Last night alone...Aw. But here's another story for you.

 
So tonight's the last night of my house sitting mission in Dullo. My aunts get back from China early on Monday morning so I'll be out of here tomorrow evening. It's going to be so weird going back home and living with my mum and Benjo and Snappy...And the dog and cat, of course. It'll take some time to get used to living with people again. Maybe I can convince them all to get out so I can acclimate, lol, like a goldfish. These past few weeks have been good - uni work not withstanding, of course. I can so do this living on my own thing. Piece o' cake.

I actually came on here to make a legit attempt at an update, but now I can't remember what I was going to say. Frak.

Hm. Anyway, I'll move on. I mentioned a while ago that I wanted to talk more about my family because it's been brought to my attention that I never really do...Admittedly that was brought to my attention by someone IRL, but you all are better than my RL friends (except for those of you who are my RL friends too, lol). 

My paternal grandparents are from the Czech Republic (formerly Czechoslovakia) and came here on a ship called the Anna Salen, which you can google and see their names on the passenger list (our surname is Altschul, check it out). They worked incredibly hard at mostly manual labour jobs so that they could set up here and support their kids and, in turn, their kids' families.

Now, during school holidays and stuff my brother and I used to spend time at out grandparents' house while our mum was at work, and our grandmother, especially, would tell us different stories about different things. Some things about what our dad and his brothers were like when they were kids and the stuff they'd get into, some stuff about what it was like when my grandparents first met, and stuff about what it was like "back home" in the CR. This, next to talking about God and the Bible, or playing this one board game with us, was her favourite topic to talk about and it was our favourite to listen to. The things that would come up time and time again were picking wild blueberries and mushrooms in forests, getting in trouble at school/home, or ice skating on the fish pond (and falling through the ice one time), which were all good things to listen to - lots of different stories - but the stories my brother and I always wanted to hear more about (but would never, ever ask directly to hear) had to do with things that happened during the war (WWII).

One story was about when my grandma and her friends were kids and were playing around outdoors - as they did - but they suddenly heard some planes fly over and the whistling of falling bombs. They were too far away from home to run for real safety so they ran and hid in this ditch where some large concrete tunnels were lying (maybe for construction, I don't know), where they waited out the carnage of the bombs dropping. Ben and I loved that story because we thought it was so cool and so risky and adventurous, as kids are wont to do, lol, but we never really ever thought about what that all actually meant, you know? But there are two stories that are better (sort of) than that for real war stories, but I'll only tell one now for two reasons: One, it's going to be long enough already, and Two, the other one is not as funny/amusing/blackly humourous as the one I'm about to tell. That one is actually a very real war story that is kind of, for its own reasons, a bone of contention in my family.

So, the story that I will tell is based in the CR and the Nazis have occupied the country. My grandmother was a young girl who lived at home with her mother and father (who the other story is about), a grandmother, her three sisters and two brothers (I think). Everything is rationed at this point; all over Europe foodstuffs are hard to find both legally and illegally, as are metals (pots and pans) and clothing (especially shoes). Families would be permitted to receive a certain amount of each kind of food; bread, sugar, meat, and so forth, you know? For the most part everyone grumbled about the rations but tried to make them all last as long as possible, which is understandable, and they all got on with their lives. But my grandma had a neighbour on a property near theirs who was not as polite about his rationing problems and he'd find a way to take more than what he was supposed to get, which meant that he'd be taking food from the mouths of other hungry people. My grandma spoke to her grandmother about it and wanted to know how he could do something like that. His family was much smaller than theirs and they managed to get by, he shouldn't be stealing and someone should do something about it. Her grandmother told her that one day, someone will do something about it, if God doesn't do something about it first.

This one day came when more rations were being organised or something like that, and everyone was outside. I'm not wholly sure why, but my feeling is because there was some rationing thing going on. Anyway, my grandma's family was walking to wherever they were going and this neighbour guy was just up a head of them. There were a pair of fully-uniformed Nazi officers standing on the kerb overseeing and ensuring that no one misbehaves (I always recall my grandma mentioning the Nazi uniforms), and on the kerb, a little way away from them, stood a pair of boots. They were in decent condition, worn but not worn out, you know? And the neighbour guy asks one of the officers, in German, if those boots belong to anyone. They say no. He asks them if he can have them (even he's not stupid enough to just take something from Germans), to which they reply, yes. So he looks around at all the people headed to where they're going and quickly grabs the boots. He makes a break for it and runs back the way he came. He gets about a block away, stops dead, screams and drops the boots. He promptly threw up and ran the rest of the way home.

He was so intent on getting something for nothing that he got halfway home before he realised that there were still feet in the boots.