The longest day at work is the day before your holiday starts. It is another 7 hours until I get to leave not just for the weekend, but for TWO WEEKS! The Lover, my daughter and I will be going to Norway. Tomorrow, we will be taking a ship from Rostock in Northern Germany to Trelleborg in Sweden and then continue in a West-Northerly direction.
My daughter, of course, has no concept of what a holiday is. She understands that I have bought salami, chocolate and drinks that cannot be consumed until "the holiday". She also understands that I won't be going to work, that she won't be going to her Kinderladen and that we won't be at home. And she thinks about The Big Ship a lot, the ship which will hold not only the three of us but where The Lover's car will also be parked. What kind of icecream will it have, she wonders? She has taken ships on the Elbe with her grandmother twice, and they had different kinds of icecream. We discussed this yesterday: maybe the Big Ship will have blue icecream, she suggested. Or cucumber icecream. Or, best of all, vanilla icecream.
Me, I have never been to Norway. In my mind, I have patched together things I have read, things I have been told, places I have been in other Scandinavian countries. We will be staying in a cottage in some remote place. I haven't asked The Lover all that much about what it will be like, because I want to picture it in my mind: lots of wood, very quiet. Beds that have to be pushed together to create a double. A veranda. A view over hills and forest. Personally imported wine drunk from the bottle.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
