Most Amazing Christmas Ever: Part 1

Alright everybody, first off I want to start with an apology (again) and an explanation. After finishing up four amazing months in Lisbon with some amazing people, I jumped on a plane to head to the far north of Europe. Destination: Skage, Norway via Oslo Trondheim & Steinkjer where we would meet Sig and her family. To give you an idea, it is roughly at the same latitude as Fairbanks, Alaska. Best part, my parents and my sister were coming to. In fact, we were taking the same plane from Oslo to Trondheim. Well, for me it was a bit of a rush. I landed in Oslo with fifty minutes to collect my baggage, re-check it, go back through security and hopefully make my flight. This entire trip, I have not felt homesick until roughly the moment I was completely through security and walking towards the gate where I knew my family was waiting. That’s when Megan screamed and came running to hit me like a ton of bricks :)

We didn’t get much time to talk until we were waiting for a train to take us to Steinkjer. We had to wait, so what else are you supposed to do…

Norway wasn’t much of a culture shock for me since I had already been, but it was fun watching the things dad found amusing…

Yep, fish eggs from a tube. What was strange was the number of sunlit hours of the day. This was taken at 2:30 in the afternoon as the sun is setting after coming up only four hours earlier…

Did I mention that there is a lot of snow…

Actually, no one worries at all about the light situation considering that with all the snow on the ground and a full moon it is actually really bright. So, we went out to have some fun with a campfire, in -15 weather.

We had some help from other sources as well…

All was well though. It was as though our two families had known each other for ages…

Big thing for us was experiencing the traditional Norwegian food that comes with Christmas at our Norwegian family’s home. One of which is Lutefisk. Look it up, if you are disgusted by what it sounds like, you should be…unless you have an expert fixing it like we did…

But just so you know, before you go digging into some lutefisk, there is another prerequisite…

Look that one up too. Akevit is what it is called. It is wonderful! There are also several varieties for varying purposes during Christmas :) Here is the full meal…

Then it was off to decorate the tree…

It was a wonderful couple of days, but the holiday was far from over.