Day 19: Loving life in Latvia sunny-side up

As I've been staying up quite late most nights, I really wanted to have a long sleep last night. You know, those times when you wake up and you think it's the next day, that kind of sleep. But no, not today. Nature wasn't going to allow it. I woke up from the loud pitter-patter of rain on the window right next to my head. I could have just fallen back to sleep like any normal person would. But no! The first thing I did was switch on my laptop (a habit I've created whilst here) and look for films to watch. So I spent the early morning from 7 til 8.30 watching a funny film. Standard morning for me.

I find that when I'm awake really early, I want to be really active, go out for a morning jog, walk the imaginary dog and cook a full English breakfast. I didn't go that far but did decide to make an omelette. As the pan was only small, I was debating about whether to use one or two eggs. I thought one would make it too thin and two would make it too thick. Two it was then. It was all going so well until I realised that it was actually too thick and the heat wasn't coming through to cook the top of the omelette. Being the master chef that I am, I made the somewhat risky decision to flip it. It nearly didn't work... But I did it!

I managed to rescue the omelette.

After dancing around my room (as you do), it was time to plan my day. Although the rain had stopped, the weather wasn't exactly pleasant-looking, so me and a couple of friends decided to have a sort of dinner party at my dorms. The plan sounded so amazing; pasta with pesto, sausages and salad. Unfortunately, things don't always go to plan, especially with students. My Estonian friend turned up early for me to proofread some of his work in English, something I rather enjoy actually. He brought the sausages and pasta and then our other friend turned up with the pesto. When we chose which kitchen to use (we were spoilt for choice in a multi-storey building), we got our ingredients out and were raring to go. We realised that we didn't have a saucepan for the pasta but a frying pan instead and we had no vegetables for the salad. Nevertheless, we did not let this get in our way.

I managed to find a small saucepan from my neighbour's kitchenware that clearly wasn't going to be able to fit pasta for four people in it. Luckily, there was another student cooking rice on the other hob who had a much bigger pan. While they all taught me the rules to a card game called Sabouteur, every time this student came to check on his boiling rice, our eyes were glued on the saucepan, hoping that he would finish cooking soon and that he wouldn't take the saucepan away! About an hour later, and that's not an exaggeration, we were able to get on with cooking our pasta.

As routine goes, we waited for the water to boil. And kept waiting for what seemed like forever. We were all staring at the water, waiting tentatively for the first bubble to appear. When the water did eventually start to boil, things started to go more smoothly. We stirred in the pesto, put the pasta on plates and then my Estonian friend started to fry the sausages. A few minutes later, dinner was served. It was too good to be true. Strangely, nothing went wrong... Well that's what we thought, until my friend cut into his fried sausage and plastic peeled off it. He didn't realised that the sausages were individually wrapped in thin plastic but did say: "I was wondering why the sausages weren't turning brown"... We couldn't stop laughing for ages, but were way too hungry to let the food go cold!

Students, eh?

Sadly, I forgot to take a memorable photo for my blog (which I'm now known for doing amongst my friends)  but like we all said at the time, we didn't just cook food, we created an experience. An experience that will never be forgotten, that's for sure!