friendship

Bucharest

We´re back in Bucharest and it´s great! 😉 Haven´t been on a holiday since last year, except for a short 3 days´ break in Vienna at the beginning of January. In addition to that, Romania is really nice this time of the year- the accacia trees are in bloom, the temperature is warm, but not steamy and everything is green.

We got here on Wednesday about midnight, my brother and sister-in-law picked us up at the airport and we had some drinks at our auntie´s place where we´re staying this time. They´d bought some corn puffs and my mother had made some roast potatoes and chicken, so we had a late night dinner, too.

Yesterday we woke up late- it had poured all morning and the air was fresh, but warm, just the way I like it. 😉 We had coffee and breakfast at Origo, where we´re regulars when in town. They have the best coffee ever. Afterwards we walked for a bit and grabbed a cab to my brother´s place to catch up with mom and babysit our niece while she was going to the dentist.
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A night out at Tøyen Bodega

Yesterday we were supposed to entertain some friends, but I got called away for work and then, as a last minute thing, they cancelled. I didn´t feel like cooking anymore, especially since I´d caught a cold in the meantime, so I suggested we try our local tapas place instead. 😉

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Weekend

Although we´re celebrating orthodox Easter this weekend, the Norwegian Easter break is over and our friends are back from Nice. So we got together over dinner and wine at our place to start the weekend right. Sammy was very happy to see them both and was all over the place with joy! 😉 And so were we! They came with stories of the Mediterranean, of 20 degrees in the shade and of antique markets. We have to go there together!
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Dinner Party

We´ve had a couple of tough weeks, a friend of ours passed away and it´s been a hard reminder that you can never take things for granted in life. On top of that we´ve been down with a flu and working the whole time, too. For two weeks now I´ve barely had any taste and smell, not to mention my runny eyes and nose. So what  better way to celebrate a partial come back than inviting a couple of good friends for dinner?

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Sad weekend

A friend of ours is drawing his last breath on a hospital bed, so the last couple of days have been nothing but sad. We´re still hoping for a miracle and he doesn´t want to let go, either, so the whole situation is so incredibly tragic, I don´t know what to do with myself. :-/ It´s scary how frail this life of ours is, one day we´re here and the next one it´s like we´ve never even existed. I know it sounds like a cliché, but I run out of words.

I have a terrible cold and I´ve been feeling sorry for myself all day. I haven´t done anything else but watch Netflix, take my paracetamols and blow my nose. And feel sad. Tomorrow I´ll be in court all day and I should have done so much this weekend, it´s crazy. I´m having trouble reconciling the everyday life with the bigger order of things, right now. Do you feel that, sometimes?

Anyways. V is cooking fish and I´m being such a lazy sick person. The type with needs and cravings and a short temper. Hoping that a new week will somehow make the sorrow smaller, although it´s hard to see how.

I did do a couple of nice things today, though: I called my mom and my grandma to congratulate them on Women´s Day. In Romania 8th of March is also Mothers´Day, so we usually make a big thing out of it. And they were pleased, especially when I told them V was making pancakes for breakfast. 😉 Wish I had more energy to mark the day somehow, in Norway people talk about equality and human rights whereas in Romania we usually throw ourselves a party. Haha! So different! Especially since sexism is on an all time high back home…

I did hear about this cute Portuguese pastry place though and invited a couple of girlfriends for a vanilla crust and a cup of coffee there on Tuesday afternoon. At least we have an excuse to see each other. Can´t wait! Does that make me shallow? :-/

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Sunday thoughts

Finally Sunday! So good to be able to breathe and know you have no plans other than coffee with friends. I have an interpreting colleague visiting and after speaking my mother tongue for three days in a row, I´m starting to be fluent again! 😉 haha! Today I´ve been thinking a lot about identity and belonging. In fact, we discussed it at length over coffee and waffles at our friends´ place. Whether an immigrant feels most allegiance with the mother country or the country of residence has been a much disputed subject in the media, too. How the second generation immigrant defines herself is another interesting topic. For my part, I feel I belong nowhere in particular, but that I could live in pretty many places. I´ve lived 20 years in Romania and 15 in Norway. Romania is the country of my childhood and my adolescent dreams, while Norway is the place where I started reasoning, found love and matured. Whenever I travel back to Romania I say I´m going home and when I leave for Norway I say I´m going back home. Still I feel a bit out-of-place in both environments. And I get “Where are you from?” quite often. My line of work is a dog eats dog world. I´ve run my own race and worked myself nearly to death the first three years and now I´m exhausted and tired of fighting. It´s slowly getting better, partly because I´m one of 7 certified interpreters in the country (Romanian-Norwegian) and partly because I´ve chosen to surround myself with the few colleagues I like. Back in the day, when I used to work in a bank, I could count on one hand the people I had something in common with. Now I can count them on two. 😉 I think it must be me, I´ve always felt like an outsider. I guess on a certain level I couldn´t be bothered with “the little man´s stuff”, however harsh that sounds. Hoping for more sense of belonging in the coming days, now that the first sign of spring is here. 😉 Tell me about your experiences in connection with the subject, if you have any! 😉 Meanwhile, enjoy my pictures! 😉

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Glitzing my way to 2015

Yes please, 2015 couldn´t come soon enough! 🙂 We´re heading over to a friend´s place, for dinner and a show!;-) I´ll put on my best dress (haven´t decided on which, yet) and my Stella McCartney heels. 😉 This one is from last year.

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Hiking with Sammy

You´re probably fed up with my baby boy by now. Well, that´s too bad! `Cause I love him so much I don´t care to write of nothing else today. 😉 We went on a small hiking trip, you see, so I need to brag a bit about it, since I´m such a lazy wanna-be diva on a regular basis. 😉 haha! I had a coffee date with a good friend of mine I don´t get to see as often as I´d like to, so I suggested we should go for a walk in the forrest and get our coffee on the top of the hill, at Frognerseteren, an imposing café where you would meet you grandma for lunch a while ago, but that´s managed the transition between tradition and innovation well. So we talked and Sam ran and bathed and chewed on sticks and ran some more, we lost our way and we found it again and in the end we were on top of the hill savoring a cup of coffee with cream porridge (because I´m halfway back on my low-carb diet and I don´t want to turn into a heath freak!).

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Salvage the Bones

If you only read one book this summer, make it Jesmyn Ward´s “Salvage the Bones”! What a gripping, heart-breaking novel! I loved it from the very first sentence and didn´t want to go to bed before finding out what happens to the characters. It´s set in the New Orleans area in the wake of the Katrina hurricane and it depicts the life of African American teenage siblings, their poverty ridden days due to their alcoholic father who stills mourns their long-dead mother. It´s a book on friendship, forgiveness and family values. It´s a book on redemption and love. You HAVE TO read it! And have some prosecco while you´re at it!;-)