Mwa ha ha ha

well, hello there.
I've just spent the last hour writing a blog in Italian, trying my utmost to not make any glaringly obvious mistakes. Every time I have to write something more than a post-it to Marco I realise that my Italian isn't as good as I generally think it is. I'd say that my comprehension is pretty damn good and I can get my point across most of the time but when you actually have to sit down and write something, something that's going to be in black and white on the screen for everyone to scrutinise, you realise that there are huge holes in your comprehension of grammar structures. My big problems are conditional and subjunctive, I really haven't got the hang of them yet. Anyhoo. There have been complaints that my blog isn't funny, my apologies Ronan, I can try to have a bit of a hunt around for some Christmas crackers and see if there are any half decent jokes in them, course they might be in Italian so that probably won't work. Ah well, if you know me at all you'll know that I'm not a natural comedian, that I'm much more likely to tell some story which everyone else finds incredibly depressing but which I find funny for some strange reason, something involving traumatizing tragedy, just at the perfect moment to bring the atmosphere crashing down to the point where everyone wants to get their coats and go home, ending the story with "no, no, if you'd been there...". Which in itself could be considered amusing. Not much happening these days, I'm gonna go home and have lunch I think, and then I'm thinking about going to the swimming pool. This morning I found a market right in the centre of Perugia that I never knew was there, so I bought some nice stuff to make dinner with. Marco and his sister are working at the Fiera dei morti (The Fair of the Dead) for the whole week so I've been given the task of making dinner every night. The fair is in this massive park and it's a bit of a nightmare really. I went with them yesterday just to have a look around. There are about 500 stalls selling pretty much anything you can think of, pots, pans, pottery, wicker chairs, chocolate, sicilian pastries, candy floss, clothing, tractor engines, hookas (sp?), dried fruits, pasta making machines, porchetta - a whole spit-roasted pig with head and feet still attached, gutted, stuffed with various herbs and then sliced in huge chunks which are then made into impossibly big sandwiches - salami, ingenious slicing machines like you see on tv, pets to take home (puppies, kittens, parrots, ferrets, goldfish, terrapin, rabbits, guinea pig, pot-bellied piglets, and very strangely, squirrels and a deskunked skunk...). In fact the pet stalls just made me a bit depressed, the puppies seemed to have been drugged to keep them calm with all the people crowding round so they were all lying limply with their tongues hanging out and eyes rolled back. There was a parrot that was in the process of pulling all its feathers out. And there was a love bird, in a cage on its own, that was just running back and forth from one end of the cage to the other in a really demented way. Given the fact that love birds are never supposed to be kept on their own ( there was even a sign saying that they all had to be sold in pairs) I don't know what was going on. I remember when I was little that I loved going to pet shops but these days it just makes me angry, not that I'm going to go on some crusade to save the animals of course, I'm just going to write about it disapprovingly in my blog and make some tut tut noises. I think one day at the fair of the dead is enough to be honest...