THE KITCHEN REDO BEGINS (WITH PUPPY INTERLUDES!) | The Positano Diaries EP 165

We are Nicky and Carlo and our family live in Positano, Italy, nearly 500 steps from the road but surrounded by fruit and olive trees and with a fabulous view. Our garden overlooks the sea and we grow our own food. We show you what life is really like on the Amalfi Coast. So please subscribe and welcome to the Positano Diaries. This is my little friend here, she always hugs me but look what's below us okay i don't want to get to my queue anymore i want to stay here Sheila is the dog of our neighbor Michele and she has had a lot of puppies and we didn't know it, we just got back and we hadn't seen them one wants to come to me, he's already here, yes I'm behind the gate because we don't want them to run away but I have no others, but how many puppies did you have, how many did you have? but unfortunately we had to leave the puppies because we had an appointment at Ikea to design our new kitchen. I am off out on a breakfast date, Elizabeth wants to take me somewhere for breakfast but she wouldn't tell me where so she's now built it up to be somewhere very exciting and I thought I better make a video just in case it is really exciting. I'm sure it isn't because it's January and pretty much everything is closed in this area but you never know with Elizabeth she comes up with all sorts of wonderful plans. Weather overcast currently eight degrees celsius since we have come back the weather has been playing games with us there's been cloudy day sunny day cloudy day sunny day cloudy day sunny day Elizabeth has brought me to Sorrento, where are we going? We're going to the Radical cafe which is a new breakfast spot should be healthy we will see healthy food and they open in December and everything is pink. Okay I'm glad I wore my pink jumper then and while we're still in the car park let me just show you the car parks in Sorrento are all orange grove you park your cars under the orange trees and it's all rather lovely On my way home and I've just found this little baby snake on the pathway it's moving but not very much so I'm not sure if it's ill or if it's just lazy What are you doing? What do you want? The next morning we set off on a little trip along the Amalfi coast passing through all the villages it is a pleasure to drive along the coast at this time of year because there's no taxis there's no tour buses there's no hire cars and the roads are clear and empty we passed through Preano, Amalfi, Atrani and on to Minori before stopping in Maiori We're in Maiori, Carlo's got an appointment here to do with pensions very boring and then after that we're doing something very exciting we're going to Vietvi del Mare where they make the ceramics we're going to the ceramic factory that Elizabeth uses to see Antonio and choose some some tiles for our new kitchen back in the car on the ghost road yeah so we just went to see this guy who is obviously a mathematical genius but very funny as well because he does all his calculation and he goes so we've got a lot of information from him and now we are on our way to the ceramics factory we'll have a good look around there oh he was like the mad scientist in back to the future yeah apart from the hair normal hair but yeah okay so we're in the first room of the ceramics factory we don't actually need to go in any more rooms because i know what i want but let's have a quick look around because this is just fascinating in here so if you come around here there's basically piles and piles of beautiful tiles and look at that that's like a William Morris style stunning no i don't want that i mean that one would be quite cool the bamboo this is where it starts to get really complicated because look at all this and just every single one is different and there's just so much choice i mean you can just go on forever how do you choose how do you decide but as some of you may not already know i already know what i want so that made it much easier because last time i came here i found that it was tucked down here on the floor and i found it and all i have to do now is choose the exact colors this is the tile with all the colors on it that i can use so what i'm going to do is take a picture of the tiles i want and then go home i'm going to draw it and i'm going to use these colors to decide what colors i want to put in it just out of interest i'm going to show you what the floor is like because they've obviously used all of the old tiles that they haven't needed for anything else to make the floor and everywhere you go it's slightly different i like the little fishies here look let's go a bit further i mean it just goes on and on just another whole room and it changes everywhere fascinating and i was asked me to point out that the roof is at least 300 years old um they don't do rooms like this anymore but yes this is a very old building antonio is now showing color around the workshop here's some more that have been painted and they need to be glazed and then cooked and here is the painting station it's saturday today so there's nobody here but there's all these little pots and brushes like looking at these are all the screen prints of the various patterns and shapes which one is different and there's so many of them and here there's a couple of ovens vehicles at the end there okay so i've taken a hundred photos of a hundred tiles even though i think i know what i want i'm now going to go home and play with them he was telling us ghost stories as well so now i'm really scared anyway that's the name of the factory c-e-a-r um we're gonna get in the car and start heading home we're trying to find somewhere to eat obviously it is now quarter past one so certain person needs to be fed and uh yeah it's hard in january but it is saturday so i reckon there'll be places open maybe if we go to chatara let's try let's go we've got no rush to get home holly is with sky today we just wanted to also show you that we have got the sea view me now we know the name of the restaurant this is what i have to put up with he has been staring at this picture on the wall the whole time what i like about maiori is this huge long flat promenade that they have in front of the sea in the summer it's lovely um oh wait anytime a year it's lovely it's just flat i think that's why i like it because it's flat but it's long and you can walk up and down and people have bicycles here and it's just a little bit different from positano yeah very different is no I'll tell you the beach here is much bigger than Positano we've just walked down halfway and look at how big it is in front of me much much bigger with this river that runs in between and this runs right down the middle of the high street. Carlo has now made friends and we are trying to get back to the car before we get a ticket on the car but you know he's like won't stop talking. And it's another beautiful sunny day in Positano it hasn't been like this all week yesterday was quite windy and blustery and shady but yeah this is a lovely day so we've come down to the beach for a walk. Do you want to say something? Yes. I had a lot to say but now I'm all lost. Ok, we'll think about it. Ok, give me a bit of time to think about what I was going to say 5 minutes ago that now I've forgotten. We came on to the Scogliera because we thought we would sit down and have a chat with you Carlo's got a few things he wanted to talk about but the waves are actually quite noisy so I think we're gonna have to move from here and go somewhere else probably somewhere just a little bit up further at the back of the beach would probably be easier. Okay I think we have found somewhere quieter there's a little bench under this tree up here. A lot of people are very curious to know what are you planning on doing now that you have finished working in the cemetery? A lot of people are using the word retired but you're not retired you're just changing careers right? Yeah yeah it's true I have a new job I want to try to talk in English but in this moment I'm completely blank I don't have words in English and prefer tell this in Italian. This thing is related to tourism I will work for people who have a B&B so I have to do maintenance I have to welcome people I have to do what is necessary to do for a B&B but the owners don't want an advertisement on YouTube so I can't show you where I will work I on the other hand I'm going to continue on as I always have done I've got quite a few makeup bookings this summer if you've recently joined here you might not even know that I'm actually a professional makeup artist I have been for about 26 years now and the last couple of years obviously due to Covid there's hardly been any weddings here it started to pick up this summer if everything goes smoothly and I've got about 30 bookings mostly in Positano I'm tending to concentrate more in Positano whereas before I would work all along the Amalfi coast and now I've decided I'm concentrating mainly on Positano just because of the traffic situation in the summer it's not worth my while spending three three and a half hours just to get to work and back for a couple of people so I'm going to be mainly concentrating in this area here I will be making videos as well when I can take you to work with me I will so you can see the villas and the hotels that I work in if that's possible we're not going to become travel vloggers I think with us going away to England for 35 days people were starting to worry that we'd become travel vloggers but no that was me going home to visit my father as I do every two years and I deserve a break and I deserve to be with my family so I'm going to do that every two years and every now and again of course we'll have our four-day trip to Ischia in the summer and a couple of little trips away but nothing major we're not going to buy a camper van or anything like that it's hard enough to park a car in Positano let alone a camper van no it's definitely not us if we want a camper van we've already made a deal we will borrow Sara and Luca's camper van and they can come and stay in our house in Positano if they want to and we'll do an exchange with them which might be a bit hard with a baby on the way not mine this let's get that clear so everything will carry on as it always has I don't feel like I'm any of that oh also what I wanted to mention was that I am also doing a blog again I used to be a blogger way back in 2006 onwards some of you actually remember that which is quite scary because that's 16 years ago but I was missing my blog so I decided to resurrect it and I'm going to be doing that on Patreon so I'm going to start using my Patreon account as a blog so there'll be weekly blog posts sometimes maybe more sometimes maybe less but there'll be definitely a lot more happening on Patreon in the future I'm putting together also a book which is going to be full recipes lots of short stories and lots and lots of lovely photos I've been working on that for a few months now I wanted it to be out by Christmas but then I decided I could make it better so I've held off and I'm adding a lot more to it and the other thing I'm doing is oh the book that I wrote the fiction book that I wrote is currently being made into an e-book so hopefully that will be available at some point soon so that's all keeping me very very busy anyway no there's just no time for anything no days off no time off at all people keep asking me if I've watched Emily in Paris who's got time for watching tv I don't I don't even know how to turn the tv on but I literally don't have time for that at all anyhow we're gonna carry on with our walk