Stavanger / Preikestolen hike

On Friday afternoon I flew to Stavanger for the district 2250 rotary conference with our club president Ingeborg (also my counsellor) and next year's club president. Stavanger is on the west coast about a 4 hour drive south of Bergen. There were 3 exchange students who came to the district in August, and two rebounds who had been to the US. On Saturday morning we hiked to the famous "pulpit rock" or preikestolen near Stavanger, which is a 3.8 km hike to a cliff that drops 600 m down to the ocean.

It was pouring rain a good part of the time - and I forgot my raincoat! Luckily the family I stayed with for the weekend had an extra one. They gave everyone on the hike free little backpacks, and amazing sandwiches to bring up with us. The hike was rocky and slippery, and there was an insane amount of people on the trail considering the weather. I'm just going to post pictures now, because I think they'll show the hike much better than I can describe.

On the ferry from Stavanger

Straight down!

All the students

After the hike we ate at the restaurant in the lodge below the trail ( we get a lot of free food at these conferences!) then went back and got ready for the formal dinner. The dinner lasted 4 hours, which is a lot of speeches, mostly in norwegian although I think one might have been swedish; I couldn't understand enough to tell. 

I feel like my norwegian is improving though; I'm starting to be able to follow simpler conversations. My speaking is getting better too, but I still find it confusing with the different dialects. Where I live, we read mostly bokmål, which is almost danish, but speak a blend of bokmål and nynorsk where the proportions of the two seem to vary from person to person, but lean more towards nynorsk. I feel like I'm speaking a different dialect every day! I'll write another post sometime and explain this better once I know more about it; these are just my impressions. If anyone norwegian is reading this and wants to correct me, go for it!

Today ( Sunday) we found out our presentation to the rotarians was supposed to be more in depth than "jeg heter Lauren, jeg kommer fra Canada" like last week. Alyssa ( from Merritt) and I frantically pieced together a short powerpoint about Canada and ourselves, which I think turned out alright.

So, that was my weekend in Stavanger, back to school tommorow. I finally got a laptop to use in school, although I still don't have my "personnummer" to be offically registered, which means I can't get a bank account or a student bus card. 

Alrighty, sorry for the really disjointed post!

ha det :)