New Year's Eve

At the end of the last post I mentioned this post. When I started typing it, I realized that it was going to be a long one if I crammed both together, so it'll be two posts instead of 1. Since New Year's Eve comes before the 1st of January, that's up first. :-)

If you've followed along, you've gathered somewhere along the way that we currently live in Italy. Italians are rather obsessed fond of fireworks. As is seriously fond of. They tend to go off for random reasons along with holiday ones. If a favored football (that's soccer to Americans) team won a sought after game, fireworks are shot off. Sometimes hubby and I wonder if they even know. ;-)  The typical times are from New Year's Eve pretty much through the night before Epiphany. Epiphany is the 6th of January. The night before is La Befana. I'll get to that when I get caught up with these posts.

Anywho......
Setting off lots of fireworks is a beloved tradition. Last year....er, for the end of 2011, fireworks were set off constantly over the course of 30 minutes....from the stroke of Midnight on. Yeah, they love 'em. This past year, they.......

Wait.....I'm getting ahead of myself. Back up a few hours.

On Sunday (the 30th of December), after church a bunch of us went out for lunch. After it was over, a few of us stayed a bit longer and chatted. Ms. Adele (our lovely pastor's wife...a second mama/my Italian mom) has her birthday on December 31st. One thing she loves is seafood. Well, long story shorter hubby and I made plans to meet up with them around 11 on the 31st to go on a day trip. We did. It was: Pastor Sam, Adele, their grown son, their grandson, hubby, and I. We met and followed them (they knew how to get there, we didn't) to Caorle and then onto Jesolo....both in Italy. Caorle is on the water....the Adriatic and is highly favored by Pastor and Adele for their seafood.

I guess if you want good, fresh seafood, it's better if you go to the sea as opposed to it coming to you. Their son, their grandson, & I ordered other stuff (they got pizza, I got a steak-type dish and salad). The rest got plates of seafood. After a yummy lunch, we walked around the town

and then along the beach for a bit.

It was beautiful and not as cold as I thought it would be given that it was on the water. They too have a leaning tower, but obviously not as famous as another one.

We didn't stay too much longer because we wanted to go to Jesolo.

They have a sand nativity scene set up that was only running for a few more days. We all wanted to go, so off we went.

 

These aren't all the pics or all of the sand sculptures. It was housed in a HUGE tent. There is a group of artists that take mounds of sand and transform it into works of art.

We stopped by a restaurant on the way home to get take away. We chose to take it home and spend the evening alone together. While waiting for our food, we looked up Italian traditions. Interesting. Some are food related, others are....superstitious at best.

One of those is fireworks. Now, back to the beginning where I left off. As stated earlier, at the end of 2011 fireworks were set off constantly over the course of 30 minutes....from the stroke of Midnight on. Yeah, they love 'em. This past year, they didn't let them off continuously as before. But, by the time we heard the last firework go off, it had been well over an hour. Yep, a bit past 1 AM. The best part is that where our house is, we can stand on our outside landing and see fireworks on three sides...the house is blocking the fourth side. The best picture would have been to our left. You can see the church steeple and they were shooting off fireworks that hit just to the left of it. Apparently about a week earlier (maybe for a test run), they were shooting off fireworks and hubby stated they were hitting just over and around the steeple. Either way...a beautiful sight. Ringing in the New Year with my little family of me, hubby, and our dog Belle was perfect for us.