Differences

I have an hour of time to kill before going shopping in the city, so I'm gonna write down my observations of differences between Canada and Norway. I don't mean to generalize though, some of the differences could be found between areas of families in Canada, so these are my observations between Nelson and Arna/Bergen.

- They get laptops to use in school here! I haven't got one yet, but it's strange to see kids talking on msn in class when their sitting right next to each other.

- The houses are painted brighter colours; the area I'm living in would look a lot more like Nelson if the houses weren't all white/red/yellow/blue

- Rain.

- More rain.

- Although the rain isn't actually that bad, the mist makes it kind of pretty. And this is specific to my area, not all of Norway. Now I see why my host family has a bucket full of umbrellas near the front door, and the local shoe store has an entire wall for gumboots/rainboots/whatever you want to call them

- More people smoke, at least I've noticed that at school.

- Roundabouts everywhere

- Handball! I went to a practice with a girl from one of my classes last night; she's injured so we did exercises on the side and watched. It's intense! They put klister ( like ski wax) on the game balls after the players are over 16, so the floor has random bits of klister all over it

- Cross country skiing is more noticeable, even in the summer. There was a rollerski race on tv; they had helicopter coverage, the streets were lined with people, commentators, everything. I've seen Marit Bjørgen on TV several times, and the brown cheese package (yumm) has a picture of a biathlete on it.

- We ate dinner fairly early in Canada, but they eat it even earlier here. Around 3 or 4, and then dessert and coffee are around 6:30 or 7. I like this schedule; after school is when I'm the hungriest anyways.

- Weekend breakfasts in my host family are around 10:30/11:00. On the first Sunday here I woke up early, because I wasn't used to the time difference, and went for a run at 6 am. I was pretty much bored out of my mind for the next four hours, and learned to sleep in later on weekends :). My host dad usually plays golf in the morning on weekends, and my host mom stays in bed and reads. It seems like weekends are really relaxed.

- Fish and potatoes, it's true! Although some people have said that's not actually that common, and other exchangers have said they don't eat them as much as I do. It's a lot more fish and potatoes than I eat at home, however; I've only had pasta here once. My host grandma is really good at cooking fish though, so I don't mind :)

- At the shopping centre in Bergen and the train station there, they make you PAY to use the washrooms! You have to put in a 5 or 10 kr coin, which is ( very roughly) paying 90 cents to 1.70 !

I can't think of any more right now, but I've only been here 2 weeks, so I'm sure I'll come across many bigger differences later.

Ha det :)