Easter 2017

Easter has a high value in Norway! The country celebrates it with all four religious days (Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday) being proper holy days during which offices are closed. (Some even already from Wednesday afternoon.) This means three days off from work without having to take those days from your annually granted holidays contingent. Therefore: the PERFECT occasion to travel! Additionally, during that period Oslo becomes like a ghost town: nearly everything is closed, not much "going on", most people have left town to spend the days elsewhere and last but not least the weather in Oslo in that period usually isn't very beautiful yet. So (also) I really like the idea of using those days off from work to travel somewhere and discover new places or having a great time visiting people you haven't seen for a while.
BUT: exactly because of the fact of Easter being a very popular time and thus high season for travelling, prices for flights or eventual accommodation at the destination are usually very high and you have to book things pretty well in advance if you still wanna get some affordable solutions.
This year we ended up not finding time to get organised for Easter, so all ideas we had for travelling had already become unaffordable.
SO: we stayed in Oslo this year for Easter.
Luckily also the one or other person was partially in Oslo over those days. That way we had the pleasure to welcome my colleague Peter and his wife Gry to our place on Thursday 13/04 for a dinner and game evening - which was a very nice get together. Hopefully to be repeated soon :-)

The other days went by getting here and there some things done, planting some first flowers for the season on the balcony (just to figure out later that it had been still to early = cold for the flowers so they didn't even make it through the next 5 weeks), meeting some other friends for a lunch and setting up some Easter decoration.

 

Sweet Easter greetings from home :-)

By Easter Monday most people were already back in Oslo and we had invited some friends (Ginta + Hadrien and Tiago + Vanessa) over for an Easter lunch at our place.

Some snacks Marco had brought when he visited his brother in Madrid in March.

The family traditional Easter cake: "gold-and-silver-cake" (as one part is only baked with egg yolk and the other one only with egg white). This is actually something I can't do and then miss when not being at home, but travelling during Easter.

So all in all our Easter days ended up in nice company, with a lot of fun, a lot of food and great moments with friends :-)