For lack of a more original title....Christmas in Norway!

God Jul alle sammen, Merry Christmas everyone! This post is pretty self explanatory, and if you're hungry right now, you should probably go get something to eat before you read it. I think the majority of pictures involve norwegian food (as usual, really). There's not really any other way to introduce this, so I'll start from the beginning.

Last week we had a "test" in art; we had five hours to come up with a viking inspired design and make a pattern out of it. I figured I'd be done in half an hour, but it took me the full time! Definitely a different test than I'm used to; it was kind of stressful to finish in time, but also fun. We weren't allowed computers, so we had to base if off what we printed off the day before. This is what I came up with:

I finished school on Tuesday; we had a class of art history and then a little Christmas concert type thing in the gym. Tord and Helene's daughter Ida, who is studying architecture in Trondheim, came home on Tuesday. She was in Haiti since the summer helping to build a bakery. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to pronounce "Haiti" normally again; I've heard it said by Norwegians so many times that I read it as Hay-EEE-tea now. Anyways, we went for a nice snowy run together, and I don't remember what else happened that day. 

Wednesday we met up with Tord's granddaughter Sarah, who is seven, and her dad for lunch in the city. Then Ida, Sarah and I went Christmas shopping, and ended up sitting in a cafe drawing Christmas cards for each other. I went to the theatre? Cinema? I don't remember what I usually call it in english, with Ida and her friend on Wednesday night. It was strange to see a movie in english; I completely forgot where I was until it was over and people started speaking Norwegian around me again.

Sorry, this post is starting to sound like the stories I wrote in grade one; "and then I went to school, and then we had math, and then I ate a meatball sandwich, and then I went home and played treasure mountain, and then, I went to SLEEP". Although a good portion of the stories I wrote then were more like " and so, Victoria and Shawn and me went into the dinosaurs mouth, and I went straight to the gallbladder! Shawn went to the toes, and Victoria almost got eaten up! Then we escaped and played in a box. Then it was Christmas holidays! YAY YAY YAY." Yep, I filled a whole page up with "yay" in one of those yellow duotangs.

...The point being, I'm not doing a very good job of transitioning between ideas here, but oh well. We'll get to the food soon and you'll forget about that. 

Thursday here was lille juleaften, or little Christmas eve, and the 24th was juleaften. We set up the Christmas tree on lille juleaften; it was pretty similar to back home. We even put little plastic apples all over it ( although maybe that's a standard thing to do?) The Norwegian flags were the only noticeable difference, and the fact that the tree was real, not plastic.

Tord putting on the lights

Ida and Helene decorating

With all the presents!

Around 3 pm on Friday we ate grøt, rice porrige. You eat it with sugar, butter, cinnamon and raisins. An almond is traditionally hidden in the porrige, and whoever finds it gets a marzipan pig. Torbjørn, Tord and Helene's son, found it.

Table set for grøt

With sugar, cinnamon and butter....yumm

Jens, Margaret and Liv came over afterwards, and the space under the Christmas tree got completely filled up. The table was set again for dinner, and we had pinekjøtt (lamb ribs, I think), kohlrabi, cabbage, and sausage for Christmas dinner. The newspaper the other day had a breakdown of what percentage of Norwegians eat what for Christmas dinner, but I don't remember all the foods or figures. Pinekjøtt is more of a western thing, I think; pork and lutefisk are also common Christmas foods. 

Pinekjøtt and sausage

Dinner table with Liv the dancer :)

As soon as the last plate was empty, Liv was allowed to open one present. Once everything was a bit more cleaned up, the real present opening began. It was almost exactly the same as home; presents passed around and opened (for the most part) one at a time. It took from 8 pm til around midnight. I've mentioned it before..but I'm definitely very lucky! I got quite a stash of presents; earrings, gift cards, hand knitted socks, a scarf, buff and headband, more socks, in general much more than I expected, and much more than I gave out too! My present from the Rotary club deserves special mention; they already do SO much for me, I was so surprised to get a present from them too! I got a sweater from Oleana, the factory here in Arna that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts. Yep, the factory Michelle Obama has a sweater from, the sweaters I was afraid to touch because they were so expensive and good quality. It's definitely something I will treasure from Norway, I'm still kinda in shock. 

Om det er noen fra Rotary som leser det, tusen hjertelig takk, det var en utrolig fin overraskelse, og jeg er VELDIG glad for alt dere har gjort for meg!!

That was the only sentence in this post that doesn't have squiggly red spelling error lines under it; I use my norwegian school computer almost exclusively now.

Hand knitted socks from Evelyn, and a lovely angel from Liv

A little bit of home in Norway; Plate for Helene and Tord, cookbook for Evelyn, and butter tarts I made last week. Sorry the picture layout is so weird; I gave up on trying to make the little pictures line up without randomly shooting up to the top of the page, popping up in the middle of a chunk of text somewhere else, or disappearing altogether.

 Oleana sweater from the Rotary Club

 My pile

 Liv and her new ski boots (both her and Margaret got cross country ski packages)

When we were done with presents, and all the wrapping was cleaned up, everyone sat around and talked until about 2 am. I'm used to finishing with presents in the middle of the day, not when it's dark out. Not that that really matters; it was really neat to celebrate a Norwegian christmas! Today is the first Juledag, and the period from now until New years is called romjul. Since it hasn't happened yet, I don't know what it's like, but I get the impression it's a time for people to relax after all the Christmas rush. 

This morning we had the biggest, and probably best breakfast I've ever had. It was basically everything you could possibly put on bread, plus more. It's not even physically possible to try even a fraction of all the possible combinations you could put on your bread. It makes me think of permutations and combinations in math class again...how many possible combinations are there with five kinds of cheese, three kinds of bread....I don't feel like listing it all; a picture will do it better! Regardless, it's a LOT of stuff to put on bread, and really healthy too. I like this way of fancy breakfasts with whole wheat bread and toppings better than how it's done at home actually; with pancakes and really sweet toppings. Not that i have anything against pancakes and waffles!!

Gorgeous Christmas morning

 With cozy new socks :D

Cheeeeesssee 

...and meat

 Salmon, eggs, liver paste, meat, pickles, beets, tomatoes, cucumber...I said not to read this if you're hungry!

Yummmm

Liv (Tord and Helene's seven year old niece) got new skiis and boots for Christmas, so we went outside after breakfast to try them. I'm seriously having trouble writing right now by the way...my brain keeps giving me norwegian words, and I keep telling it "no, you're writing in english, you'll just confuse people if you throw in norwegian words, and it's not like you can even write all this in norwegian and still make sense." It isn't listening to me so well though, so it's a little bit of a fight. I've noticed over Christmas though that I can generally follow the thread of a conversation at the dinner table and such, and in general feel like I have a better idea of what's going on. Even without being able to say all that I want to in Norwegian, it's just nice to understand better.

Anyways, that's not what I was talking about. 

Liv and I went out and tried her new skis, and I used mine as well. I brought last year's training skis with me, and it was really nice to ski again. I've managed to stay somewhat in shape with running, but I didn't realize how much I missed being on skis. We went once around the house, then started building a quinzee. We didn't get past piling up the snow though.

Taking a break

We ended up going with Margaret (Liv's mom) down to a meadow below the house, and sledding/skiing up and down a really nice sledding hill. They went home after a bit, and I went back up to the house, switched to classic skis, and found some grip wax. There were some ski tracks on the old railway, and I classicked along there for a bit. I can't figure out how to conjugate "classic" to past tense, so I guess it's gonna stay as "classicked." 

Skis! I missed you guys

Past the old train station

It's definitely a good thing i didn't bring my racing skis here; I definitely put a few new scratches in my old ones! It wasn't really a workout; I kept pace with a couple going for a casual walk along the road parallel to the tracks, but I think I worked off a tiny fraction of breakfast, all in time for dinner!

Dinner was grouse that Tord caught, with potatoes and carrots and gravy, and cloudberries with whipped cream for dessert. I don't even understand how they manage to produce so much amazing food in such a short time! Might have something to do with all the food shopping and preparation they've done in the past few days, and the stockpiling in both fridges. I've documented the upstairs one, but while I was skyping with Shawn at 3 am yesterday in the garage so I wouldn't wake people up, I looked in the downstairs one. And, of course, took pictures.

 Stash of whipping cream

 Yeah, there's four containers of sour cream....in the backup fridge

 Three things of butter; there was four earlier

There's definitely no starving here

Well, that was my Norwegian Christmas. It was very koselig! 

Hope everyone, wherever you are, had a merry Christmas! And for all you back in time across the ocean, that the rest of Christmas day goes great as well.

The cute little mouse Liv made says Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Edit: Tord and Helene ( host parents) were reading this, and pointed out that I wrote "pinekjøtt", the correct spelling is "pinnekjøtt". Pinekjøtt literally means tortured or tormented meat. We got a good laugh out of that one  :P

Four months in Norway!

If my exchange in Norway was a cake, I’d have eaten a serious chunk of it. Probably enough to be sick and not eat cake again for a few years. Actually, that’s not true. Especially if it was a brownie cake.  But Norway isn’t cake, and I’m definitely not sick of it. It’s hard to believe I’ve been here four months today. Four months since I flew across the ocean for the first time, four months since we touched down in the fog and rain into Oslo.

I’m sitting in Norwegian class, and we’re supposed to be answering questions about a movie we watched last class. I only saw the second half, and had no idea what was happening, especially since it was in Danish. The internet is blocked so I can’t look anything up, and I don’t really have to do it anyways. So I’m reading a section of the Norwegian textbook, and writing this blog post. With the balance seriously skewed towards writing the blog post.

I think it’s amazing how many more languages people are exposed to on a daily basis here. As I mentioned, we watched a movie in Danish last week. The next day, in history and philosophy, we watched a movie set in Iceland, with the text in gammelnorsk (old Norwegian) which I think is closer to Icelandic. The subtitles were in Swedish. I was partially able to follow along with the text, but understood only a few of the spoken words. We also have a French channel on TV here now; I watch it sometimes to try and retain a little bit of French. I was watching it the other night, and trying to decide if I understand the news better in Norwegian or French; I’m not really sure anymore. I think I still lean towards French, but the gap is shrinking. That being said, I don’t really feel like my Norwegian has improved much in the past couple months. I guess once you learn the basics it has to plateau, and I haven’t been doing much to actively learn the language anymore. Listening and reading seems to slowly and steadily improve, just from being surrounded by Norwegian. Speaking is harder though, and I still use a lot of English expressions and words, sometimes even when I know how to say it in Norwegian, but I’m not completely sure.

It’s a big leap to go from hearing a word or expression in conversation, and being confident enough to use it yourself. My speaking is definitely delayed in relation to comprehension, but I think this is fairly normal when learning a foreign language. I also tend to use English conversation fillers; I say things like “yeah” and “right”, even when speaking Norwegian. I guess that’s just a habit. 


Yayy for bear hugs and polar bears! (both real, of course...)

Sorry those were kinda out of context; they're Abby's pictures from Løten Lys back in October.  The part above I wrote in class, as you probably gathered. Then I took the bus in to the shopping centre to buy some pens and a glue stick. These took about five minutes to pick out and buy, leaving me with half an hour to kill before the next bus. So, I went into the grocery store and took stealthy pictures of random foods, mostly christmas themed, while trying to look like I was texting with my phone at a funny angle. Hence the bad quality pictures:

Christmas liver paste, and Christmas beet salad. I don't think they're actually any different than the normal products.

Nothing to do with Christmas...but lots of knekkebrød! :)

Julebrus: Pop that tastes like a mixture of cream soda and fruit punch. Yummm

Grandiosa pizza.....Christmasized

Christmas yogurt....they really go all out here

...and right beside the Christmas yogurt, random bins of bulk shrimp. 

Christmas sausage and Christmas beer...it's a little ridiculous

Brun ost <3

And the last one; packages of rømme grøt. I'm not really sure how this works, seeing as it seemed to consist mostly of sour cream when I had it. Maybe it's a thickening mixture? As i was taking this picture, a man came up from behind and took a package. My stealth camera skills clearly didn't work, because he asked jokingly if I buy food, or just take pictures of it. That was when I decided to stop wandering around aimlessly and leave to catch the bus home.

Hmm...what else do I have to say? I made buttertarts yesterday, and finished making the rest today. I think it's funny how I manage to break all the rules about pastry making: you're not supposed to work the dough too much; I ended up kneading it to make it stick together. You're supposed to use cold ingredients; I used hot water to smush up all the butter, which you're also not supposed to do. Not my proudest pie making experience, but I honestly don't taste a difference. So who cares! When I was looking for a recipe online, I found out they're actually Canadian, I didn't even know. So that makes it all the better to freeze them and have a little bit of Canada with a Norwegian Christmas. 

Today, December 13th, is Luciadagen; I'm not entirely sure what that means. It's some kind of religious holiday, and involved little kids going door to door  dressed as angels and singing. Some people also make Lussekatter, yellow pastries. Agathe at track practice gave me one of hers, it was really good! I took a picture, but a) don't feel like going and getting the cord to upload one picture, and b) it doesn't look all that appetizing sitting half eaten on a bench in the change room. So, here's a more professional picture:

Yummm :D

We had a few days of snow, before the rain washed it away again. But here's a couple pictures to finish this post, back when it looked like winter, and not October:

I think I set a new record for percentage of a blog post devoted to food.

Natta   =)

Edit: I forgot I had a couple pictures on my camera:

Julekalender...isn't it cute? Since I'm the youngest in the house right now I get the little gifts each day, either lottery tickets or little chocolate snowmen. So far I've won 30 kr! :D

Advent candles

And to finish off this blog post in a really anticlimatic fashion: a Christmas themed milk carton.

Natta for real! Although I guess it's morning now   =)