On Saturday, the last day of the year, I organized most of the paperwork that we collected in the last year. I bought folders and plastic holders and arranged and sorted all the papers. A tedious but rewarding job.

At 5 pm Sasha called Perushtitsa, and she was on the phone with Milan and Nadia when 2006 arrived in Bulgaria. An hour later the Netherlands was celebrating the New Year and I called Middenmeer to congratulate my parents, Ettie, Gerben and Len who were watching the fireworks in the street.

We started cooking around 6.30 pm, and we prepared a lot of delicious things. With the rakia we had a mlechna salad. Irena had advised us on the brand of yoghurt to use and it worked out very well. The garlic prevents us from eating it during the week and it had been quite a while since the last time I had mlechna.

Our main course was not turkey; after Thanksgiving and Christmas we choose to have a chicken instead. We prepared it using the broil setting of the oven, and it came out very soft and juicy. On the side we had small red potatoes, roasted with rosemary and salt. We had a garden salad, that we served in the new bowls we got for Christmas. We drank a red wine, a Bulgarian Asenovgrad Mavrud from 2001, that won a Golden Riton prize and we found in a wineshop in Georgetown a couple of weeks ago.

Although we had planned to go to an Irish pub nearby for the midnight celebration, we were having such a good time at home that we decided to stay and watch the ball drop on Times Square on CNN. We opened our champaign at midnight and celebrated the New Year. An hour later we also saw the ceremony in New Orleans, where a giant gumbo pot was being dropped.

At the table with the mlechna salad and rakia.

The main course.

Champaign, ready for the midnight celebrations.

CNN.

To all our readers, no matter in what timezone they live: Happy New Year and all the best for 2006!

Two good friends, Daniel and Erika, have bought a new house!

They have been living together in Hungary for a long time, but this is the first house they are buying together so it's a great step. Congratulations!

Daniel sent out some pictures and it looks like a nice place, large and with a great view. It's on the second floor of a three-story building, in a medium sized city called Solnok.

Daniel mentioned that they will have some renovations done before they move in so they will move to their new place in April next year.

Sasha gave a me a very nice present for Christmas: noise-cancelling headphones!

This is truly a very special headset -- it filters out monotonous low noises by generating an "opposite" sound waves for those noises. Even when you're not listening to music it sounds like someone lowered the sounds of the world around you to a really, really low volume -- awesome.

I tried them for the first time on our long bus trip from New York to Washington and they worked great.

A duck in a pond full with leaves.

This is the pond between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial at the National Mall.

The journey from Washington to New York on Friday went very smooth, mostly because of the professional bus driver who managed to evade the most congested roads. On the way back we were not so lucky.

We woke up early Monday to take the train to New York at 10.30 o'clock. Irena brought us to the trainstation. We said goodbye and had plenty of time to take the train. When we arrived in the city we had a cup of coffee and walked to the bus stop. However, when we came there we saw nobody waiting, while there are usually people in line. So, we double checked the ticket, and we realized that the bus company had changed the location of the bus stop! We ran eight blocks across town, from 34th to 42nd but we were too late and just caught a glimpse of the bus leaving. I yelled and waved to the bus driver but that did nothing than attracting several cab drivers who offered us a ride.

Well, what do you do when you have a good hour to kill on Times Square? Indeed, we went to Starbucks and spend our time well. We were really early at the bus stop for the 1 pm bus (the correct location this time) to make sure we would get on. That was a smart move because a lot of people were waiting and some people couldn't get a seat.

Traffic was slow of course, there were a lot of people leaving New York, one of the reasons we had planned to take an early bus in the first place.

Traffic being bad is one thing, the bus breaking down quite another. We spent a very long time on a bus stop in south New Jersey, waiting for the busdriver to finish whatever he was doing. The most annoying part was that he didn't mention anything about the bus being broken -- he just went outside and started fixing stuff. Some fellow passengers got quite upset and yelled at him to explain, he was the calmness himself and just smiled. After 1,5 hours everything was apparently working again and we left. Traffic was now getting really bad, and especially at the various toll plazas we had to wait very long in line.

We arrived in Washington at 9 pm -- a full 8 hour journey. We immediately took a cab and wait to a nice restaurant, Woodgrill on Wilson, near our house to have a drink, dinner and forget about this experience.

Taking an early train.

The bus driver adjusting the pressure in the tire.

We left this afternoon for New York. We took the bus at 1 pm from Chinatown.

We had the best seats in the bus: all the way in front with a great view on the road and a lot of leg space.

I was worried about the traffic, with the holiday weekend starting, but we arrived around 6 pm on Times Square, much better than the previous time I travelled on a Friday afternoon.

The bus has a more experienced driver this time, and she took a lot of alternatives routes to avoid the congested roads. That's why we entered the city through the Holland tunnel instead of through the Lincoln tunnel.

This morning when I walked to my work I passed by a nice car.

The owner was obviously very much in a Christmas mood.

Sasha and I are leaving for New York this afternoon; we're taking the 1 pm bus from Chinatown. I'm very glad the strike in New York is over, it would have been a nightmare to enter the city otherwise.

The secret of the mysterious Christmas card has been resolved.

If you open the flower by pulling on the sides, it has a secret message: a happy 2006!

We received a mysterious Christmas card this week -- no sender name on the envelop, and no message on the card either.

It's a beautiful card -- but whose is it?