friends & winter

When I'm having a "Norway sucks" period it helps to have friends from home visit as it forces me to show them the good stuff here, and of course time with your best friend is always a huge boost. As well as friends arriving, winter also arrived with a bang, a little to early for my liking but whad'ya gonna do?

Sunday

Ah, Sunday. The day in Norway where nothing is open apart from 7/11 and garden centres. The government here think it's fine to shop for plants on a Sunday but nothing else. Sundays are for walking in the mountains. Enjoying the best thing that Norway has to offer, beautiful scenery.
But man cannot live on beautiful scenery alone!
 I'm looking forward to next year when hopefully Norway will have a new government that will drag this backward country kicking and screaming into the 21st century!

Hej hej Sverige!

We needed a little escape from Norway so we drove three hours to Gøteborg for a little Swedish adventure. I treated myself to a proper winter coat and I'm still feeling very guilty about the £600 I spent on it! eeeek! Once it's -15c I will stop feeling guilty but for now that amount is killing me!
Saturday was my day,shopping and wandering around the city and Sunday was Henrik's day, wandering around Marstrand and Carlstens Festning
Oh yea, and we bickered for most of the time, which of course always makes a weekend away a bit more fun!

So-long cottage

Autumn is well and truly here with some mornings a chilly -3c which is just too cold to be staying at the cottage, so on Sunday we closed up for the season. I always feel a bit sad when we do this esp as we had a crappy summer weather wise so did not get as much use out of the cottage this year. Oh well, only 7 months til its warm enough to return (that seems sooooo long.Damn nordic winter!)
We spent our last weekend there under many blankets,wearing thick socks and eating tomato soup and apple muffins. Time to embrace winter. We will travel to Gøteborg at the end of the week for a little break and to stock up on new winter gear. Any Gøteborg tips are welcome!

Høst

You'd think that after two years in Norway my norwegian would be fantastic? Well, it's not.
I'm pretty lazy about speaking it and will speak english given any opportunity. My understanding of the language is good and I often have conversations where the other person is speaking norwegian or swedish and I reply in english. I'm not gonna stress about the language. I have a job, I talk to the kids in norwegian and I think that eventually I will get there....
There are 3 words at the moment that I keep mixing up
Høst=autumn
hoste=cough
hest=horse
 On Friday I went to the doctor and started off speaking norwegian with him until he started to laugh.
I was telling him that I have had a bad cough for a few weeks only instead of saying cough I told him that I had a bad horse! I switched to english right away!
Please tell me you all make mistakes too when speaking another language?