God Jul !

“So…when are you flying back?” Is a frequently asked question this last week. Not because all the Swedes want me gone (at least as far as I know), but because they are all expecting that we Dutchies will fly back to our ‘warm’ country in the south. When I tell them that we are actually staying here, they all look at me with big eyes full of surprise. Today I even got invited by a lady from the supermarket to celebrate Christmas at her place together with her kids and family. They all feel so sorry for us that we won’t be spending Christmas together with our family. And they claim that, because everybody is leaving, there is nothing to do in the city. Well I guess they are all wrong because I’m heading towards to a really nice week!

Tonight around midnight Derya will arrive – my first visitor in Stockholm! All the other Dutchies are also having persons coming over so tomorrow night we’ll be having a Christmas dinner together, 10 persons in total. We got a huge kitchen for ourselves – since the corridors are, apart from some Chinese, deserted - we got silver, red and green paper to decorate the table, we got a couple of Christmas stars, I just downloaded 200 Christmas songs, we got glittery things to decorate the kitchen and... We got a 15 cm high Christmas tree!

The first day of Christmas, I will leave Stockholm actually. At 6 ‘o clock I will get, hopefully together with Derya (anybody knows a good argument to convince a person, afraid of long boat trips, to step on board?!), on a huge cruise ship. Destination: Tallinn, Estonia! We will arrive there the next morning around 10 and take the boat back that same day at night. Curious how the trip will be, since it is known for all the drunk persons. We’ll be floating in between two countries for a quiet a long time, so there is a lot of time to enjoy the tax free drinking…

Thus hopefully I will survive the 5 course Christmas dinner and the two times 16 hour boat trip! But since it will take a while before I can write something on my blog again, I wish you all a very merry merry Christmas! Let’s see who beats who first, because I heard the temperatures in the south are actually not that warm as the Swedes are thinking. Will it be snowing in Holland or in Sweden first?

God Jul!

Yoline