Christmas Stress

So after having met everybody of my family and my best friend, I stayed at my Dad’s place, because he had picked me up from my best friend the day before, and I would go shopping with his girlfriend the next day. So in the evening we watched some TV and went to bed quite early. I was sleeping in the apartment’s office at one of their old (but still quite comfortable) mattresses. The had guest rooms in the large house, too, but I preferred to be in her apartment – it was close to the bathroom, I could hear when somebody was awake in the morning and when it was breakfast time. So the next day we had breakfast all together. For my Dad’s girlfriend, breakfast was something big – she spent almost one hour to prepare it and there was coffee, fresh bread and croissants, all possible kinds of sausages, cheese and salads and sometimes even omelette or other eggs. We spent a lot of time having breakfast, and her philosophy of a good day was that she only ate in the morning (a large breakfast) and in the evening. When you eat enough for breakfast, you just need a small snack for lunch and save a lot of time and calories, she was always telling me. I was not too sure about that, usually I did need a lunch, but if she didn’t, it was good for her. I loved breakfast with my Dad – after he had left my Mum (and even before) it had been quite seldom that we had had breakfast together. So I always enjoyed sleeping at their place. After all the food my Dad had other things to do, so he just gave me some Shopping money and left the house. His girlfriend and I cleaned the kitchen and got ready for our Shopping tour, and only 30 minutes later we left the house and went to the city centre.

Since the moment when I had arrived some days before, I was freezing all the time. The temperature drop from almost 30 to less than 0 degrees made me suffer and my body couldn’t cope with that. Furthermore, the day I had arrived and the day after that, it had been quite sunny and up to 12 degrees outside, so I had brought my “strong winter survival” clothes back to my apartment because I thought I wouldn’t need them. And there we were – temperatures were falling each day a bit more and I had to get back to my apartment to get some of the super warm clothes. But back to shopping! Freezing, we walked along the different stores in the city centre and entered into some so see what they have. I tried to concentrate on the boots I had seen in the internet already, because I didn’t want to buy too many things now – I wouldn’t even be able to wear them for the next 6 or 7 weeks. So we went to that shoe store where Dad’s girlfriend knew the owner and I really found some boots I liked, and they were not too expensive – they were even in sale! But, of course, I didn’t find them in my size. That’s the problem when you are too tall and your feet are not just large, but also quite broad. But we entered the store anyway in order to ask for them or similar models. After a short smalltalk between my Dad’s girlfriend and the owner’s son he showed me some other models, but they were all much too expensive for my student’s budget. So we were already about to leave the shop again when he suddenly came back from the storage behind the customer room and had the first boots in his hands. He told me in a much too enthusiastic way, that he had found the boots in my size – obviously they had forgotten to bring them outside when Sale had started. So I tried them on and they fit! I bought them and after another smalltalk, this time with the owner of the store herself, we left and continued our little shopping tour. We looked for some clothes and other stuff, and finally we arrived at the lingerie shop. Of course, Dad’s girlfriend knew somebody there, too, and we asked her for some suitable underwear for our dresses. After a while we both had found something nice – not only the one piece we had come for, of course, and with a lot of friendship discount we paid and left the store.

As we had found everything we had been looking for, we went back to the car and returned to her house. I had really missed these spontaneous shopping tours with her during the last months. We had a coffee and then I had to leave and get to my friend. She was living about 15 minutes away and we just wanted to meet at her place, talk a bit and find out what was new in each other’s life. We were both happy to meet again when I arrived at her place, and after having exchanged our Christmas presents we had a coffee in the kitchen and talked. And talked. And continued talking. After about two hours there was nothing more to say, so due to the nice weather outside we decided to go for a walk and have some fresh air. She was living in a very, very small village and there was a lot of nature around, and of course also some ways to walk. We kept walking and talking for quite a long time, and when we returned to her house we were both freezing. We had a hot chocolate to regain some warmth and watched TV. In the evening we decided to go to a restaurant in the village nearby to have dinner – they had opened recently and there weren’t so many other places where you could have food that wasn’t pizza or fastfood. But it was a nice Bistro and they had modern and sometimes even innovative dishes. So we went there and enjoyed our food, especially me because my culinary variety had suffered a lot in Tenerife, except when we were eating outside in restaurants.

We had an incredible dessert and continued the evening in the shisha bar only one street away from the restaurant. They didn’t have the best shishas but it was the only shisha café in the village, so it was okay. When I was more than tired and she had to go to bed because of her work the next day, I brought her back to her house, we said goodbye (this time only for about six or seven weeks) and I returned to the apartment of my Mum. She was already sleeping when I entered her place, so I tried to be quiet, looked for some sweets and went back to my small room to watch some series via my Laptop. As the last days had been quite stressful, I fell asleep early.

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