Next weekend is Christmas and we will spend it in Slovenia where we have rented a house on the slopes off Krvavec, not far from Klagenfurt. We have decided that we do Finnish Christmas food on the 24th, so we needed to pass by IKEA for stocking up on necessities. Now we have smoked salmon, sill, mustard, ham, gingerbread etc. during the week I’ll prepare the Finnish casseroles.

(Pic. IKEA)

As we were close to Udine and the forecasted weather was sunny, we decided to take a stopover there. We had a fantastic Arabic dinner at “Mille e una note”, a tour around the Christmas market, the castle, we met Santa who distributed gifts to all children and made friends with a policeman who’s car we got to try. All in all a very successful Saturday.

Today was a day off in Italy. We had originally planned to move this weekend but since there’s still some paperwork hanging we will likely need to wait until January. For this reason we had no real plans for the weekend. Last night we were checking hotels in the alps on Slovenian, Austrian and Italian sides but could not make up our mind. Therefor this morning we basically started driving in direction of Tarvisio with no real target than hopefully some snow and sledding, maybe premier on skies for the kids, maybe a Christmas market. When we arrived in Tarvisio it was raining so we started driving towards Premollo, that was so foggy and empty that we did not even want to exit the car. At this point of time the kids had fallen asleep, and were ready for a serious quarrel on who’s fault it was that we did not have a hotel yet, that no one had checked the forecast and that this was in general a very poorly planned excursion.

Standing between driving back to Trieste or stopping for lunch in Tarvisio to calm down and realign options we decided for the latter... luckily... now after a fantastic meal, some sledding in Tarvisio, an evening tour at a fantastically winter lit Kraniska gora; we ended up in an apartment hotel larger than our current apartment with autonomous heating. The kids have been playing, now they sleep and the rain has turned to big white flakes falling outside the window, with some continued luck we will ski tomorrow!

So finally the first birthday party of a friend in kindergarden arrived. The kids have been excited for weeks! Especially the older one who is quite homesick and would go back to Finland with friends, kindergarden, house, grandparents, toys and everything he holds so dear, on next available flight. Birthday parties represent a lot, it means that you have a social network and that you belong! He is a very brave child but even that has veen challenged somewhat lately. So arriving at the playground where the party was held and seeing friends he knew made his eyes sparkle as he turned back and said ”my friends are here” and ran off with the small peergroup.

Was difficult to catch a picture today without other persons faces in them.