corrupt to live in anymore and my dad was a journalist which made it a whole lot more dangerous. Now the only reason we chose to move to Ireland out of the whole world was that my mom had lived there when she was younger for a short time in her life and my grandmother and great grandmother had been born there. So anyway we moved to southern Ireland first, I started school here for the first year, we stayed in southern Ireland for about three years, later moving to Northern Ireland, Belfast.

My parents quickly found my sister (who was about 10 now) and myself (I was six… aww how cute!!!) a primary school. I was so scared on the first day that I cried as soon as my parents left the classroom… the teacher moved me over to a desk where there where more children (I was sitting at one with… four at the beginning … it needed more people at it, well it did have five for a very short time…) and introduced me to two girls there Natalie and Lauren C. (not sisters their last names both just begin with C :-P), who have been my best friends since...

Anyway to carry on with what I was saying, I soon became friends with almost everyone in the class and stayed in Finaghy Primary School until the last day of primary seven (I’m not sure how this works out in any other countries but I was 11, if that helps).I moved onto Hunter House College, parting ways with a lot of my friends, a few months later my parents decided to start home-schooling my sister and I so I ended up parting ways with ALL of my friends. Although I did gather a get-together once in a while.

I’ve been home-schooled since and I’m very pleased that I started it or it wouldn’t be likely that I would be sitting in south-west France typing this now and I also wouldn’t have moved house a few months after beginning home schooling as to the limitlessness I had. Not having to live close to schools.It’s really strange to think of stuff like that :-S. Anyway, if you read the 5th post under this one, you’ll see how we came to get to France, don’t think that the people who have already read it would appreciate me repeating myself (something that I do often) :-P!

Ohhh! In France at the last house, we found out a secret that our dog (Gizmo, our shih-Tzu, which is a small dog, creepishly koala like, with a pigs tail, has more rows of teeth then any normal dog and hair instead of fur…) was keeping from us… HE LOVES FISHING! Well actually… he couldn’t be bothered with the fishing part, he just likes to take the fish back to the water and drop them in…

Sometimes this doesn’t go as smoothly as it sounds, sadly Gizmo was a little bit too rough with two tidlers (literally the size of my baby finger) and he didn’t bring them to the water soon enough… it’s okay though, my sister and I hummed a sad song… the fish just… floated away… one came back to life though :-D!!!

I have the tape somewhere I just need to edit it a slight touch :-P, he was better with the bigger fish, it was really funny, they kept slapping him in the face (well I wouldn’t like to be in Gizmo’s mouth either…).

Gizmo’s not so great with the fishing part because he’ll stand in the water, up to his stomach (which is right on the embankment… he has VERY short legs), and groan at the float. Sometimes he’ll get so annoyed that the fish aren’t biting he’ll start to bark and scratch at the water, flicking it up. A few times he chased the toads in the lake as well!

Ohhh my dad caught a toad once, it was pretty late and we were watching a baby toad eating flies at the edge of the river, so my dad got a piece of bait and put it on his hook, began waggling it around in front of the toad (about the size of my thumbnail) and it went for the bait! My dad quickly yanked the rod so the toad couldn’t latch on and get hooked. That was really funny!

Well I’m tired… and slightly hungry as well now so I’ll leave it at that! Hope to hear… and see :-P from you all soon! Thanks for reading (sorry it was a bit random today).

- Bianca

Last night... Dun dun DUNNNN!

Hi Everybody!

I think that when my life gets that little bit boring (and I have nothing to write for Kiss My Fishy) life throws something, sometimes not so good…sometimes awesome, in my direction.

Well last night my parents, my sister and I were going out to dinner with my dad’s friend who’d come over from Ireland. It was all going great (especially my banana split, wow, the first time I’d had it and oooooh *drools*). Anyway, once we’d finished with dinner we took a stroll, about to go to our car but decided to go for drinks first instead (don’t worry, I just had pineapple juice :-P)… anyway, to carry on with my original story!

We walked my dad’s friend back to the hotel he was staying at “for a laugh” as he worded it. The reception was very pretty, filled with plants and statues of… stuff. We said our goodbyes and finally walked back to the car, laughing and joking, as you do.When we got there DISASTER struck! Dun dun DUNNN! No really though… The underground parking was LOCKED! And what’s worse was that our house keys were inside the car! We walked around to the back doors where you’re “supposed” to walk out of, here was the closing (and opening times), just 20 minutes after we’d parked the car, did the doors close (21:00). And they’d only open at 7 am. I know, stupid, eh?!

You see… we didn’t see the times because… okay this is so lazy… Greg (my dad’s friend) had been waiting by the fountain in the main square in town for us, and we couldn’t find any parking (because we thought the underground parking would’ve been closed at this time), so we’d driven around the square three times before finally giving in and trying out the underground parking.

We were surprised that it was still open (but we thought it would stay like that all night, once finding out that it was open now because it was all mechanical-ised) and so quickly finding a parking, ran up the ramp, that we’d driven down, instead of walking around the parking lot, finding the door, then walking up the stairs and then crossing the road, this sounds so much more complicated, you see. So the end result was that we didn’t see the times, wow, that was difficult to all get out!

If you’re from the U.K. or just don’t know what under ground parking is… even though it tell you pretty much in the name I will describe :-P. Basically it’s like those high-rise parking buildings, but that’s been squished down underground, I didn’t think anything strange of it when I’d first gone under, then realised that we weren’t driving up, we were going down. They’re really great, well they’re supposed to be, because it makes out that there’s not supposed to be many cars parked on the side of the roads… last night this proved as incorrect :-P!

So anyway… where was I with my original story… oh right, so we were LOCKED OUT of the parking lot, so we couldn’t drive home and even if we took a taxi home we wouldn’t be able to get into the house! We walked straight back to the hotel Greg was staying in, asked if they had rooms left, they were the least bit helpful, the guy looked in his little bookings book, looked up at us and said “Non”. Even though I saw keys hanging up :-P! He didn’t even lift the phone, or give us directions to another hotel!

We walked around for about 10 minutes, finally finding a hotel. We knocked on the knocker, heard heavy footsteps and a man answered the door. My dad told him our problem (in French) and the guy (I never caught his name so it’ll just be “the guy” for now :-P) ushered us in went over to his paper filled desk. Picked up the phone and began ringing other hotels, after two attempts I said with my, oh so wonderful French, I know I’m so modest, well it’s not that great but really came in handy here :-P.

Pensez-vous que la police peut… (Do you think that the police can…) he broke me off here, just nodding, dialled the police’s telephone number (17) spoke in rapid French , wrote a number down, hung up, phoned that number, spoke more and hung up again. Smiled, sat up from his seat, brought us outside, pointed and said that a person will come there and open it for us (yes, still in French) we thanked him and walked over to the area.

About 10 minutes later a guy in a GIANT black, zip up coat, walked over, half his face coved by the jacket, hands in pockets (very scary :-P). He asked us for the parking card, after some searching through my dads pockets, we realised I had it in my purse (give me some credit I was half asleep by this stage :-P). I handed it to the guy (didn’t catch his name either, so he’ll just be the new “the guy”) he took it, placed it in the machine, the lift opened we all squished into it, with “Whoops, was that all we had to do?”, we all felt absolutely terrible from getting this guy out of bed in the middle of the night. Anyway we went down in the lift, got out, walked over to the car, thanked him.

Got into the car drove to where you’d usually drive to get out, put the card into the machine there, the barrier went up and a few seconds later the iron gate lifted itself up and we drove home. My feet were killing me because I’d been wearing boots so my bed couldn’t have been more welcoming then it was.

I’m afraid to say that no new pictures have been coming through, despite my efforts at sending out tonnes of e-mails to fishing clubs :-P. So hopefully I will get a reply or something. The poll I put in seems to be going well though! Already 11 people have voted :-).

Okay, well I’ll leave it at that and I really do hope to hear from you all soon. For those of you, who have taken the time out to read my blog, thanks a million!

- Bianca

Carcassonne!

Hey everyone!

I know :-O What?! TWO posts in ONE day! Well, I DID promise this one about Carcassonne on Monday!

Yes, so we went to Carcassonne yesterday, it was about an hours drive from our house. The scenery on the way was absolutely stunning! You have to drive up the twisting roads through The Black Mountains, there was a gorgeous, clear river that flowed to the right hand side of the road once we reached the city outside of Carcassonne, I don’t know where it came from though, might have dozed off for a few seconds :-P.

The most frustrating part in Carcassonne though, was being in the city outside of it, being able to see the towering castle, but not able to find the route to it! Not such great street signs ;-P! Yep, just blame the street signs! (Below - Carcassonne on a NICE day :-P).

It was well-worth it… once we found the entrance :-D! The best part was that I’m reading a book at the moment called “Labyrinth”, by Kate Mosse (not the David Bowie one with the kids that get lost in the labyrinth). And in it there’s a character from the 13th century (not too sure on the century, will look it up later in the book, wow, I’m impressed, just looked it up and I was right :-P) that lived in Carcassonne so you get more of a feel of what the castle and it’s grounds would have been like back then.

Anyway to get on with my ORIGINAL story, we walked through, have some pictures below of me standing in front of the entrance… holding a half eaten ice-cream :-P, (That's the second one)! (Top one - I'm the shortest one and wearing white :-P, my mom in the middle and my sister all the way to the left)

After looking around some “medieval” shops we came across “The Torture Chamber”. It’s like a museum of all of the torture… devices that they used on “heretics”, “witches”, and the “accused” in the olden days, the one date that I can actually remember was the first recorded date that they used “The Iron Maiden”, it was disgusting, that not even 500 years ago they STARTED using it (1515 A.D.). The Iron Maiden is like a sarcophagus that has long, I’d think very painful, nails on the inside, sticking out all over the show, the “accused” gets placed inside and the doors are slowly clamped over, it doesn’t do BRUTAL damage so the average person takes two whole days to die! It was so gross!!! Much worse things there too…

Afterward we walked around some more, ate, went to the BEST sweet shop EVER! Got ice-cream and walked around some more :-P! We drove home later, stopping by a gorgeous mountain valley, that over looked Hautpoul. (Below - Hautpoul)

Really hope to get some more (Wow! More sounds weird there :-P) fish pictures in sooooooon!

- Bianca

P.S. Yes I know, I thought I lived in south-west France too, but with this weather… pfft, it's okay though, it wasn't as bitterly cold as Ireland was :-D.

Not so lonely any more!!!

Hey everyone!

I have some GREAT news!!! I received the first EVER picture from a fellow fisher all the way in Pennsylvania, USA (This is veeeeerrrrrryyyyy far for me :-P)!
So I’d like to say thank you very much Matt! This was taken about two or three years ago when Matt was 21 or 22, now Matt is 24 :-P.

I have some more people that have promised some pictures so as soon as those come through (hopefully soon, hint hint, nudge nudge, wink wink) I’ll post them straight on! When tonnes start coming in, I’m going to get a website built and have all of the pictures in photo albums on there :-) ...

I’d also like to thank Janice, in Alberta for trying to persuade everyone on the www.nlft.org forums to put up a picture of them kissing a fish in their avatar!

I hope to hear from everyone soon!

- Bianca

French stuff... I guess... you could call it that...

Hey all again,

Well, not much news over here… none about fishing anyway. We’re all settling down very nicely in France, in the new house. We’ve even bought a new car with… a whole lot of frustration from me having to translate and the sales people not understanding… or usually me not understanding what they were trying to get across… eventually though we did it, and it was well worth it.

Tomorrow we’re taking a drive to Carcassone (a medieval city… somewhere in France, will get more details on it tomorrow or on Wednesday), with it. So will write about that afterwards and try get some pictures :-). On Sunday I found out that’s it’s only a five hour train journey to Paris from Toulouse, so that’s good to know… I guess :-P.

Oh! About two weeks ago, my sister (Venetia) and I made French friends… okay they made arrangements to meet up with us the next day in town, but they didn’t pitch up :-O!!! Okay well I think we got lost in translation… Still haven’t seen them around, but on the first day that we met, they took us to a little square, beside the park in town.

Here there were tonnes of kids dancing, they called this type of dance “Tecktonik” (Whew, that is the way to spell it, I used to have it as Techtonique... looks French enough :-P... but was wrong >.<). It’s … quite different to British dancing... Tecktonik is like loads of arm movements and twisty leg movements, some jelly body movements as well, (wow, now you can REALLY imagine what I’m trying to describe :-P).

At the beginning Venetia and I thought of it as strange, but after watching some videos on youtube, I think it doesn’t look… too bad :-P, and want to learn it… so far I can do… one move… and it’s a very simple one (most of the time I can’t even get my hands right with it >.<). Hee hee! The girl who does break dancing even said it was more difficult than that, so I don’t feel that bad about it :-P!

How sad am I?... Actually don't answer that, it's just a rhetorical question :-P. I have absolutely no other news… wow I need to get a lake! :-P Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca

How we came to be so far across the pond! (Ireland to France)

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? :P)! 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 :-P!

- Bianca