Welcome to 2011!

Happy New Year everyone! Allow me to welcome myself back to my blog. I have slowly and painfully managed to pull myself out of holiday mode. It was particularly hard this time, as I had such a supergreat time over the holidays.

Christmas was normal: food, drinks, friends, movies and handmade gifts which I will brag about on my other blog.

But New Year's was abnormal in oh so many wonderful ways. First of all, it was abnormal of me to want to go somewhere cold with lots of snow. Second of all, it was totally unheard of for me to like it. Yes, dear readers, I liked the snow! Yes, I went out in it and I wasn't cold! (Granted, I had no physical contact with it, as I stayed safe within my polar fleece and Gore-Tex bubble.) Now I finally believe that Norwegian saying, that there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

As is the way of wise people, very late on the morning of the 31st we decided to climb to the summit called Scaunul Domnului (God's Seat), the very one that's mentioned in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
All bundled up and ready to go:
We knew we had an 8 hour walk ahead of us and we knew we'd end up walking in the dark for at least 2 hours, but we went anyway. And boy was is worth it!

It was special for me, as it was my first (more or less) serious winter hike, and everything, even familiar places, looks so different when covered in snow.

The view from the summit was unlike anything I'd ever seen before. The pink sky made it all look like a painting, and the fir trees seemed more like computer graphics than real life.

It was Mutty-Mutty's first time in the snow too, and he had a great time:

On the way back, slipping, tripping and groping in the dark, we became sure that we'd be too exhausted for any kind of New Year partying. But back at the cabin we were met by the rest of the gang, freshly arrived from the city, who gave us no chance but to stay up. And party we did, until the wee hours of the morning.

The rest of the night contained a lot of this...
...some of this (sneakily)...
...and, for the less fortunate, some of this:

And you know the best part? Nobody was drunk! This is just our collective true self, coming out when we are all crowded together in one small cabin. It was another opportunity for me to realise how blessed I am with such silly friends.

As we all know that practice is very important if you want to become good at something, the hike-food-party-sleep sequence was repeated twice again in the following days.

I hope your holidays were satisfactory and that you'll have a great year. But if first days are anything to go by, then 2011 will be a blast!