Christmas Fun and Laughter
25Dec09
(posted by ellygrant)Merry Christmas faithful readers! If you are reading this on Boxing Day, then you are indeed dedicated, so thankyou!
We hope you all had a good day yesterday with lots of good times and little stress. We’re here in Romania with Jon, Margot and James Nairn and really enjoyed ourselves!
Here’s a short (yeah right) run down of our day:
8am: We wake up and turn on our laptops. Soon the apartment is filled with the joyful tune of ‘boo di doo boop’ as family in Australia – who were by that stage well and truly over-indulged – called us on skype to tell us all about how fun it is to have Christmas in summer and to ask if it snowed. It didn’t snow, but there’s still week old snow out there so we’re not complaining.
9-10am: A batch of chocolate filled croissants emerge from the oven and Team Jon and Stu go hard on the coffee making. Yummo!
11:30am-ish: The other Christmas orphans – Texan Dave and Canadian Andrea – arrive which means we can divvy up the presents and rip into them.
We’ve become severely disenchanted by the shopping in Haskovo, so I was impressed and delighted by how thoughtful the presents were. Of course, we are biased towards Romanian shopping! I love the orange spiral earrings Margot found for me, they’re so fun! We are also very taken by the cute little European-esque Santa ornament, he will definitely be treasured for the rest of our lives. With those and the beautiful candle set and big box of choccies we were really spoiled by them!
We in turn presented the Nairns with a ‘Snowed In Survival Pack’ which will aim (probably in vain) to get us socialising together and not on our computers if we do indeed get snowed in. The pack included the last bag of Humphrey-roasted coffee, Bulgarian wine, home-baked brownies and a 1000 piece puzzle of Sighişoara. Fun times ahead!
1pm: LUNCH!!! Jon and Margot created a wonderful lunch of roast chicken and veggies for us. It was probably the first Christmas where I appreciated hot food! They very thoughtfully made sure to include lots of root veggies (potato, carrot and parsnip) that we’ve sorely missed because of uranium avoidance. Dessert was homemade apple pie and custard with ice cream. I inadvertently started everyone off singing the Happy Birthday song with ‘Merry Christmas’ substituted in. Quite strange.
After lunch: More skyping. The non-Australians were shocked to hear that my brother Fred woke our parents up after midnight just to tell them I was on the phone. It was quite a foreign concept to them that we would treat our parents with such disrespect! The rest of us found it pretty funny and not at all unusual. We continued the introduction to Australian irreverence as we played a game called Dutch Blitz which involved Margot declaring that James needed more alcohol so he would stop winning and James launching a counter-attack against her. How dare a son treat his mother like that! [Dutch Blitz is a great card game, but I think you can only get it from the US]
Now: We just watched a funny little animated movie called Igor together before the parentals went to bed and Andrea went home. The boys are now watching a horror movie ‘30 Days of Night’ which I think has vampires in it. The movie is set at night, when there’s snow on the ground and after the viewing, Dave himself will have to walk home alone in the snow in Transylvania – the birthplace of vampires. How fun for him!
Boxing Day plans: I think sleeping in, puzzle starting, left over eating and beer drinking are definitely on the menu.
Hey, we sound like a family!
Merry Christmas everyone,
Love Elly and Stu xx
Tags: Coffee, food, holidays, Humphrey, Romania, shopping, snow, Special events
Dan – Bandit Chronicles
Imogen – Over the hills and far away…
The Chronicles of Humphrey
12 comments so far for “Christmas Fun and Laughter”
26Dec 2009 at 3:21 am :
Hello Elly & Stu!
I’m glad you had a good Christmas! I was also just letting you know (If no-one else from BS has) that we sent a moderately large parcel to you and that it should hopefully be safely at David and Kathryn’s house when you get back. Something to look forward to maybe?
Anyway, I hope you have good holidays!
Love Bethany.
26Dec 2009 at 8:00 am :
Ho Ho Ho Stu & Elly. How unlikely that I would be the first to comment! But somehow I have got hold of mum’s laptop at the right time, so have read yr post aloud to Grinny & Felix. Much enjoyed!
Felix is being a wee angel today (although Sal, who had him at the milk bar more than usual last night, might say different). We’ve sung “Felix navidad” a few times already, and suggested to Sal & James that Navidad may have been a better middle name than James. Strangely they disagreed! (BTW – “Feliz Navidad” is Spanish for “Happy Christmas”, and the song was a Christmas hit last century for Jose Feliciano … who was … err … never mind…).
Everyone enjoyed skyping with you yesterday – pretty amazing really, doing a Christmas call across countries and cultures (and for free!!) Ma & I send special greetings to Jon, Margot & James. It’s a lovely symmetry having Andy @ our place while you’re at the Nairns. Enjoy the rest of your Roman(ian) holiday (movie reference), lots of love Dad (Pete/Gaffer) and Mum (Lynnie/Grinny/Granny) xxxx
26Dec 2009 at 8:56 am :
Oh, sweet guys! Thanks for filling us in with pictures of your day. It was totally weird chatting to you on Skype with no visuals yesterday!
Love the earrings, Elly. And that’s definitely the coolest Santa I’ve ever seen! You both look really happy in the photo, which is what we like to see. It was nice that you had a family to spend Christmas with, in the absence of yours.
I’m about to be thrown out of the country, because I forgot to turn either the cricket or the Sydney-Hobart on. But I did have some Humphrey-roasted coffee for the second day running, even though I shouldn’t have! Very yum. We also had the traditional Oakley Boxing Day breakfast of ham and eggs. Sophy just had the ham. I just had the everything else.
Anyway, this comment is getting way too long. Merry Boxing Day! Talk soon. xx
26Dec 2009 at 12:42 pm :
MERRY BOXING DAY
Yes, I’m sad, reading blogs on boxing day. Actually, it’s just much more interesting than whatever the guys are watching on TV. Anyway
* Nice shirt stu? Guessing it’s romanian!
* I think I would have been at the other end of that computer screen in the first photo! Woot
* I don’t think any amount of beer would be able to mae james loose that game — he is just too good!
* In the last photo, Lara & I reckon stu looks like a happy dog, and elly look like a happy cat.
Lastly, there is an error on you blog. When I click on the message field, the cursor jumps up to the website field. The only way I can type here is to write it in notepad, copy it to the clipboard, then click on the website field, press tab, and then paste.
I’m guessing it’s just my computer though?
26Dec 2009 at 2:01 pm :
Hooray for people reading our blog!
Bethany: Fred did inform me about the parcel last night by accident. He asked if we’d received it yet! I’m very excited and can’t wait to get home now!
Pete+Sal: Loved talking to youse too! Hopefully our laptop will get better soon and we can have a conversation where you can see us and we can hear you. Otherwise you gys might need to learn semaphore.
Humf: Stu’s shirt is from Melbourne, he wore it to Heth+Caleb’s wedding. My top did remind me a lot of Puss, or the Grinch, haha. I reckon the error is probably your computer since the other three people commented without hassle!
28Dec 2009 at 11:03 am :
Humf, your computer knows you know too much and is setting you a challenge.
30Dec 2009 at 2:41 am :
Merry Christmas!! OK so its the 30th so it would probably be more appropriate to say: I hope you guys have a good new years eve/day, do you have much planned? We don’t really, I think we might boycott new years as it’s just another day really and the hype/fireworks are a bit over the top but anyways
In a previous post you mentioned you would make a video for anyone who wanted “hello !” – is there anything you want to see from over this way? Something out and about that you miss? Or that you wanted to show to peoples over there? I’m sure a few of us could wander around with the video camera.
Hey my computer does the humphrey thing too… Must be a netbook thing?
31Dec 2009 at 5:54 am :
No, not just a netbook thing. I just had trouble on my laptop too (the first time I’ve ever had trouble though). What browser are you using Humf? I just switched to Google Chrome and I’m wondering if that’s what made the difference?
31Dec 2009 at 5:57 am :
You can just press tab from the website field and then type…that seems to work for me.
31Dec 2009 at 12:02 pm :
Hey there, Nerds.
My technologically adept sister has the right of it. Chrome is the problem. I logged out then used Chrome and got the same problem. At first, I didn’t notice it because I usually just TAB between fields, but even when the website field is filled in, you can’t click into the comment field.
I didn’t write that part of the code. Actually, I barely wrote any of the code; just adapted what was here. I don’t like the comment system much at all. I’d like it to be able to remember people or use OpenID (which means if you’re logged in to google it will “sense” your details automatically) but I’ll get around to that later. I’m sure someone has written a better comment system that I can scam.
Anyway, use Firefox! Chrome is only helping google in their quest to take over the world!!
Byee
Stu.
01Jan 2010 at 8:18 am :
Definitely the first time I’ve ever been called technologically adept.
What do you (google it) mean google is (google it) taking over the (google earth) world?
02Jan 2010 at 7:44 am :
hehe, mine works and i’m not trying to solve anything to do with the STUPID internet. guess who’s not a nerd