Crunchy Knekkebrød in a Silent Classroom

I'm sitting in philosophy class eating one of the loudest foods that exists: knekkebrød, while the rest of the class sits dead silent and writes a test. CRUNCH...try to chew really slowly....CRUNCH....fun. I finished my test about 45 minutes ago; there's only so much I can write about philosophy in norwegian. I feel sorry for my teacher reading it, whenever I don't know a word, I replace all C's with K's, and add in random J's and hope it becomes norwegian. If that still looks too far fetched, I just write the english word in quotations. I also tend to translate expressions word for word, I'm not sure if "to see the big picture" means the same thing literally written in Norwegian. My teacher speaks fluent english though, along with norwegian, french and icelandic, so I'm sure he'll figure it out somehow. I'm happy to be able to write that much norwegian, even if it really is, as my teacher remarked when I used "kalme" instead of the real word, "rolig", "laurwegian".

Can't you just hear the crunching? 

I'm writing this on my school computer, which is a norwegian computer, so it's putting angry red lines under nearly every word I write. Kind of annoying, along with the fact that I can't figure out how to change the screen brightness, because the control panel is, obviously, in norwegian. I feel slightly blinded when I look away from it for a second.

This post really has no purpose, other than to make me look like I'm doing something productive in this silent classroom. It's pouring rain outside, and any semblance of winter is long gone, it just looks...wet.

But anyways, back to the point (not that there really is one)

Learning norwegian is going up and down, but I do feel like I'm improving. I speak mostly norwegian at home, and can hold basic conversations. When sentences get longer I start sounding awkward, but I can manage with shorter ones. I'm also starting to understand more of what's going on around me; the other day in philosophy we had a debate about Aristotle and Plato's views (or, in norwegian, Aristoteles, and Platon, I don't really see why that's neccesary...) I wasn't able to contribute anything, but I understood nearly the entire discussion.

There's still a lot of awkward exchanges and times where "smile and nod" if you don't understand doesn't work. I haven't had any major misunderstandings yet, thanks to most people switching to english if I don't understand.

Looks like the class is done writing the test now, I think they all wrote closer to five or six pages altogether, rather than my one to three sentence answers, where the first sentence is just repeating the question! The two tests in this class are the only ones I've done so far, because I actually want to learn the subject matter. I'll give an overview of my classes, and what i do in them:

-Norwegian: I don't have a hope of understanding when the class studies old nynorsk sagas, so I don't really try. I go on facebook, try and learn norwegian, and generally don't accomplish a whole lot.

-Math: Same deal as Norwegian, although it's only once a week, so I haven't had very many classes. They started with exponents and percents, fairly basic stuff, then switched to learning systems of counting. I've never counted using letters before, and don't really feel the need either...

-Gym: I wish this was more than once a week, it's a nice change from the usual classes. We've ran on the track, done orienteering, played various gym games, and done a 3 km running race. It's harder than gym class back home, but I like it.

-Art History: Seems to consist of the teacher showing powerpoints of old sculptures and buildings, and I usually don't understand what she's saying about them. I haven't gotten too much out of this class yet.

-Design/Architecture: A really neat class to have, since I've never taken any art classes before. We just finished working on photoshop and illustrator to make patterns, and now we're working on composition.

-Visual Art: These three art classes alternate in some mysterious pattern so that I have one or another about 4 hours a week, sometimes more. I'm never entirely sure if it's Design and Architecture or this one, but we've been doing a lot of sketching of people's forms, and did some studies of drawing muscles and bones. Sometime I'll take some pictures of what I've been working on, but I don't have any at home.

(I never did mention that now it's 3 hours later, and school is over, so I'm back home on my english laptop)

-History/philosophy: This is a really small class, about 8 people. I guess art has 9, and french has about the same, so those are my smaller classes where I'm more involved. I've never taken philosophy before, so it's a challenge to take it in norwegian. The teacher teaches partly in english for me, and expects me to follow along, so I've learnt a fair bit here. We're going through the greek philosophers right now, and moving on to roman. After the test today we had a fun quiz contest between two different groups in the class, he put in a few Canadian questions for my benefit. Thankfully I knew the population of Canada, but wasn't sure whether we won more or less than 10 gold medals at the last olympics. It's always strange when people know more about your country than you do...

-French:  Again a really small class, where we don't use laptops much, so I usually follow what's going on. I find it really difficult to distinguish between norwegian and french sometimes, it seems my brain only has room for two languages at a time. Regardless, it's good to think in french a little bit.

-History: My description of the other classes gives the impression that I somewhat follow what's going on, but history is definitely an exception. It took the teacher a couple days to realize I was there, and since it's such a big class, I'm not really involved. I haven't actually bothered to go get the textbook yet....woops. When I occasionally look up from my laptop I tend to recognize what he's talking about though, it follows a similar path as history/philosophy, but without the philosophy part. Sometimes I spent the class trying to read parts of my history/philosophy textbook, with a lot of help from google translate.

This has been WAY too much writing without any pictures, and if anyone is still reading at this point, I'm seriously impressed. So, here is the very wet view out my bedroom window right now:

In case you can't tell, it's actually raining really hard...

I think I mentioned it before, but i have my personnummer now, and actually have a norwegian bank account, even if there's no money in it. The Rotary club agreed to pay for my bus pass, which is so nice of them; it'll let me take the train to Bergen and the bus as much as I want. It'll be really nice not to have a half hour walk whenever I want to go to the city or the shopping centre!

About a month ago I met a woman eating lunch with her son on a bench, while I was coming down from a hike. She said she’d seen me running often, and we started talking. She invited me to her place for dinner on Wednesday, along with another Canadian woman her husband met on the plane from Egypt to Oslo.  The Canadian woman is 26, and her husband is working with Statoil.  It’s always neat to talk about Norwegian and Norway with a mix of foreigners and locals, and that's what we did most of the time. Some random things we talked about:

-Norwegian dialects, and how the bergen dialect can sound like german to foreigners

-Different ways to learn languages; grammar based, versus conversation based. Sigrid ( I think was his name), Birgit's (the woman I met on the bench) husband, was saying that you should learn to say “I’m learning _____________, but I don’t speak it very well yet” then go out and practice that, and keep adding sentences to what you can say. They lived in...Azerbaijan? I think, for a few years, so learnt that language, as well as speaking some of the best English I've heard here yet, which is really saying something.

-How narrow norwegian roads are

-How norwegians like to talk about the weather

-Different ways of making rømmegrøt, apparently if you use semolina flour rather than regular, it isn't as thick

There was much more, and it's always really neat talking to people who are also learning norwegian, and comparing observations.

It's time for a picture again, although I really don't have any exciting ones. I'll put you in my shoes and take a picture of the two different directions I can see right now:

Out the living room window

A bad cell phone picture of the living room...note the napping Tord's feet :)

Thursday was "Operation Dagsverk" in Norway, and as far as I could tell, it involves students working or selling things to make 300 kr (about 50 dollars) each, which is donated to some kind of project in Brazil. I didn't understand what was going on when some students talked to my class about it, and only found out what it involved, through facebook, on Wednesday at midnight. By then it was too late to arrange something, so I didn't have school on Thursday. When I told my host family about it, they offered to donate the money, being the amazing people that they are. All I had to do was make dinner, vacuum the downstairs, and clean the downstairs bathroom. All things that I'm used to doing at home, although I still haven't actually cleaned the bathroom yet.

I was planning on making either stirfry, or some kind of indian butter chicken for dinner, but we didn't have the stuff to make sauce for either. So I put my collection of 1 kr (about 17 cent) coins in a bag, and walked to the little grocery store down the road. I literally spent half an hour wandering around trying to decide what to make; buying ginger, coconut milk and spices would have cost way more than my little piggy bank contained, especially since the coconut milk came in little boxes that were about one inch by two inches. There was no teriyaki sauce to be found either. After trying to read the instructions on nearly every package in the (very small) foreign foods aisle, I finally settled for a jar of tikka masala sauce, which turned out really good. I ate the leftovers for breakfast today, not exactly your traditional norwegian breakfast!

I just remembered that I do have more pictures to put up! Last Sunday Sonja and I hiked around in Gullfjellet, which i posted about a few weeks ago. It looked very different this time, and we saw lots of people skiing and sledding. 

Sonja, me and a Norwegian flag :)

Redningshytta!

My buried feet - note the fuzzy white socks, they're actually snow! 

Our trudging trail, next to a ski track. At this point we were wishing we had skis!

Sonja took the train to Arendal on Wednesday, so I got to see her for a little over a week. It was really fun to show her around, go hiking, win a norwegian scrabble game against my host family, bake two apple pies, and speak fast, crazy english and know that (sometimes :P) she would understand.

I think this is plenty long enough, seeing as I wrote my last post less than a week ago, and this one is mostly text. I can smell waffles cooking in the kitchen, it's a tradition I think I'll bring home with me!

Next weekend I'm going to Tromsø, WAYYY up north, for the weekend with my host family, to visit some of Tord's family, so I'm excited for that! 

Ha det :)