Recap

I always forget how long the day is when you get up early. You would think I'd learn, but it surprises me every time.

This morning I got up at 8 in order to get my mom to the bus station in time to get a bus to the airport for her flight out this afternoon (she has been visiting for the past 9 days during which we took a trip to Finland!)

After waving goodbye I walked from the bus station to Lixian's place downtown. Lixian is probably the best friend I've made here, but I hadn't seen her in a couple weeks since she was away visiting friends in Sweden and then I was in Finland with my mom. We ate some breakfast, drank coffee and the discussed our respective trips. At 11:45 there was a student demonstration across the street, so we went to check that out. There were a few hundred students there listening to someone passionately shouting into a microphone, but not being able to understand Norwegian, we left pretty shortly afterward. We then went to go pick up -- oh I forgot to mention this...while hanging out after breakfast we decided to get tickets to go see Jose Gonzales in Oslo on December 13th! So we put in an order then went to the Post Office to collect them (ha! take THAT ticketmaster service charge!!)

It was a nice day out so next we decided to head to the cemetery. I'm not sure what it's called, but it must be Norway's national cemetery or something since Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch (along with many others) are buried there. Lixian was excited to see dry leaves on the ground since apparently in Vancouver it's too wet to ever play in piles of leaves. Me, being the experienced leaf player, kicked up a sizeable amount and then dove head-first into them. Lixian followed suit, and then afterwards we just laid there with out heads sticking out above our respective leaf piles and chatted about life (we got a couple of menacing looks from the workers whose job it was to rake/blow the leaves into piles, but I don't feel too bad about it).

I don't think I'm describing this very artfully (I definitely overused the words 'leaf' and 'pile' in that last paragraph), but it was a great moment. At one point I thought to myself "I'm laying in a pile of leaves in OSLO, the sun is shining, and I'm talking to a good friend -- yes, this is my life!" After chatting for a while we headed back to her place, said goodbye and went our separate ways. I grabbed a kebab before hopping on the metro and heading home for a nap. Someone smart once said "Bed's are best appreciated after a night away." It having been NINE nights since I had last slept in mine, you can only imagine how good the nap was.