The holidays away from home!

I have been very lucky for the past two years and have managed to scrounge up the necessary funds for a flight back to California every summer and every Christmas. This year, unfortunately, it was time to save up, so Christmas found me somewhere very different from El Dorado Hills, California.

Vilnius, Lithuania!

In my first year at uni I managed to snag myself a Lithuanian boyfriend and this Christmas, he was nice enough to invite me home for the holidays since I couldn't be with my family in California. At the moment, besides a single weekend trip to Amsterdam, I have yet to do any travelling on the continent. That said, my two weeks in Lithuania were the first two weeks I spent in a European country besides the UK, and it was amazing! It was freezing (at its lowest, it hit -15°C), especially considering the fact that I'd never been through a real "white" Christmas. I built my first snowman, had my first snowball fight, and saw real icicles for the first time (and how can Christmas be bad when it includes all of the above?). Though I had many adventures during my two week stay, I wanted to share my experience of a Lithuanian Christmas Eve dinner.

My family at home, even though we're in America, tends to celebrate a bit of an Italian Christmas because we're Italian on my mother's side. Instead of a giant ham or turkey, we have spaghetti, tortellini, and swordfish for our massive Christmas Eve dinner. In Lithuania, it's traditional to refrain from eating any meat on Christmas Eve, so all of the dishes served are either meatless or have fish (herring in particular). This wouldn't be so crazy, except it is also traditional in Lithuania to have TWELVE different dishes, all for Christmas Eve! I thought this was insane, but as a polite guest (and a bit of an observer, considering my severely lacking skills in the Lithuanian language department), I obliged. I tried, among other things, six different versions of herring (herring with raw onions, herring with cooked onions, herring with mushrooms...& etc), potato patty things, smashed up cannabis seed (which is not, for the record, a hallucinagen of any kind =P), and assorted pickled vegetables. For dessert, we had home-made apple fritters, poppyseed fritters, mushroom fritters, and poppyseed milk (which they put little bits of crunchy poppyseed bread in and kind of eat like fancy cereal). It was seriously something I will remember for the rest of my life. There really is nothing like being able to sit in on another culture's traditions, and experience them first hand.

So tally one more point under the "Amazing Cultural Experiences" category - one that I certainly never would have gotten if I hadn't come to UEA!