Christmas is almost here

Christmas is approaching! Which means plenty of Christmas meals, and other Christmas-related activities!

Things kicked off on Wednesday night at my Italian class, with the traditional Tombolata from Naples. It's normally played by Italian families from Christmas eve to Epiphany - we decided to spice up the game by giving the winners Christmas pressies (the tombolata itself is most assuredly very traditionally Napoletan, dating back to 1734). The Tombolata is a bit like an Italian version of bingo, except that the various numbers have themes/stories from Naples associated with them (which means that the playing board has some nice piccies on it). It was all rather good fun - and to boot I won some nice noughat to bring home as well!

The next day, we had our team Christmas meal. We went to the usual team meal restaurant, that is to say the Provencal Golf, which is just down the road from the office. It's a nice enough place for a meal, although nothing to write home about. I do like their desert buffet ;) Nice to have a bit of a get-together before heading off on holidays though - and sadly an occasion to say bye to some of the sub-contractors who won't be coming back in 2014... (cost-cutting, that's the name of the day these days...).

In the evening, I was quite looking forward to seeing Romeo & Juliet at the new theatre in Antibes. Was quite looking forward to seeing Julie and Aurelien as well. Things started off promisingly enough with an aperitif and light meal at the theatre restaurant. The play however, was what could be referred to as a disaster. I'm a big fan of Shakespeare, and while I don't mind modern versions of his plays (I quite liked the Baz Luhrman adaptation of this very same play, for example), but when it's modernized like this, no thanks... I think Shakespeare is of course best enjoyed in English, but translating the bard's text into French slang is not a good idea, if you ask me... Not only that, but we actually found the actors poor as well. So to cut a long story short, we made the unanimous decision to bugger off before the end of the play. That's a first one for me. What shocked us was that the play actually had pretty good (if mixed) reviews on the internet. Am I becoming an old fart ? That's something to ponder over the Christmas holidays...