What did I tell you yesterday? Yep, here it is:

Very early on Friday morning (I’m talking 4am) I braved the freezing Oslo morning air and headed for the airport. I had to fly to Amsterdam first, and then on to Hanover where Theresia picked me up in her friend’s car and drove us back to Göttingen. There were so many pretty autumn colours on the way, but we were on the autobahn so we couldn’t stop to take pictures.

I was pretty tired from my early start (not to mention having stayed up late the night before for my first book club meeting… but that’s another story) so Theresia and I took it a bit easy with a stroll into the old part of town. There were lots of cute old buildings, and I stood on the marked spot where if you turn around you can see all three of Göttingen’s churches. I didn’t stand there long though, because I felt like a prat.

We sat up talking for as long as I could keep my eyes open… which was really nice. I still think Theresia was probably glad when I left because I’m fairly sure I talked her ears off all weekend.

Saturday we spent most of the day preparing for the party. Theresia does nothing by halves, and had already prepared a huge tiramisu along with several antipasti platters.

Together we also put together some turkey skewers which had been rolled in egg and then a mixture of grated fresh parmesan cheese, herbs and mashed potato powder, and then baked in the oven. Theresia impressed me further by making a gigantic dish of spinach and ricotta cannelloni and a bowl of garlic and sour cream dip. Mmm. I have never seen so much food for a non-dinner party!

The guests arrived at around 8pm and after a few initial jitters about speaking English, everyone seemed to warm up (the beer probably helped) and I had a lot of interesting conversations. At one point someone asked me (in German) whether I was a medical student as well… I started to say “Sorry, I don’t speak Norwegian” when my brain kicked in to remind me that a) I actually DO speak Norwegian, and b) GERMAN was the word I was looking for. It still didn’t come out right and I stopped just short of saying “Sorry I don’t speak English”. What a dork!

Another interesting language-related incident was when I needed Theresia to pass me a fork and I said “Kan du sende meg en gaffel?” Yes, somehow my brain had decided that the only reason I couldn’t understand what was being said around me was because I was talking and thinking in English… so it did the only thing it knew how to do and switched to Norwegian. Right.

On Sunday we had every intention of going for a walk or something… but it just didn’t happen. After cleaning up from the party, we pretty much just sat around and talked all afternoon until it seemed like time to find some dinner. We went to a ‘Potato House’ and I ate one of the best steaks I’ve had in months. I forgot how good a nice piece of beef can be. It’s so expensive to buy nice beef in Norway that we usually use lamb instead. While we were finishing up our meal with a Chai Latté, a guy dressed in old fashioned clothes came in and started knocking on the tables and babbling away in German. Theresia quietly explained to me that he was a travelling apprentice. I found a good explanation of what it is all about here.

Monday we travelled to Hanover where it rained all day (again) and we also discovered that all the museums in Hanover are closed on Mondays. So we visited the new town hall (new meaning opened in 1912) to have a look at the scale models of Hanover in four different periods. The most shocking was the model of Hanover just after the allied bombings in WWII.

After that we had a lovely lunch at a restaurant near the main train station that looked a bit like I imagine some of the British houses in India early last century might have looked. Lots of curtains draping down from the two storey ceiling, and booths with silk cushions around low tables. They played very chilled out music and the menu focused on a theme of wellness. They even had an entire double-page spread in the menu for different water from around the world including Norwegian Voss and a ridiculously priced water from the US going for around 90 Euros a bottle! The food was delicious though, and very reasonably priced compared to what I’ve gotten used to in Norway.

Theresia saw me to the airport where we discussed the somewhat strange idea that the next time we see each other she will be a fully fledged doctor until my gate opened. When I got to Amsterdam my flight was already being called and I had to run through the entire airport to get to my gate in time. Then when I landed in Oslo Chris’s phone decided not to receive my message so he didn’t make it to the train station to meet me… leading me to walk through the currently dug up roads around Oslo central station to get to the tram (this was about 11.30pm) with my luggage and four bottles of duty free wine. A dodgy looking guy lurched towards me at one point and I was thinking “You do NOT want to mess with me right now, buddy”. I don’t know if he saw the look on my face or what, but he soon lurched off in the other direction leaving me to drag my luggage onwards through the mud to the tram stop. A less than glamorous ending to what was an otherwise lovely weekend.