Radijo Klubas: How we celebrated Christmas twice :)

Christmas and New Year is over now ... and Manana and I have some new stories to tell :)
As we didnt spent the Chatholic Christmas together, there are two different versions how we both spent this time.
Manana stayed in Lithuania and celebrated the catholic Christmas here, although in fact for her, Christmas is on 7th of January.

Manana's Version

As Rabea went to Austria I've had to stay home alone in Siauliai. It was a bit scary to be honest. I'm not used to live alone in Šiauliai. That's why I asked my Georgian friend Giorgi [he is a EVS volunteer in Latvia] to visit me and I suggested him to go to Vilnius and celebrate Catholic Christmas there with other EVS volunteers. As a vast majority of Georgians are Orthodox Christians we celebrate Christmas on 7th of January. So it was a first time for us when we've spent Christmas according to Catholic traditions. Before we went to Vilnius I've showed him Šiauliai. We also attended carnival in the club Havana which was organized by students of Didždvario Gimnazija. It was very funny and interesting :) We enjoyed it a lot.
Vilnius.. finally I've seen the capital city of Lithuania:) It's almost 4 months we are Šiauliai and I visited Vilnius just once, on Christmas. We've seen old town and we liked it very much. Somehow it reminded us Tbilisi - capital of Georgia because of the hills in the center of the city and narrow streets in old town. We've visited the central Cathedral. It's very nice and well, very big :) We've been walking around the old town until evening and then we went to our friends house where other EVS volunteers were planning to meet and spend Christmas together. We've spent really nice time on this evening. A special thanks to volunteers from Vilnius for organizing this event and for hosting us:) We've met very nice people from Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Spain, Belgium and Belarus. So our Christmas dinner was quite international :) I think it was a good decision to go to Vilnius on Christmas time. But I hope to go there at least once more :)

Rabea's Version

I went back to Austria for ten days to spent some time with my family. The trip back home was kind of strange. As my flight left quite early, I had to take a bus to Riga Airport at 5:45. Early as hell. But, okay, I thought, I will see my sister and parents and friends again, so it is worth it. But then, in the middle of nowhere (in fact somewhere after the Latvian border ... but it seemed like nowhere) the bus broke down and i waited with Russian and Lithuanian native speakers (My Russian skills dont exceed the "Thank you" level and my Lithuanian skills are not much better ...) in the dark and cold for another bus which came after an hour, during which I was not sure, what we are waiting for and if I will ever reach the airport on time. The only English speaking passenger, who asked me to work in his company after 15 minutes of knowing me, was pretty drunk and not really helpful.

However, I reached the Airport, was so relieved that I scared my boyfriend in the early morning with some nice stories of an Austrian girl, who simply wanted to go to an Airport, but was spending more time speaking with a drunk man standing on an highway, than calmly sitting in a bus.
Unfortunately in Riga the weather conditions were bad. Apparently the problem was the fog. So they cancelled all 6 flights which should have taken off before mine. I was already picturing me spending Christmas on the airport. But, hours after my flight was scheduled, my flight to Zuerich was the very first one, which wasnt cancelled. This time I was lucky.
So I reached Austria in the end, very exhausted and tired and spent Christmas with my family. It was very nice as expected and I somehow managed to see all my friends in this short period while I was there again.

On 2nd of January I went back to Riga. This time with my cousin from Switzerland, who spent one week with Manana and me. Manana also joined us in Latvia.

So first we spent some days there, exploring this very nice city, and then we went back to Siauliai, because we wanted to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas. We had some problems with preparing the Georgian Christmas meal, but in the end we had a very delicious main dish, and a good dessert, which was, due some mistakes while preparing it (lets call it creative cooking) not fully eatable :)
However, it was very nice, and who can say that he or she celebrated Christmas twice this year.