Winter has arrived and it's friggin' cold...

So these past 10 days Winter has officially arrived I’d say. They were claiming it had arrived when Claire and I were in Istanbul but frankly that was pleasant weather.   I actually don’t mind it now either, but I can admit it’s cold.  I don’t even mind the cold so much. The rush of blood that hits the cheeks, the warm breaths you can see coming out from people’s mouths, that invigorating chill. It doesn’t bother when I’m out and about and walking around either.  When it rains though...that I don’t like. I don’t like Chill AND rain...this means my clothes don’t dry properly.  People in the village heat their houses to the nth degree, to the point where I suffocated inside that I lunge out in the cold air when we’re leaving. Grandma’s house is old...she has errr...I wouldn’t even call it a fireplace...I don’t even know what the word for it is. Perhaps I genuinely don’t know what it’s called in English or my  English has regressed so much due to lack of use over the past 3 months that I can’t find my words. It’s  like a stove...you put logs in it, it’s attached to a chimney, it ultimately heats the room.

Anyhow the point of me explaining this is, the ‘heating device’ heats only the immediate room you’re in. My room doesn’t have a ‘heating device’. Luckily its situated right above Grandma’s  (and Mum’s ) room so I do get some warmth coming up from the floor boards at night.  The past couple of days the weather has been rainy and miserable. All I want to do is sit in a room and either watch FGSN , White Collar Season 2 (which I finished the other day). During the day they light the stove in the kitchen, in the kitchen my grandma and mum are gasp bagging away that I can’t concentrate...but it’s too cold to up and leave to another room, so do you do..? What I have been doing is going up to my room and sleeping under the doona and trying to keep warm...I know in two weeks I will mopping the floor in muggy oppressive heat...hmm....Yeah...I’d still prefer the Winter, but I’m just saying it gets boring.

Only 10 days ago the weather was still pleasant. I took these photos when my cousins went to ‘pick’ olives.  They say there aren’t many olives this year (and there really wasn’t much fruit on the trees that I can see) 

I tried my hand at picking some olives,  but I only dared climb around 3 rungs of the ladder when I said to my cousin “eh..I’ll pick the ones on the ground”.  The Olives from the trees are sold as olives to be eaten, where as the ones that had already fallen on the ground from wind etc, you still scour the ground picking, but that’s only  used for Olive oil.

Me attemptıng to climb a ladder precariously placed between branches.

The Olives aren’t ‘picked’ as such, more so you rake then off the trees. Large nets are laid beneath the tree to catch the olives, you then empty the nets in the baskets, which you take home. Most people who own olives trees have olives sorting machines. It’s like a conveyor belt, you throw all the olives in there and the machine sorts them out into small, medium, large sizes for you...then you take it the distributor to sell according to size. It’s hard work, and they own peanuts doing it.

 Yet they all seem to live fairly comfortably in the village.  Although my cousins have been eating Grandma’s (and Mum’s) profits for years...but we won’t get into that.  One of these days one of my cousins may learn to read English and stumble upon this blog..