It's been cold here. Like, -1º cold, where I walked out and there was frost on the leaves and the puddles were frozen. It's not so bad though, if I don't leave the house or rug up heavily when I do. However, I don't think I'd really be able to manage here much longer - I really miss the warmth and being able to wear shorts and go to the beach. Not long now though! I have my final presentation for Neuroscience this Wednesday and so have been working on that. Things are slowly wrapping up here and I'm starting to make plans to clean out my apartment and start giving away or selling what remains. I'm yet to bring my suitcase back up from storage, but can assume that that'll happen after my last assessment.
As it was Halloween on Thursday, we had a little Halloween-themed dinner and watched The Nightmare Before Christmas. The three-course menu consisted of pumpkin soup with herbs, stuffed capsicums shaped in the way of jack-o-lanterns (they had little faces) and apple crumble. We also carved a pumpkin and called him Simon. I ended up roasting and eating Simon.
On Saturday, Chiara and I went to Veggie World. It's just a convention in town for new vegan foods on the market and people promoting their products, such as sustainable or single-use accessories in the kitchen, to chocolate bars, banana chips, meat and dairy replacements etc. The usual. It was actually really fun to see everything they had on offer, and we had so many samples. However, the food was very processed, and as expected, about 15 minutes after we left we both started to feel quite ill having overdosed on salt, sugar, fat and preservatives. I think there's a reason I choose to stay on a very whole-foods friendly diet. My stomach doesn't seem to tolerate much else. But it's great to see how many alternatives there are now to conventional items that have animal products in them, and that the trend is on the rise. It was very busy!
And now that Halloween is over, we can start celebrating Christmas! Today we actually played Christmas carols, drank glögg, made and decorated gingerbread cookies and assembled a gingerbread house! Not sure if that house will stay together though, as we layered the roof with banana chips and it became very heavy, very quickly. Instead of opting for a traditional candy-layered house, we decorated it with pumpkins seeds, pecans, banana chips, raisins, almonds and dried cranberries. There was so much sugar in the icing and gingerbread itself that we thought it'd be interesting to try something new. Shalini made a little wreath out of thyme. I've left the house to dry in the common room, and hope it'll still be together when I check tomorrow morning.
After my exam, I think I'm heading to Helsingor and Helsingborg for a day or two with some of my Danish friends from Neuroscience, and then Katherine's comes to Copenhagen the following Wednesday. It's exactly two weeks from today that I leave to come back home!
Comments