We bought a new apartment!!!

We are just soo excited, I just can't believe it myself...

It was really excited. It was our 4th apartment that we went to see, and the first one that we thought that "here can we live". It is 52 m^2 and is located at Sinsen. So it is really big, pretty central and looked just amazing. We never thought that we would get it, but we just decided to throw everything in on our first try and see how it would go....and our strategy worked..we got it:) We payed 1.750 000 NOK, so it was not too bad..






See more of the apartment here.

New Website!

I am now putting all my pictures and my website away from the Universities servers, since I realized that I probably won't work there forever...I should start now. I have put my website on Googlepages, here, and my pictures on Picasa, here.

New Years

We spent New years eve in Holland with Georg's family and friends. Georg had not seen them since this summer, so he was looking forward to spending some time with them. We always have a nice time there, relaxing and catching up. This time was no different. On New Years eve we started with dinner with his family. I cooked Pinnekjøtt, our traditional New Years Eve food that I can`t go without, and Annamarie and Ate made Tapas.

Before we had dinner we had to go through a special Dutch New Years Eve tradition. Every year, when it`s dark, kids go around town picking things up in peoples gardens and brings it to someone else's garden (preferably very far away). Georg told me that they used to do this a lot, and it is a very loved tradition among kids. This meant that we had to clean up the garden. We had to remove everything that remotely could be moved or taken away. It was one big process, and the shed was pretty full afterwards:) It was quite funny, I have to admit.....:) Georg`s parents had a big and heavy table that they had not been able to get rid of for quite some time, and we thought that this could be the right time to set this outside. Unfortunately, they didn`t bring it with them. Probably because it was so heavy. But it was worth a shot:) When it got dark we could see kids running around outside the windows, and they got very terrified when they saw you.




After a very nice dinner we went to the apartment of the girlfriend of Sjoerd (Georg`s friend that visited us in Japan.) We had a great time there drinking lots of (fake) champagne and catching up with each others life's. We spent the night crashing on Laurens coach, where we had our sleeping bags and some clothes. I had such a hang over the next day...uff! But it was a great New Years...

More pictures from Holland here.

Hiroshima

Before we left Japan, we also had a weekend in Hiroshima with Milica and Sasaki-san. It was a very nice trip and we learned a lot about Japan`s history after the war. Georg has written more about this.



I also put out a lot of pictures here.

Christmas

We spent Christmas with my family in Larvik. After a very long day traveling from Japan and with an eight-hour jet lag, we mostly spent our days sleeping, watching TV (soo nice to watch Norwegian TV for a change), taking small walks, do traditional Christmas things and play with Bastian. It was very relaxing, just what we needed.



It also was the first Christmas Georg and I spent together, so it was nice showing him all of our silly traditions. We had a wonderful Christmas, even though even Norway didn't have any snow...

More pictures from Larvik here.

Leaving Japan

We were leaving Japan the 21st of December, and we had to do as much as possible before that. This consisted of shopping a lot... in particular for Christmas presents :) , eating a lot of sushi (which I now love by the way... who would have known) and try the teriyaki burger at Mac Donalds, and have several goodbye gatherings.

We had a great last night out with the gang, eating yakitori, and then we went to our local karaoke place. It was a lot of fun. At work we had one Christmas party with the ICYS, with the small NIMS group we had a Christmas/Annett is leaving-party. At the NIMS party I served them brown goat cheese. To my surprise, and contrary to my intentions, some people actually liked it.

My NIMS group

It was quite sad to leave Japan. We have gotten very good friends there, and really felt at home there now. But we also looked a lot forward to see our friend and family back in Norway.

The trip home was horrible...! We were at Narita airport 2.5 hours before our plane would leave, but our queue was enormous nevertheless. It turned out that all planes to and from London was either canceled or delayed. Back then we didn`t know exactly how bad it was (mum had called British Airways and it turned out that first plane to Oslo would have been on the 24th...!), but were overjoyed when they proposed that they could put us on a plane to Paris, and then catch a flight to Oslo.

In Paris (as probably all European airports that had flights to London) it was CHAOS! That in addition to the several terminals on different locations made it very difficult to find anything. You see, we had to check out and then check in again at another terminal (we didn`t know where) and travel with another airline (we didn`t know which). But we found everything in time.

To make things worse, we had to get in touch with my family. They would pick us up at Gardermoen. My phone didn`t have any battery left (I didn`t check... not used to having a phone anymore) and I didn`t remember any numbers whatsoever. Luckily Georg had written down my dad`s number in his wallet, and we were ready to call when we got to Paris. We had no euro's, so we were hoping that we could either exchange some money, have time to take out some or pay with visa. Because of the chaos, we didn`t have time to take out money, there was no place to exchange money and the visa didn't seem to work on the phones. In a desperate attempt to try all phones that had this visa thing, we found one and we got through to my dad...!

It all ended well. But we were VERY tired after about 30 hours of traveling... Georg had a small infection under his eyes that over the course of 30 hours had gone from bad to worse, making him look as a drug addict at the best... We soo didn`t want to travel for a while now. We'll just stay in one place for a while....hehe...like that is gonna happen:)

More pictures here.