Season of Love, Family, and Disappointments

[For other pictures accompanying this post, go to the
December-January Pictures site.]

It's the day of December 15th, and I have just finished my last final, a biology final about evolution that I overslept to and arrived 10 minutes late at, and all the important packing had been done. Denise, Kristin Dunn's older sister, called me and told me that she'd pick me up outside of Solberg 15 minutes later. Kristin had, since they were going down to Omaha, Nebraska anyways, offered to take me there, so that I could fly cheaply to Phoenix and not have to get on a nasty bus for 24 hours. However, due to a family crisis she couldn't join us on the trip, and I was taken by Denise instead. From Omaha to Phoenix, from Phoenix to hotel, from hotel to bus station, and nearly missing bus due to hotel shuttle driver incompetence.

Anyways, I arrived in Lakeside after 4 hours in a van, and there we spent the next few days decorating the house with lights, having Norwegian style rice porridge, and going to King Kong (great, BTW). I left their house with Ren on Monday the 19th, down to Phoenix, and we went shopping Christmas gifts and to Applebee's before I boarded the plane. It was a long, but nevertheless worthwhile trip, seeing as the anticipation made the greeting from a crying mom and enthusiastic brother and grandmother so much better.

The following days and weeks I would come to spend a lot of time with my brother. The first day however, I slept until 6pm and loved every second of it, even though I had been placed on a couch since my bed had been taken out and the room given to Thomas (mi hermano). The second day, December 22nd, I wrapped the Christmas present I had gotten for my (best?!) friend Thomas, and my brother and I made our way to his apartment. There was no one opening the door, despite his car being parked outside, and we decided he should get the present no matter if he wanted it or not. We flung it over the railing to his balcony, and left to go home.

On the 23rd we didn't really do anything, but it was totally chillaxing just hanging out with my brother and his recently acquired girlfriend. I secretly validated, as is my job as older brother, her positive and negative sides, and in the end came to the conclusion that she was worth his time (it should be noted that my personal validations are pretty darn tough, possibly tougher than the maternal one, so 'worth his time' is actually not an all that bad result). We had (my second time) rice porridge, this time on the correct day, and Thomas ended up getting the almond and thus the marzipan pig. I think this was about the day when I met Julie again for the first time, and she took me to Kirkeristen, where I bought her a coffee and we talked for about an hour. It was nice to finally talk to a friend from home again, someone from the Oslo life I lived only six months ago, and someone who actually cared how I'd been.

Christmas Eve. It's hopefully redundant by now, seeing as I've covered two Christmas celebrations on this blog already, but I'll say it again; this is Norway's official Christmas celebration. We don't, like the US, celebrate Christmas day at all. We woke up early enough, 11am, and made our way to the cemetery where we visited the spots where my grandmother's buried, and placed a nice wreath and a candle by her tombstone. Then we drove out to my other grandmother's house, and after getting somewhat lost we finally arrived around 5pm.

After some waiting we had dinner, pork ribs, various sausages, potatoes, gravy, meat patties and so on. After a long, but nevertheless unproductive gift exchange with my brother and I doing the job of the tired 11 year old Santa Claus, we basically drove back home and decorated the Christmas tree (which is usually done the preceding day). Merry Christmas!

Christmas day. I woke up around 2-ish, and by then my mom had cleared the table of the various Christmas breakfast items. I still got it brought out to me, with boiled eggs and the whole whoop-de-doo, and the day after this turned out to be quite uneventful. I hanged out with my brother, my mom went off to some friends, and we stayed up to like 6-7am the next three days. Somehow it seems like I always do that, when I can anyways, turn the day around so that I'm awake when everyone else sleeps, and like it's somehow more natural to me.

The various days between Christmas and Newyears, in Norwegian called 'romjul', were very chill days as well. I went out to see a movie with my friends one day, "Broken Flowers" with Bill Murray, which was nice but had a puzzling, unsettled and sudden end. The next day we went out to a bar and talked for a few hours, and met up with some other friends, checked in on their lives if you will.

Then, on December 30th, I went on the plane to Trondheim, where my dad and his fiancee lives, and he met me at the airport. On Newyears Eve we went to a friend of theirs, and had Chateau Briand for dinner. Then we went back home to his place for the panoramic view of the enormous fireworks display sent up by almost every single resident of the city, including us. It was beautiful! Then, when the guests went home, my dad and I sat up until 8am talking, and then I called my AZ family on their New Years minute to talk to them all for 40 minutes.

The nest few days I spent in Trondheim, and we had turkey on January 1st, and various good dinners the next days, and then on the 2nd we went to see his recently bought cabin only 10 minutes from his house, in the woods. It was all great fun, and then he wanted me to stay 2 more days and rebooked my ticket. I got back to Oslo on the 4th, and spent that day with my brother again.

On the 5th, after an early doctor's visit, I met up with Julie at 3 o'clock. We went to a pizza restaurant, actually in the company she works for, and had a great pizza there. It had both a (supposedly) hot pepper half, called "Brennheit", and an even hotter Thai part which was really great with salsa and a greek dressing, called "Thai Summer". From there we went to her favorite place to hang out nowadays, "Green Chili", where we basically stayed for 6-7 hours just exhausting their coffee list (including Vietnamese Waiting Coffee) and having a great cake (and not to mention getting a sugar high from an overdose of brown sugar). It was great fun catching up with Jules again, time tends to fly whenever we catch up like that, and it was good to see that time doesn't play such an important part in all people's relationships.

The 6th would become another interesting day. Thomas, mi hermano, my brotha, and I, went down to the Postal Office Headquarters to get him a job. He did, of course, go in to their receptionist and ask if they knew "how to get a job". He should have added "around here", but he didn't, and was referred to some job agency on the other side of town. By then he was to embarrassed to go in again, and we went to McD's and got a burger. Then we met up with Julie, whom we went with to one of her restaurants to pick up a discount PS2 game I was going to give Thomas for Christmas. Then we went to Green Chili, had a coke, and went to a kebab place and got a burning hot kebab. It turned out better, but at first it burned our tongues off.

Later that night I got the brilliant idea to get on the subway to Thomas, my best (?!?!?!) friend, to see what the frickin' heck was wrong with him. The past six months I've actually, like normal people do, tried to call him and talk to him from the US. And every time he hears my voice, after his "Hey, it's Thomas", he actually hangs up! As ridiculous and childish as it may sound from a guy who's almost 20 years old, that's what he's actually done every one of the like 30 times I've called him. And when he even did it while I was in the same city as him, and after giving him a Christmas gift and message on his cell phone, I decided to go down there. Not that it clarified everything, because the guy didn't open the door at all, even though it was a weekday. Angry, yes I was, but not as much as I am disappointed. What a way to suddenly turn around and crash a 9 year old friendship! The mystery of it all, though, bugs me the most, I have no clue as to what might be going through his mind, and I have no idea why he would just suddenly shut me so completely out of his life. People grow at different paces, I guess, and growing apart isn't all that unusual, but a notice would be good anyways. Or an explanation. Right now I'd take anything.

The dreaded 7th. My day of departure. My mom said her goodbyes, and my brother walked me to the bus station. We also said our goodbyes, and I got on the bus. Suddenly an inexplicable sadness, a profound sadness got a hold of me, and I couldn't seem to shake it. This time I wasn't running to something, it seemed, I was more like I was leaving something behind. It hurt, inexplicably, and I understood that this might have been the first time I actually felt like the things I was leaving behind weren't all that outweighed by what I was leaving for, and a doubt that still persists protruded my mind.

The flight went fine, I did however manage to oversleep and miss my bus to Sioux Falls from Minneapolis on Sunday, so that I had to stay for an additional day. I got to see the Mall of America, the biggest mall in the US, as well as the movie "Wolf Creek", which I watched as the only person in a big movie theatre. I got back to Sioux Falls okay, and since then I've been looking for internships at hospitals, since my classes don't start until February 7th. I was basically kicked out of the religion class I was in, seeing as I missed 4 days which constitutes about 3-4 weeks of normal classes, so that's why I'm suddenly class-less. I'm optimistic about the future, I'm looking into transferring to Hawai'i Pacific University this fall, so life has the capacity of being good/better again. I trust in my own capacity of getting it right somehow, anyhow, and then hopefully all the pieces of the puzzle will fit again. And I can enjoy the whole picture.

Labels: Pictures

posted by CK @ 04:34