Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day

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This space represents the awesome entry I had planned for Christmas Eve, complete with photos of awesome and scary nativity scenes from around Dili, which cannot be posted in its original format because for some unknown reason you can't post photos within entries on this blog. Why??? why??? I swear every other blog in the world has this function!!!

Anyway, photography of nativity scenes was the key activity on Christmas Eve. I'll post photos with the totally witty comments when I do my mass photo upload soon.

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Christmas lunch with other expat orphans was the main activity we undertook on Christmas Day, after lazing about for most of the morning wondering when the electricity would come back on, and would the cheesecake we made the day before be ruined? (Happily, no.) Cheesecake at Christmas is a tradition in my family and I would have been very sad if it had been ruined. I was surprised to find that most of the ingredients or substitutes could be found in Timor, actually, I hadn’t expected that.

Anyway lunch was a mammoth effort, coordinated and mainly cooked by a lovely guy called Richard who is lucky enough to be housesitting a gorgeous, large, cool and shady house out in a paddock on the edge of Dili. Now it is Boxing Day and we have done *very little* all day. This is not because we are particularly tuckered out, but because unlike the past year (or two years, come to that, for me) we don’t actually have any tasks, chores, obligations, social engagements or events to do or attend. In fact there isn’t really anything scheduled until it’s time to take Matt to the airport at oh, 5am on New Year’s Day, and then I don’t have anything after that until returning to work on the 5th of January!!! This is an extremely strange feeling for me, I can’t remember feeling like this EVER since about, oh, summer holidays between second and third year uni, perhaps?

I mean, I washed some clothes this morning (by hand, I mean), and I went for a run-walk, and I’ve read, and I could wash up. But, there’s nothing that I *have* to do. We don’t even need groceries (because I craftily sent Matt on a grocery-buying extravaganza for three days before Christmas so we wouldn’t have to today).

Instead of being productive with this time, I have mostly napped, listened to the cricket on the radio (woeful, just woeful), played games on my computer and read. You must realise, I am actually quite proud of myself for this. I’m not very good at relaxing!