Christmaaaaaaaas!

I have been excited about Christmas for months now, and judging by the amount of Christmas decorations at ACL, it seems I am not the only one who's excited! My tolerance for tackiness is surprisingly high when it comes to Christmas.

My last weeks in Alex before the break included:

• a masquerade ball which turned out to be more like a regular club night
• an Armenian Christmas market and a visit to the citadel in Alexandria with my lovely language partner Tigu and her fiancé Morshedy
• a Christmas party at the ACL where we could hardly see anything of what was going on due to a camera man with a massive camera who was standing right in front of the stage
• a small birthday celebration for me and my flatmate Sara

They were very busy but quite enjoyable weeks. I only have pictures from my day with Tigu and Morshedy, though.

Tigu and me at the Armenian Christmas market

Morshedy and Tigu in front of the citadel

I have now been back in Norway for a week, and being home has felt very natural and very surreal at the same time. In one way it feels like I've never been away, except for the fact that they've switched around the lines of the underground a bit and changed the timetables (how dare they!). However, moving from one place to another so quickly, it sometimes feels like my mind hasn't quite caught up with my body yet (yes, I know, Elliot, avoiding this is one of the advantages of slow travel). I sometimes have to convince myself that this is real, as I especially in the beginning felt like I was just observing it all from a distance, in a dream.

There are some obvious differences between Alexandria and Oslo. The temperature is of course one: coming home to -8 degrees was a bit of a shock no matter how prepared I was for it. Another difference is that Alex is home to as many inhabitants as my whole country, and there is room for a certain improvement in organising for instance the traffic, so the streets of Oslo seem unbelievably calm and quiet in comparison. The chaos of Alex (not to mention Cairo) has at least prepared me well for Christmas shopping: whereas braving his way through frantic shoppers drove my dad crazy, I didn't find it that crowded at all.

Oslo's main street Karl Johan decorated for Christmas

Karl Johan

This is where I live!

After coming home, I've had time to meet up with family and friends, celebrate my beloved grandmother's 75th birthday (again, no pictures! It seems the paparazzi in me went on holiday a bit too early), remove a wisdom tooth (I could hardly open my mouth, which is quite inconvenient at Christmas), watch The Hobbit (which I've been excited about even longer than I've been excited about Christmas, and it didn't disappoint me! It was aaaaawesome!), and, of course, prepare for Christmas with my family. We have bought all Christmas presents, giftwrapped them nicely, made and decorated ginger snaps and started preparing for tomorrow's family dinner party in celebration of my birthday. We have not decorated our house and Christmas tree yet, but tradition dictates this has to be done on the evening of my birthday the 23rd of December, interrupted only by us watching "Grevinnen og Hovmesteren" ("Dinner for One") on TV, the short British film no Brit has ever heard about, and which only gets more hilarious as each year passes by and I start laughing even earlier in anticipation of the funny bits. Anyway, I think what I'm trying to say is that I'M READY FOR CHRISTMAS!

Decorated ginger snaps

For those of you who have not watched Grevinnen og Hovmesteren:

The pyramids!

Everyone from my flat went to Cairo this weekend. A lot of the time we were hanging out with Rachel's fiancé Ahmed and his friends, and some friends of Sara's. It was very nice, and especially when we visited the pyramids it proved good to have some Egyptian guys with us to keep the tourist touts at bay. That way we could focus on actually enjoying the sight instead of spending all our energy on turning down the services which were so vehemently offered to us.

This weekend I think I ticked a lot of the boxes on the checklist for "The ultimate Egyptian experience":

Seeing the pyramids in Giza: check
Crawling inside one of the pyramids, feeling like an awesome explorer even though there's pretty much nothing to see in there: check
Doing camel riding: check
Seeing the Great Sphinx of Giza, which has an oddly small head and enormous feet: check
Regretting that I didn't bring sun lotion with me in December: check
Doing Christmas shopping at Egypt's biggest mall, City Stars, instead of at Cairo's old souq Khan al-Khalili due to protests: check
Getting lost in City Stars: check
Getting lost in City Stars: check
Getting lost in City Stars: check
Getting sick of City Stars: check
Constantly being offered "great deals" by people I met 2 minutes before due to the strong and sincere friendship they feel for me: check
Drinking sugar cane juice: check
Being miiiiiildly freaked out by walking right in front of tanks while everyone else is treating it as the most natural thing in the world: check

Most of the pictures shouldn't need any further explanation this time!

City Stars

While some Egyptians are more bothersome than your average Norwegian or English person, others are way more helpful than what I'm used to. For instance, the guys we were hanging out with would carry my bags after I bought ten thousand Christmas presents, and when I tried moving my suitcase full of the aforementioned ten thousand presents on or off the train on our way home, someone would instantly rush over to help me. By contrast, when I left London last year carrying 50 kilos worth of luggage divided between two big suitcases and a big bag, no one would as much as move out of the way for me (in the end a man on crutches helped me getting all my luggage off the train - not even then did anyone else think to offer their help). Anyway, I guess there are two sides to the coin.

I get childisly excited about Christmas, and now that it is December I can finally let all my enthusiasm loose! I made a Christmas calendar for my whole flat - are you proud of me, mum? And today was the first Sunday of Advent, so I lit the first Advent candle! I think all I talk about nowadays is Christmas. Well, the countdown has officially begun!

My (attempt at a) Christmas calendar: one bag for each day, each containing four little packages with sweets!