friends

It´s officially Christmas

Although I didn´t work a day last week and only a couple of hours this morning, today is my first official holiday. I can finally unwind, do the rest of the preparations and start enjoying myself. Vuong bought the tree and set it up yesterday, we were able to find one of the decoration boxes (out of two), I managed to make some cookies and will bake some more today. I also bought the last gifts and will make some chutney and sugar coated almonds as go-to gifts. 😉

It snowed a tiny bit yesterday and although it turned the sidewalks slippery, it also means the ground is not entirely bare. 😉 White Christmas this year, too! A couple of trips to the woods with Sam are mandatory and so is ice-skating in the city center, if it´s open for renting skates.

Yesterday we celebrated Christmas with our friends Franck and Marion and his kids. We had a lavish brunch of yummy pancakes, scrambled eggs, ham and all the cheese and marmalades you could think of, followed by the gift-opening session where Sam gets to tear the paper once the wrapping comes off. 😉 It was a lot of fun and we felt like being with our second family. What else would you call very good friends, if not family?:-) On our way back, we had a stroll in the Sankthanshaugen park with Sam and it was delightful! All the pretty lights, the snow and the majestic buildings, plus people playing with their children and dogs in the snow..

In the evening I saw “Boyhood” with a friend at the cinema. What a fantastic movie! I´ll write a review soon, but you need to see it if you have the chance! Afterwards we had a chat over a couple of beers and a yummy pizza at Hell´s Kitchen, absolutely recommended.;-)

I hope you enjoy my pictures and that they bring you in the mood for Christmas. 😉

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Monday off

I´m starting to get old- if I´m  too active in the weekends, I need an extra day off. 😉 This weekend was particularly rough: drinks and dinner with an awesome couple from Australia on Friday evening, Christmas market with Sammy and friends, dinner at friends´house later on and an unplanned party at our house and that was just Saturday. Yesterday we had pancake breakfast with our other friends who stayed the night, did some washing up afterwards and saw the Hobbit at the cinema in the afternoon. So today I was dead: When the alarm rang I thought it must be Sunday morning! Fortunately there isn´t lots to do at work this time of the year, so I was able to cut myself some slack and take Sammy to the woods. 😉 It´s been so dark lately anyway and I haven´t felt like getting out of the house, so the streak of sunshine I could spot made me feel besides myself with joy! And because we were in luck, we got a friend to meet us at Frogneseteren, the restaurant on top of the mountain. I and Sammy took the subway half the way and walked the rest. I had cream porridge and Christmas soda, my friend had a Danish and we both walked back with our lattes. 😉 I fell on the ice and almost chipped the camera, but the latte only spilled a bit. 😉 haha! Enjoy the pictures!

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A weekend somewhere with snow and mulled wine

We´re talking about a weekend away from home now that Christmas is around the corner, besides we´re used to changing the scenery once a month and the weather has been appalling in November. I just miss the snow and the sun so much! I want a couple of days where I eat when I´m hungry, take Sammy for long walks in the woods, go for a massage or a facial at the hotel spa and maybe learn how to ski, while I´m at it. 😉

Norway is amazing in the winter, but everything is so pricy that you end up spending 1000 Euros during a weekend. Nevertheless I feel we need some boost before Christmas and our family gathering in Vienna is not before mid January, so I can´t wait that long.

So while waiting for a couple of friends to give us the green light for either Norefjell or Geilo, I´m hoping I can stay as stylish as this gal from mytheresa! 😉 Take a look!

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Copenhagen part I

We arrived on Thursday at around 9 pm at our friends´ amazing apartment in Østerbro and were welcome with bubbles, Danish roast beef, sesame broccoli salad, remulade (a sort of mayo with pickles inside), to mention some of the goodies. We chatted and toasted and pet their dog until we girls collapsed at around 1, but the guys carried on until 4 am. There was the joy of seeing each other again, all those nooks in the apartment that had to be discovered, you name it.

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Monday again

This weekend has been a bit overshadowed by the fact that I´m working out of town this week. Not only is it an ugly trial, but I´m living in a small town with literally nothing to do after hours. I was hoping to do a bit of reading, but taking my laptop with me was uninspired, there´s so much on the mighty internet more alluring than Shishkin. I really don´t like Shishkin, the way I don´t like many of the contemporary writers that everybody else is so crazy about! Makes me wonder if there´s something wrong with me. I just don´t buy anything beyond reason, call me sad, but I really don´t. I need people to stick to whatever normal people do and feel and books to depict just that. Surreal is no good in my book. Does it make sense?

Anyway. This weekend was uneventful, but cosy, we had lovely weather and took our mandatory trip to the woods with a happy Sam, made some good food and watched a lot of Netflix. On Sunday it was time to be urban, take Sammy to the Botanical garden and have coffee with friends in lively Grunnerløkka. He´s such a sociable soul, he loves being outside with us and our friends, even if that only means sitting beside us and barking at the passing dogs. 😉

Last night I arrived at my hotel at 11:30 pm, so there was no time for sightseeing. Today was a splendid day, the court room was spacious and had thousands of windows overlooking the sun and I literally died in my cashmere sweater in our little interpreting box! (but it was from Paris!!) No time for much sightseeing today either, although I did spot the city center walking back to the hotel. By the time I´d lunched on a nice sunny terrace, all the shops were closed. The whole town seemed to have gone to sleep, it was so depressing I went in for a nap myself. It seems I should be done here by Wednesday, so I might as well try to enjoy tomorrow as much as I can. Maybe I´ll get a haircut and a massage. Or maybe I´ll just buy a sandwich and soak up the sun. 😉

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Boeuf Bourguignon

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I made this dish today for the first time and it was such a success! The recipe is from a national Norwegian newspaper called Aftenposten, I only made minor changes. I served it with bread and white wine. (although French baguettes and red wine is probably better ;-))

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Autumn

This week has been good to me so far and it´s nearly weekend already! I tried to eat healthy, worked just enough hours, took Sammy for a long walk in the woods on Monday, worked out with my Personal Trainer yesterday and went to bed early. And I started feeling a bit better. Last week´s tension had taken its toll on me and left me without any energy. And exhaustion is just one step away from depression, so I try not to end up there again.

Today I´ve taken it slowly, went for a long walk with Sam, spent some time in bed with coffee and Instagram and now I´m about to start billing for a couple of hours. Later on I´m having lunch with a friend, then work for a couple of hours more and this evening we´re entertaining guests for dinner. 🙂 I´m not sure what to cook, I thought maybe I should give Boeuf bourguignon a try. I have plenty of time to wait for it cook to perfection, the only question is if I feel like going to the Wine Monopoly to buy the wine.

I´ve also started therapy. I´ve been dreading the idea for so long I knew I needed to jump into it or else I´d never do it. It´s very emotionally draining, but it triggers a lot of mental activities that help you focus. I believe everybody holds the cure within oneself, it´s just that when life seems to be too demanding, one cannot sort out one´s priorities any more. Enough about that. It costs a fortune, if one were waiting in the health line, one might as well be dead until it´s finally one´s turn.

Can´t wait for the weekend to come! We´re going to a party on Saturday and to a birthday picnic on Sunday. 🙂 I need to find the perfect dress (in my wardrobe) and get the manicure to go with! Until then, I leave you with some pictures from this week´s activities. I hope you have a great one! xxx, Alina

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Belgrade

Missed me, yet?! I´ve been away for some time now and I apologize. I´ve been going through a sort of a 30 years´old crisis, working too much, sleeping too little and questioning my priorities. That´s no joke, I tell you! Luckily, all that´s gone now! I´m on a fabulous holiday in Belgrade with my husband, staying at a 5 stars hotel, eating our way through Serbian and international cuisine and discovering whatever this surprising mix of East and West has to offer us. We came here to attend the wedding of some friends of ours, a lovely Serbian-American couple and it was such a show! For now I´ll let the pictures talk for themselves, details when I get back home, on Thursday!

Old building in the old part of Belgrade

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Friends

Friends make your life worthwhile. I´ve never had tons of them, but I had a couple of close friends in school up until I moved to Bucharest to study languages, 15 years ago. Quite on the sociable side, it has always been easy to find a person to chat with over a coffee or two. A close friend however is not something you stumble upon at any street corner. It took me in fact years of either trying too hard or giving up too easily on new friendships to find the right people. For ages, I used to think that I had no close friends anymore. That they somehow belonged to a closed chapter of my life and that the new ones were more or less acquaintances. People to have a beer and mingle at parties with. Somebody to invite over for dinner from time to time.

Two years ago I worked in Bergen for 3 months, so I would only come home in the weekends. It was a strange experience, a good one in many ways. I hardly had time for my husband, my pets and my closest friends and that´s when I discovered I did have some close friends, whom I really missed while away. Little by little I gave up on friendships that mostly stole my time and my focus away from things that matter.

I´ve been a little under the weather for the last couple  of days and I had to ask my friends for practical help. It was so difficult to ask and yet they offered their help without even blinking! Today things are starting to  look up. I came home to find a card from Paris sent by my best friend friend from high school. It´s amazing how the little things in life are the ones that count the most!

It just felt right to write down a couple of lines paying homage to friendship. Because it´s so precious. And because without it, you stand alone.

Sunday mood

I´ve had another exhausting weekend, but I´m starting to come to my senses today. With only two weeks left till my oral certifying exam, I attended an interpreting seminar both Friday and Saturday. Both dialogues and monologues had to be interpreted and I was in the same group with persons that had nothing to do there in the first place. Needless to say I wasn´t on my best behavior. It felt like high school all over again and that cost me a lot of energy, ´cause I´m dead beat now. So beat that I had to go back to sleep an hour after having woken up. I only managed to do something sensible now- put together a veggie soup. We´re having a couple of friends over and I´ll pick up where I left off yesterday with more dialogues and monologues and note-taking technique.

Saturday evening lifted my weekend spirits, we celebrated a friend of ours´40th anniversary. We had dinner at Smia, an  intimate eatery with great food. We had salmon for starters, reindeer for mains and a fancy brownie with ice-cream. And too much wine. The best thing about the dinner was nevertheless the welcome drink- calvados, apple juice and prosecco. Yum! I´ll be sure to try it at home next weekend!

A long, lazy day is coming to an end and I don´t feel like it. Tomorrow I´m flying to Stavanger to interpret in court on Tuesday. But first have dinner with a friend. And shop a little. Meanwhile I´m having some delicious noodles that my husband prepares to me now. 😉

Have a good week!

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