Şorici 2009

Just like last year, mum sent me sorici this year also . Now I can say I feel the winter holidays for real .

My Christmass Present

I have been good this year, at least Daniel thinks so .

Christmas with the Lindqvists

24th of December we had a typical Swedish Christmas at Daniel’s parents. We were 21 persons!!! big family and Daniel’s mother and father did all the preparations and cooking by themselves. I think they deserve a place in Guinness Book fo this .

The food was delicious, typical Swedish Christmas dishes, next to wine, beer, glögg, snaps and JulMust. JulMust is a soft drink like coke but with a special flavour and you can find it in the stores only during Christmas time or Easter. During this months almost no Swede buys Coca-Cola or other soft drinks. Most of the nonSwedes I know here don’t like JulMust and are surprised to see me drinking it, actually this year I craved for JulMust .

My favorite part of the evening was the adults presents exchange. Since we are so many and buying a gift for each other will result in all of us going bankrupt, few weeks before Christmas, Daniel’s mother puts everybody’s names on folded notes and we have to extract them from a hat. For me this year I had to buy a gift for Daniel’s father and Daniel had to buy a gift for his brother-in-law, Stefan. There is also a limit, the gift cannot cost more than 100 kr.

Then we have to write riddles in rimes, one for whom the present is from, one for what the present contains and the last one for to whom the present goes to. The rimes are funny as the presents themselves and we all have fun trying to guess the riddles.

Every Christmas, Daniel and his sisters and brother take a picture together, while somebody makes them laugh .

Here all the pictures:

http://picasaweb.google.com/crenguta02/GodJul#

Note:

If I would translate “Christmas with the Lindqvists” in Romanian, that would be “Craciun cu Crengutele de Tei” ) (lind = tei, qvist=crenguta)

Eddie Izzard in Stockholm with “Stripped”

Here all the pictures and below some short movies, irrelevant for the whole show which was great .

Just one inconvenient, the chairs at Hovet must be the most unconfortable chairs ever for a pregnant woman .

Eddie Izzard is in Malmö and tomorrow is coming to Stockholm

I was saying here in May that we bought tickets to Eddie Izzard’s stand up comedy show. Tomorrow is the big day .

Here are his last posts on Twitter:

Gooood morning …

It looks like I swallowed a ball ) .

Lucia

Today the Swedes celebrate Lucia , for me that means lussebullar (safron buns), which are very good, and glögg (red wine with spices) which I never even tasted since it’s alchool .

We also have a celebration at work, where children from a school come to us and sing for us. The girl elected as Lucia wears a crown  made of candles on her head, which I think it’s very difficult and dangerous as the candles are lit. The candles symbolize the fire that refused to take St. Lucia’s life when she was sentenced to be burned.

Here it is how it looked today …

… and I had about four of these.

I love this one :)

Somebody in Romania voted yesterday for Saint Nicolas as president

Celebrating Saint Nicolas in Sweden

In Sweden there is no special holiday for 6th of December, but two years ago I explained Daniel the tradition we have in Romania for Saint Nicolas day. Good thing I did that, because St Nicolas didn’t miss me today , but I almost forgot about him. I forgot to do my part of the job  and also to check my boots in the morning… but after Daniel reminded me, I went and checked my boots and found the surprise . For Daniel St Nicolas came a little bit later, I did not completly forget, just filling the shoes .

Baby ultrasound week 30

This is a picture of our baby taken 4 weeks ago, let’s see if you can understand it.

You have to take a step back and look at the picture, realize that the baby is big in week 30 so could not fit entirely in a picture taken from the ultrasound. Her head is the half right side of the picture, she has very big cheeks . Below I have explained the picture.

With red her eyes, green around her nose, with orange her big cheeks and yellow her mouth.