More Fun at the Billa. Explore the World with Alliga Joe!

Hey Kids!  Grab your passports and cameras!

Remember Supermercato Billa's i Puffi promotion back in the fall?  Well, they're at it again! 

This time, you can tag along with explorer extraordinaire, Alliga Joe and his two human companions, Lara and Bil, on a grand, world-wide adventure with "Alliga Joe Visits the 6+1 Continents with Bil and Lara."

Together, they explore land and sea, from north to south, east to west, and learn all about the plants, animals, people, and the facts and figures of the planet we live on. 

For every €10 you spend at the Billa Supermarket in Italy, you get a packet of stickers to paste into a collector's book that you buy at Billa for €3.90 (€2.90 if you have a Billa card).   Each sticker represents  something that the three explorers discovered during their trip.  

From Bengali tigers to the Korowai of New Guinea who live in tree houses, to the lost City of Atlantis, each sticker has an  interesting description so you can learn while you stick.  I've started my album already.

Everything is written in Italian but since you are young and have a mailable young brain, you'll be learning a new language and all about the planet too!

You have until April 29 to collect the stickers but then you have until May 6 to write about your most memorable adventure and send it to Billa with 10 empty packets.  If your story is the best, it will be published in Billa's Focus Junior Kids' Magazine.

Join Bil and Lara.  It'll be more fun to see the world with Alliga Joe instead of reading about it in books, cooped up in a classroom!

Puppy!

   

Auntie Puddy and I were in Ventimiglia on Wednesday morning, looking for some new shoes and purses to match our old purses and shoes when we spotted a cute little puppy being walked down the street.

We ooh'd and aahh'd when the owner and the little puppy walked by. 

Later that morning when we saw the little puppy and the owner in a shop, we dove in to have a closer look.

Now, you know that Auntie is a big cat fan so it takes a lot to get me excited about a dog but there we were, Auntie Puddy and I, petting its soft, furry little head while it wagged its tail and soaked up all the affection like a sponge.

You must admit, that little puppy sure is cute!

Cat Spotted at a Cat Café in Tokyo!

 

The air was crackling with excitement at Auntie's house this morning as she heard news about Cat!

In case you don't know about Cat, he was the furry feline drifter who arrived at our house in France one day, cost us hundreds of euro for surgery to remove a tumour, ate like a pig, became quite fat, and then ran off when we put him on a diet.  Since then, he's popped up here and there, from time to time, and we always look forward to news of his feline exploits.

Well, my Japanese friend just returned from a trip to Tokyo and along with some lovely gifts, she brought news of Cat whom she recognized from reading The Auntie Times.  

She told us that she saw Cat at a Cat Café!  Well, Hello Kitty!

What's a Cat Café you may ask?

Well, let's say you live in Tokyo and you like cats and you can't own one since it's customary in Tokyo to pay a lot of extra cash to your landlord so you can, the Cat Café is the place for you!  For about 1,000 yen, you can sit in a lovely café, sip tea, eat snacks, and pet and play with cats.  I know!  How fabulous is that? 

Some Tokyo Cat Cafés have up to 20 cats to play with but to keep the kitties safe and healthy, you have to follow some strict rules.  For example, you  aren't allowed to pick them up, dress them in cute outfits or take them home with you.  You're only allowed to gently pet and scratch them and then only after you've taken off your shoes and washed your hands when you arrived.

A poster from Cat's stage performance

So, let's say you're at a Cat Café and you want to know more about the lovelies purring at your feet.  Most Cat Cafés keep a Cat Album with photos and detailed biographies and personality profiles for each of the cats.  Some of the cats even have Twitter accounts so you can follow your favourite cats' tweets! 

It makes sense that Cat would turn up at a Tokyo Cat Café.  When Uncle Jim and I visited Tokyo last year, Cat was starring as "Pete the Cat" in a play based on the 1957 novel, The Door into Summer by science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein.

The play closed many months ago so I guess Cat is taking a bit of a sabbatical at the Cat Café between gigs.

Cat seems to have many talents.  

Who knows where he'll turn up next?

 

Eats Barks and Stays. Oranges Too!

"Enough was enough," was the general sentiment around our household last week when Celine finally cracked and had had it with sweeping all the stuff that kept falling out of our biggest, most majestic pencil cyprus tree on the terrace.

For the past month, a big pile of detritus made up of cyprus needles, chewed cyprus cones, tree bark, and poop has been greeting her when she arrives in the morning. She was getting blisters from all that sweeping.

What the heck was living up there?

Hey!  Stop that!

Well, Auntie decided to do a little investigating of her own so she and Celine got the longest broom we had in the house and together we poked at a big clump of a nest made of cyprus needles, cones and chewed bark to see if something would fall out.  We were hoping that the something was an animal, without a temper, but all that fell out was cyprus needles, cones, chewed bark and poop.  Most of it fell into our hair.  So much for investigative research. 

Did you see anything?

We've had our share of beasts roaming here and there and from time to time in the garden.

Years ago it was a  pretty pheasant whose life was cut short by a neighbour with a hunting  rifle  and  dinner guests who liked stuffed pheasant.

After the pheasant fiasco, a badger moved in, dug holes under some of the olive trees and then vanished.  Then of course there was Cat  who came and went and popped up in Tokyo last year as a stage star.

The suspect

The general consensus was that we had another tree rat like the one in September's post, "Wanted:  Cats who eat Rats."  But when Celine, with her keen, young, eyes and a magnifying glass pointed out that the poop falling out of the tree was too big for a tree rat, the plot thickened.

When I discovered chewed up oranges in the garden, this meant war!

This means war!

Plan "A", mothballs around the tree.  It didn't work

 



 

Later that night, after Uncle Jim and I had finished watching a movie, I grabbed a flash light and snuck out onto the terrace.  All was quiet and the moon was full.  Slowly I made my way in the moonlight to the bottom of the Cyprus tree.  I paused for a moment to let my eyes adjust to the darkness.  I snapped on the flash light and aimed it high into the tree and... yipes!  There it was staring down at Auntie from its perch!  It was a big furry animal that looked like a giant mouse!  I yelled for Uncle Jim but by the time he arrived, the giant mouse-monster had hidden itself.

Eric the gardener joins in the mystery

Early the next day, I told Celine about the giant mouse and she did some research.  She was sure that the varmint  living in the cyprus tree wasn't a rat at all.  Based on my description  it was probably a dormouse!  

If you're ever read Alice in Wonderland, one of the characters was a dormouse who was always falling asleep.  This makes sense since dormice are nocturnal so daytime was sleep time for the little critters.  This also explained why we never saw our dormouse during the day.  It was probably snoozing away.

Now that we knew what we were dealing with, it was time to pull out the big guns, aka, the gardener, Eric.

On Thursday, he bravely climbed into the cyprus tree  using a really long ladder and dismantled the nest.  He didn't see any critters.  I guess they were in the garden eating my oranges.

Eric recommends a trap. 

Stay tuned as the plot thickens... 

`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, 
who seemed to be talking in his sleep,
 `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing 
 as "I sleep when I breathe"!'  Alice in Wonderland

Celebrating the Humble Lemon: Menton's Fête du Citron



The citrus covered entrance to Menton's Jardins Biovès.

 What should you do when life gives you lemons?  Have a festival of course!  At least that's what they've been doing here in Menton for the past 79 years and they show no sign of slowing down.

Every year in mid February, Menton holds the spectacular,  Fête du Citron  and it's quite the barrel of laughs with huge, 10 metre high structures covered entirely  with lemons and oranges.  Of course, no festival would be complete without fireworks, a parade, the crowning of Miss Lemon, and people everywhere munching on lemon tarts. This year the fun begins on the 17th.

Lemons in Menton go way back.  Historical documents show that lemons have been grown in Menton since 1471, long before the lemon squeezer was invented.

Having cooked everything from tarts to cakes to gelato with Menton's lemons and having squeezed a tree's worth into glasses of Perrier over the years, I know what all the fuss is about.  Their skin and flesh have a lower acidity than other lemons and they taste sweet and delicious.  It's Auntie's favourite lemon for sure.

What every good lemon needs is a cheerleader, and so Menton has a special organization called, Association pour la Promotion du Citron de Menton or The Association for the Promotion of Menton's Lemons.  One of their goals is to get a prestigious "I.G.P." or Indication Géographique Protégée status for Menton's lemons and thus official recognition for their special qualities.  Most lemon lovers acknowledge that these qualities are mainly due to Menton's favourable growing conditions and they definitely have a point.  Menton has the warmest climate anywhere in France, partly due to warm breezes from the Mediterranean Sea and a  tall ring of surrounding mountains which shelter it from cold winter winds.  Currently, these mountains are powdered with snow but that's another story!

If the lemons do earn their I.G.P. status, they'll get a nifty label and maybe the producers will be able charge more for them too.  We have a few lemon trees in our garden so maybe Uncle Jim and I can get some  stickers for our lemons.  We'll just have to wait and see. 

Menton's first  Lemon Festival was organized in 1895 when clever hoteliers in Menton held  a parade to liven things up and amuse and attract the rich and famous people who spent winters here.  Records show that even Queen Victoria attended the first Lemon Festival.  It makes sense since she stayed at the pretty Chalet des Rosiers and maybe she was a little bored and missed England.

The highlight of the Lemon Festival are by far the  gigantic  sculptures made of oranges and lemons spread around in the pretty Jardins Biovès.

How to attach all those lemons to all those sculptures?  With elastics!  It's a snap.

In the months leading up to the Festival, iron workers  create big metal forms in different shapes and sizes and then eighty workers take over, climb up on ladders and cover the forms from top to bottom in lemons and oranges.  Since the lemons from Menton are so valuable, all the sculptures are made of cheaper, imported Spanish and Italian lemons and oranges.

A massive 145 tonnes of oranges and lemons are attached to forms to make hundreds of sculptures every year.  If you take a close look, you'll see that the fruit is attached to the metal forms with elastics.  They use about 500,000 elastics in all.

Even though I love to see all the big lemon sculptures, I can't help but imagine what I could do with all those lemons and oranges after the festival.

Imagine all those big, giant jars of jam...

Citrus for sale in the Menton market