13 January 2008

Hey

It’s been a while. Happy New Year, Happy Befana, Happy anything else that has happened since the last installment. For Christmas I went to England. All very nice. Lovely cold weather, lots of turkey, sprouts, gorgeous gifts. We bought my parents a computer! They’ve been promising to buy one for ages so finally on Christmas eve we kids made an impulse buy and got it. It was a great surprise for them. We’d bought a web cam too before deciding to buy the computer and got them to open that first. We said “this is for when you finally get yourselves online”. Hahah. So now they’re battling with dial up but shortly they’ll be getting broadband then there'll be no stopping them. They’re doing well to say they’re never had a computer, they’re using Skype and email already. With broadband things will get better as I’ll be able to send photos and we can use the web cam properly. I tried to show them my blog, but it was impossibly slow. The You Tube links take forever to open on dial up.

New Years Eve was all’ Italiana round at OH's parents. In typical Neapolitan fashion the menu was fish and seafood based. Prawns, capitone, mussels, oven baked fish, oysters, plus some other seafood which I don’t know the names of. I tried a tiny piece of captione (eel?), it’s rubbery and fatty. Not for me. I fell to sleep from 10-11:50. Woke up to watch fireworks of every kind from the spectacular organised display ones to the home made ones. :S

New Years day we went out for a walk. The streets were covered in fireworks from the night before, look at these...Do they look dangerous or what?


It’s tradition to throw out old things so the streets had stuff all over, but it was about to get much worse....

Which brings me onto the rubbish crisis in Naples/Campania...I normally get a lift to work which means I avoid the situation on the streets, but on Friday I was a piede so I had a chance to see how things were going. It wasn't nice. Basically I couldn't always walk on the pavement because of the overflowing trash. You have to go onto the road to get around it all. Really grim. Each time I saw an enormous rubbish mountain I had to cross the road so that I didn’t have to walk near to it, then I crossed back over when I got to another one, zig zagging my way down the street. Here are some photos from Friday morning.

Notice how the heap is just outside a pharmacy. Poor them.



This one is blurred, but if you see where the traffic lights are, that's where the pedestrian crossing is.


When I came home in the evening surprisingly they had cleared quite a lot of the rubbish including the heap outside the pharmacy. The problems are very much still on going but they seem to have moved a lot of the massive heaps which were way out of control. I'm not sure where they've moved it to...

I should mention that in all of this, recycling is only touched on and NEVER have I heard mentioned about making less rubbish. Ie, by not using plastic plates and cutlery, by not letting the salumeria man wrap everything up in individual paper packets, not using numerous plastic bags (and gloves) when buying fruit and vegetables, etc etc.

Anyway, that’s me updated. A presto.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I was going to ask you if you ate the capitone, before you got to it in your posting. It's one of those things in life that you either like or don't. I find people are not capitone fence sitters. Have you ever seen them come live from the tank...I hope for your sake you haven't. It would shutter your Anglo-Saxon eyes.

The garbage thing is beyond embarrassing. Scumbari for the entire world to see. And then they wonder why people around the globe say what they say...

Bon anne a tutt' vuije, a OH, a famiglia, a tutt'equante.

Delina said...

I have seen the live capitone in tanks yes. Bleee! They're outside every pesce vendolo on New Years Eve.

Very embarrassing about the rubbish, I agree.

Happy New Year anche a te Pat!

Gil said...

Welcome back and Happy New Year to you.

Delina said...

Thank you Gil. Same to you.

Alex said...

Wow, I can't believe how many years this trash thing has gone on. It is just terrible that the home is always so clean but anything outside of that is just a big bin. I really hope things change.
Happy new year -I've missed reading you!

Anonymous said...

I guess there is too much tradition of throwing out old things in Napoli.
I hope that problem gets resolved soon. It's a beautiful city without the trash.

Cherrye said...

Wow, Delina. I have been thinking about you and some of the other bloggers from that area - pretty much every night when I "watch" the news. Watch that is - not "listen"...

I imagine the odor is horrible! Is it?

It sounds like you had a great Christmas with your fam in England and I think it is great you bought your parents a computer! What an amazing gift. I had my mother using yahoo IM for a while, but it somehow "left" her computer and she doesn't know why! lol...like mother like daughter, I suppose...I can't find the calculator on mine!

joe@italyville.com said...

Saw it on CNN... any update on resolving the situation?
Hope it clears up soon. Love Napoli. Buon Anno!