New title

So, once again this blog gets a new title as I'm sitting here late at night listening to the rain hammer down on my Manchester roof once more.  A new title because I'm back from Sicily with a new job in a new country with a new company.  Yep, it's goodbye SKM Manchester and hello Rio Tinto Simandou project in Guinea in french speaking west Africa.

I spent my last few days in Sicily getting around to see a few places that I hadn't seen before (they pack a lot in for such a little place!).  In this photo I've climbed down (and later up, much harder) a gorge at Avola to explore the pools and waterfalls at the bottom.  I even went for a quick dip as you can see from my wet hair.  Emphasis on the quick - it was freezing!

Then it was time to say goodbye to Sicilia and all the people at ISAB Energy that I had grown exceedingly fond of.  That was really hard - unlike most of my projects at SKM, this time I had been integrated into the client's team and made to feel a part of everything.  They made me feel very welcome even though I didn't speak any Italian at first (although I was pretty fluent by the end).  An 8 month (8 months!!) experience I won't forget.

Still, no rest for the wicked!  I made it home on Monday night and on Thursday a friend from Australia arrived for a visit when I happened to be on holiday between the old and new jobs.  He was keen to tour the Australian battlefield sites in the Somme in France, which happens to be where my grandfather fought.  I also happened to need to go back to speaking French instead of Italian.  When you use happen like that in three sentences in a row clearly you're going to be going to France!

The Somme was an intensely moving experience which I'll blog about later.  First though we went round the beautiful Champagne region east of Paris where I'd never been before.  We went touring in our black Audi A3 (which might impress some people... personally I would have been happy with the Ford Fiesta option!) and marvelled in the endless fields of lush wheat, the dense grape vines grown close the ground to protect them from frost (and to keep chiropractors in business during the picking season) and hundreds of kilometers (I exagerate not) of cellars used to store the most famous product of this region.

Because naturally any visit to Epernay in the Champagne region is imcomplete without a visit to the cellars of Moet and Chandon (there were many other winemakers' cellars we could have visited but who can resist a champagne inventing monk?).  There I learnt more about the process of making champagne than I had ever suspected existed.  Did you know that all important Bottle Turner must turn every bottle every day (left one day, right the next)?  Apparently a top Bottle Turner can Turn up to 50,000 Bottles a day.  And I bet you thought you were good at *your* job.

The weather in France was glorious... for a few days.  Then for our visit to the battlefields we dropped from 31 degrees to 11 in just one day and added some rain to boot.  Appropriately atmospheric though.

.... to be continued.

But in the meantime, the other big news of my life is that I've got a new computer!  Ok, that might not sound like the biggest deal ever, but because work has provided my computers for the last decade or so, the last computer I bought was a 486.  Aha.  That's like prehistoric my friends.  So I've spend the ENTIRE day (and a half) setting up the new beast.  Not that I won't get a new computer with the new company, however a big global mining company won't be quite as relaxed as my relatively small engineering consultancy when it comes to letting me do as I please with my computer.  And I'm the sort of person who needs absolute control of her own workspace (not to mention all of those slightly dubious activities (ok, downright illegal) that might take place with respect to certain movies and tv shows).

Ricotta dreams

I mentioned previously that I've been taking advantage of the a few weekends free to get around some final spots.  One of these was Vizzini, where I went to la Sagra della Ricotta (Ricotta festival).  Vizzini itself is a gorgeous old mountain village where you get the impression that time has stood still for a while and the guys cooking up the ricotta in the big vats didn't do anything to change that impression.

If I understand correctly, ricotta is sort of curds and whey (I don't know which).  True ricotta is made from sheeps' milk, but there weren't enough sheep for the festival and so this lot was made with cows' milk.

And it was fantastic!  You had to really fight to get into place to hand over a bowl when it was ready, which they then filled with this half solid half liquid mix of ricotta heaven.  That was of course the savoury version - the street was lined with stalls of the sweet version in the form of cannoli and all sorts of other yummy things.

On the side we had, amongst other things, an antique car show and here is one of the tiny original Fiat 500s.  Although this is all dolled up for the festival, in reality you still see quite a few of them around in operation!  Makes a Smart car seem oversized.

We also had a horse parade.  Here you can see their many feathers (for a moment I thought I was in South America or something)... there are much  better pictures of the horses and their colourful little carts but I like this one for the view of the locals :).  A bit different from the trendy young things in Ortigia!

One week to go....

Sadly counting the days

So, just two weeks left in sunny Sicilia.  And I'm sad about that, I've had a lot of fun here.  It hasn't exactly been the most challenging period of my career, but I'm not complaining about a 6 month holiday!

After Easter at Stromboli I took some more time off the following weekend to see the western side of the island.  I saw lots of interesting stuff of which other people have taken much better pictures than me. :)

First a trip through beautiful Cefalú (another place I'm glad not to be at during the summer period) and then up into the mountains of the Parco delle Madonie.  Here I stayed a night in what looked like a Swiss chalet (they have skiing in the winter) and went hiking up to about 2000 m, seeing deer, goats, birds of prey (unspecified - I'm no ornothologist) and at least the prints of wild boar (which I then ate with my pasta that night).  I also checked into the gorgeous little town of Castelbuono where I could have spent much money buying cosmetics made from the milk of the ass had I chose.  (I chose instead buying liquor made from the fruit of the prickly pear)

Beautiful - the mountains of Sicilia are in my opinion better than the sea in many ways, but most people I meet here have never even been there!  Many of the locals get up from their beach and move across the island to another beach for a holiday in summer.  Strange, but understandable.  Trekking seems to be something of a rich/educated sport in Europe.

This is really a poor place for being part of a western country.  Just about everyone had a go at repressing the locals for a long time (the Spanish Inquisition, Gariboldi, the Mob and Berlosconi being the most recent in that order) and apart from the industry where I'm working, tourism and agriculture there's a lot of seemingly entrenched poverty.  There's also a sort of contradiction about these beach loving people who don't actually swim much...  I told someone about my upbringing in Australia where many schools had swimming pools and lessons twice a week, big sports grounds and so on and he was amazed.  Here the kids are lucky to have a small patch of concrete big enough for a basketball game.

Next up was Palermo, the capital of Sicily and it's old.  2700 years old according to trusty Wikipedia.  It has history just oozing out of every pore, not least out of it's roughly 2 million churches (possibly a very minor exgeration).  I saw all the must see sites, such as mind bogglingly priceless-for-its-day Cappella Palatina built by the Normans as well as lots of interesting smaller places (this was after all a stopping point for the crusades).  To round out the whole religous theme I also went to the wow awesome wow cathedral at Monreale.

Before leaving the city however I went to the botanical gardens and walked around in the rather cold rain.  These were interesting for several reasons (eg they originally started a century or two as a teaching garden and first introduced mandarins into Europe) but there's nothing like a massive moreton bay fig to bring back memories.  I didn't climb this one though :) (no big bouncy branch like at Wellington Point beach).  As if that wasn't Qld enough, there were macadamia nut trees and lately I've been seeing bottle brushes and birds of paradise plants everywhere.  As these are all tucked in amongst the gum trees....

Just out of Palermo is the nature reserve of Zingaro which provided another lovely trek along the cliff with stunning views of the Mediterean (what was I saying about those mountains, something about being better than the sea??) before heading up to the medieval mountain top fortress of Erice.  I stayed the night in a seaside industrial resort full of germans and school children out of Marsala, which looked lovely during the 50 laps I made of it trying to find a hotel in the actual city before giving up in disgust, before heading the next day to Mazara del Vallo, one of my favourite spots.  Almost more Tunisian than Italian with all the immigrants working the fishing village and the ancient Arabic layout from the days when they had their turn at running Sicilia, I had lots of fun roaming the Kasbah (yep, it was even called that) before eating hands down the best couscous I'd ever imagined possible.  The whole western area is known for its seafood couscous.  Yum.

Ironically, this side of the country was the only place where they had decent road signs.  I could actually make my way continuously from one place to the next without doing 5 loops trying to work out which the arrows actually went!  The city was also really well set up for tourists, although the websites are a bit of a disspointment.  I'll just link to the museum of the Satyr and tell you that the story is actually really interesting.

Now it's getting late and this blog is getting long so I'll just mention Selinunte and Segesta, two very ancient sites I saw on the way home.  I did actually take some really good photos of these two, especially the quarry near Selinunte where you can see the parts of the temple columns that the ancient Greek masons had just carved out of the rock when they were interrupted by the invasion of the next lot.  Segesta was also beautiful - those guys really knew how to site a theatre for maximum effect.  Unfortunately you'll have to take my word for it on the photos as I'm temporarily misplaced them.

The other notable thing about Segesta - I was able to translate the Italian instructions into French for some tourists.  If there was some sort of smug smiley icon thingy here I would avail myself of it.

Since then, we've had a 5 day strike and a public holiday on a Saturday (what sort of mean goverment makes you take Saturday as your May Day?) and so I've got around Siracusa even more.  Next time I will make an effort and put up a photo of the locals making hot salty ricotta like I'm sure they did 200 years ago....