Godt nytt år!

Midnight sparklers

After an uncharacteristically great New Year's Eve and a lovely time in rural Suffolk, I was quite sad that the holiday was over and that it was time to come back to the cold north. But after a few days, it feels like I've never been away. And I remembered that being here is quite a lot like a holiday! Well, if your idea of a holiday is spending your days in the company of Norwegian teenagers, your evenings watching re-runs of Blackadder (and studying the subtitles, of course!) and as much of the intervening hours as possible on public transport and/or discovering bigger and better supermarkets, then I am in paradise! But, in all seriousness, it's good to be back. The teachers have entrusted me to plan some lessons for next week, on such diverse subjects as Gandhi, Geordie and gooseberries (the last one is a lie, but it begins with G!). Marie-Hélène and I are also very excited about our week in England coming up at the end of January. We are tagging along with a school trip in the interests of 'widening our experience of the Comenius project' i.e. having a jolly. And many more travels should be had this year. I would make it a New Year's resolution, but I think the idea is that they should be hard to achieve...
My actual resolution is a pretty damn massive cliché: to do some bloody exercise! I'm headed for Tøyenbadet tomorrow for a bit of a dip, and I'm hoping my laziness will permit me to get myself down to the pool once a week... we'll see! My housemate Asbjørn has been encouraging me by reminding me of all the 'humanity' in public pools - but I will have to ignore that and embrace the wee wee!
Other plans for my precious day off include... opening a bank account. My cup overrunneth! Red tape is my friend.

**Norwegian word of the day**
munnsår!
Which I learnt off the telly. It means 'coldsore' and, I am reliably informed, can be used as an insult (to call someone a pain in the arse)!

Now, get out of here, you bunch of coldsores, and let my frozen befuddled brain recover!