Norway in November

By late October the kids have settled into school, we have a few nice friends, a routine (stumbling out of bed in the darkness of 6:45 to wake the boys up in time for school and trying to get Shane to have a shower before me so I can lie in for another 5 minutes - I'm absolutely not a morning person)
We have made enquiries at a few local gyms and become 'member's of one of the gyms, so despite no frequenting of said gym, progress in the fitness stakes has been made.

End of October is also when we head off for my much anticipated trip to Norway to visit our friends Cathy and Thormy and their great kids. Shane has been to Norway a couple of times and is excited to see them but I am beside myself, counting down days, emailing Cathy all the time telling her I'm so excited, bordering on annoying.

We pack our things and head out the door with what seems to be the luxury of time before our EasyJet flight. Then we run into traffic on the Milan autostrada and we don't clear it for a long time. Meanwhile I am frantically calling the car parking place begging them to have a van ready to take us to the airport as soon as we get there and trying to navigate with the iPad on my lap and help Shane pick the best lane. Absolutely stressful to the max. I really thought we had enough time! Why do I always find myself saying that whenever we go ANYWHERE?! Thanks to massive good luck, we make the flight and have Thormy there to pick us up at the airport. We then get a ferry over to the other side and drive about 3 hours to get to their home in Arendal in the south of Norway, Arendal is a beautiful little town, typically Norwegian, water, white houses, boats, beautiful blonde people...it's heaven.

Over the next 5 days I manage to master the art of downhill skiing on the Wii, we take the boys ice-skating, we have a picnic which gets abruptly ended by a downpour of hail (ouch), surprise Shane with his birthday present of a boat trip to an abandoned island followed by a lunch of prawns and champagne at the top of an empty lighthouse, and have the best kebabs ever in Oslo!
The only low-light of the trip....a 5am wakeup to get the bus to the airport on time, me getting the pickup point wrong, all of us walking around the streets of Oslo in -4 degrees, followed by an icy taxi trip to the tune of about $250 because that bus was the only bus going to the out of town budget airport....ahhh, memories!!

The Heslops have arrived!

Beautiful Arendal

Roast reindeer, don't knock it till you've tried it

The ideal spot for a beach picnic

Thormy impressing us with his fire skills

And Charlie impressing us with his Wii bowling skills

Charlie impressing us with his wood collection skills

Shane impressing us with his Tarzan skills

Typical Shane and Cathy faces

Our jolly boat captain

After a slippery, windy and honestly scary exit off our boat, we are on terra firma again!

Now that's a lunch!

First time ice-skating, bike helmets came in very handy

Charlie trying to tame the tiger

Best dinner ever, not a bowl of pasta to be seen :)

Autumn - Day in the Life

Late night gelati trip

Shane mountain biking

Morning ritual - saying goodbye to Sammy

Just some of the local cheeses

Wet weather doesn't stop tennis lessons

Charlie at tennis training at FAGGI

Autumn - time to say YES

I never thought I would be one to be seeking or obtaining wisdom from Hollywood films, and certainly not ones with Jim Carrey.  Yet, here Shane and I are, sitting on our couch, watching 'Yes Man' and drawing some uncomfortable parallels...so we started saying YES to a lot of things we wouldn't normally....

• 500 euros spent on a 6 sommelier wine course that we lasted 4 weeks at - the Italian education system is alive and well in all aspects of education, even at the CAE equivalent. 3 hours spent listening to how to describe the color and bubble ratio of a wine according to the certified Italian sommelier standards with not even a drop to taste until 10:50pm was just too hard work for us...unfortunately we thought we were signing up for a wine TASTING course...that would work in any language. You live and you learn

• Yoga - very nice couple of evenings spent at the local gym doing hatha yoga. First 2 weeks were false starts. Spent 15 minutes driving around to find the gym, to no avail,  and decided to get my own dose of relaxation at the local gelateria, best 4 euros spent almost to date. Once I got to the classes they were great, however Shane pointed out in our passing of the yoga teacher in town a slight creepiness to the yoga teacher which got to me at the end of one class. During savasana I noticed my head was very hot, then my face, then my ears...I had to stop myself from doing that uncontrolled laugh that I still remember from being in church at my Catholic girls school when something funny happened and you had to be quiet...our yoga teacher was passing through the room and practicing reiki, which is a really nice gesture, and was an enjoyable experience, but slightly uncomfortable at the same time...

• Latin dancing Friday - we get to head to our friends' house, let our kids run wild for 3 hours while we eat and drink, and then maybe spend 30 minutes dancing in our friend's attic. I love the drinking and eating, but I love the dancing more...thanks Simon for all your expert tips on how to move our hips :)

• Volunteering at the school - a great opportunity to connect with the school and share what's so great about Australia. Makes me realize how lucky we are to be Australians, how great it is to be a kid, how lucky I am to be able to help these kids with their English, even just a little bit, and encourage some of them to think about a world outside of Biella

It could be that we have more time to notice it, but people have made time to invite us into their lives here...dinners and lunches don't need to be a Masterchef affair to have a good time. I'm going to remember that you don't have to always do something perfectly, you just need to give it a go, and the worst that can happen is you spend 500 euros to learn the words for bubble ratios in wine.

A week with my mum

After Charlie and Sam's first week of school I head off on the day after my 34th birthday to meet mum in Paris for a girl's week. Despite an emotional start to the week with my bursting into tears in the taxi from the airport because I was worried that I was traumatizing Charlie and Sam by making them go to school in a foreign language, the week was fantastic.

PARIS

Highlight - being able to shop and eat as much as we wanted, and eat tartare and drink wine and not have any pizza or pasta for a whole week!

Lowlight - getting used to cigarettes everywhere (good for mum!), and baaaaaad coffee

Louvre gardens

Salted caramel macaron delight

I want to be rich and buy art like this

I want to be have a flower shop like this in Clifton Hill

I want I want I want

I know my dad would want this in his dining room

Big canons, thanks Napoleon

ISTANBUL...Turkish is a hard language to even get a 'hello' around

Highlight - finding the best rugs ever in the Grand Bazzaar

Lowlight - discovering how expensive they are, that they don't haggle and that I can't afford them (glad I didn't have to haggle anyway, I'm a disaster in the haggle department)

Hard on the tourist trail

Yay, Rocco!! Impromptu tour in the rain :)

Best cheese crepes ever

January 2013, time to catch up

After our first few weeks in Biella, I headed off to Paris and Istanbul for a great week with mum. When I got back we were into the swing of buying a car (a pretty stressful venture in another language with the wrong documentation at every turn), making friends at school and trying to help the boys integrate with their new environments when they didn't speak a word of Italian. With all that behind us, I made the commitment to Charlie that I was going to knit him a woolen blanket. Didn't matter that I didn't know how to knit, youtube was going to help get me there...2 weeks before Christmas I had completed my first patchwork blanket! I then decided I was going to knit one for Sam too to be fair. After using every spare minute that the kids weren't around since October knitting, a decent case of RSI later (thanks Shane for the treatment), on Christmas Eve with the help of my lovely friend Simone DF I had completed both blankets and sewed up all the ugly loose strands. The only problem with this was that I haven't updated this blog in 4 months and so much has happened!!!

I'm not one for new years resolutions, but I figure that the start of 2013 is as good a time as any to play a bit of catch up with the old blog, but my posts will be pretty light on for words for a little while, which could be a good thing!