When you have no teacher in art class - why not paint on the walls?

When a teacher is away here, it's much less common to get a substitute teacher. It happens, but is nowhere near as likely as at home. Instead, the counselor or principal (rektor) will come in, tell us what to do, and leave. Last Tuesday our assignment in art class was to look through some old books about Bergen, and photocopy parts in preparation for our test on Friday. 

That didn't take long, and we were left with an hour or so to kill. What to do? The first suggestion was to paint the walls in the art classroom, but we decided that maybe that wasn't the best idea without permission. We found a big roll of paper instead, taped it to the wall, and just started painting with paintbrushes and hands, with no plan whatsoever in mind.

When I say "my art class" by the way, it means 9 students, five of which were there and painted. It's not like we had 30 kids flinging paint at the walls. My school here only has about 300 students, and I have several small classes. French has like 9 or 10, History/Philosophy has like 6 or 7 on a good day, and art has 9 when everyone shows up. The rest are normal sized classes.

So we dressed up in plastic bag tunics, bound together with masking tape to keep our clothes clean, and started painting, with no real purpose.

I started off with a circle, because I had to paint something, and it morphed into an eye. 

Not exactly a masterpiece, but that's what you get in 45 minutes. It was a really fun and spontaneous class.

For the next art class, on Thursday, we had no teacher again, but were told to go into the city and take pictures of various buildings from the middle ages. We knew we had a test on Friday that would have something to do with Bergen's history, but didn't know exactly what it would be.

This is probably a good time to tell a bit more about Bergen and Arna, and just where exactly I am in Norway.

There's the three "fingers" with Bergen on the west coast of Norway. It still surprises me to turn on the TV and see finnish TV channels, or hear of people driving to Sweden or taking a boat to Denmark. I tend to forget I'm actually in Europe.

To give a little perspective, Bergen is about as far north as Whitehorse is in Canada. Considering how far north Norway is, it's very warm. The climate here is much closer to a Vancouver than Whitehorse.

I'm living in Arna, which is a sort of suburb of Bergen. Bergen has around 250 000 people, and is the second biggest city in Norway. Arna has a population of 12 000 or so, but unlike Nelson, has no developed main street or stores. There's a little mall with grocery stores and a few clothing stores, but there's barely even any restaurants in Arna; everyone goes into Bergen.

Getting to Bergen takes 8 minutes by train through a mountain , but longer (20 minutes or so) to drive around the mountain.

Some facts about Bergen:

• Founded in 1070, and the capital of Norway for a period of time. I still find the idea of walking through that old of a city incredible. Nearly a thousand years old! 

•  an important trading city, with a lot of German influence. 

• Parts of the city have burned down many times. THIS link lets you see the area 34 fires burned since 1170, as well as where the ocean was at that point, and how far the city had developed. If nothing else, it's kind of fun to move the mouse really fast and see the orange blob jump around as the city grows

• In 1702, approximately 90 percent of the city burned down, in its worst fire.

• The Black Death came to Bergen in 1349, from an English ship.

• Bergen was Norway's biggest city until the 1830's, when Oslo overtook it

• Bergen comes from Bjørgvin, old norse meaning "the meadow among the mountains"

So, for art class on Thursday, we walked around to some of the landmarks and took pictures; being tourists in our own city. 

Art class in the city, missing Christopher and Emil, as well as Silvia who took the picture

On Friday, our "test" was to make a brochure presenting different landmarks from the middle ages in Bergen, using our own photos. Not too difficult when they didn't turn the internet off for it. I can't get the indesign file to upload here, but the top of my brochure looked like this, nothing exciting;

A couple of the places I talked about:

Domkirken (a church), built in 1150

Håkonshallen; built as a party hall for the king. It was used in the king Håkon's son's wedding to a Danish woman in in 1261

So that was a history lesson for today. I find history way more interesting when it's this close and real, rather than just a dry textbook. It's really neat to be able to walk along cobblestone streets past ancient churches just going from the shopping centre to the train station.

I'd like to do a section about differences between Canada and Norway here, but everything here seems so normal that I can't think of anything major I haven't written before. A couple posts about differences from earlier in my exchange are here (3.5 months in) and here (near the end of the post, 7 weeks in) and a really old one, just two or so weeks in here

I wanted to do another one of those posts after reading Karen's post today, who's in Brazil. She has a great blog, and this post was really interesting! 

So, here goes a short list of observations, after 7 months in Norway (WHAT?....yeah, seven month anniversary was yesterday)

• Wikipedia: As far as I remember, we were always taught that wikipedia doesn't count as a source in school. You couldn't just write "wikipedia" in your bibliography. Norwegians use it for everything though. We get wikipedia printouts in class, and the newspaper the other day even quoted it for some statistics. 

• Their use of commas and periods is backwards from us when it comes to numbers. So 10,9 means 10.9, while 1.345 is 1,345. This still confuses me.

• They call 10 km "en mil" which sounds like "a mile" with a norwegian accent. So for 50 km, especially for things like ski races, they'll say "5 mil." Didn't make any sense to me til I asked.

• Measurements for cooking are all metric too, which I find reallllly confusing! The measuring cups have different lines for rice, water, flour etc, based on weight I guess. You can't just use a simple cup measure for everything. I never really realized though, what a confused mixture of imperial and metric we use in Canada. "Yeah, well we measure distance in km, but height in feet, temperature in celsius unless it's an oven, or sometimes a fever, weigh ourselves in pounds, and milk in Litres....." It's a fun one to explain.

• There aren't really any "one stop shop" kind of stores, at least none that I've come across. No walmart here! You have to go to a different store for different things, can't just buy thread, glue, fill a prescription and buy groceries at the same place.

• This doesn't necessarily mean there's more variety in the average stores at shopping centres though. Every one I've been to (in Oslo, Hamar, Halden, Sandvika, Ski, Bergen...) they have almost no variety in clothing stores. Cubus, H&M, Vero Moda, Bik Bok etc are everywhere.

• Public transportation: It might just have something to to with living near the main road here, versus way above town at home, but it's never been so easy for me to get places. I may not always be the best at figuring out bus schedules and routes, and theres lots of people who would complain about the system here. But compared to what I'm used to, I love being able to just take a bus every half hour, that connects right to the train to the city. It's easy to catch busses from there too, although I haven't done that too much. The trains across the country are great too, at least from where I live. If you book at least a day in advance, you can get tickets to Oslo for like 35 dollars. Way cheaper than the Greyhound bus at home, nicer, and faster. No stopping for smoke breaks every stop at random sketchy bus stations; the train barely even stops.

• Bergen dialect: I've mentioned plenty of times how much variation there is in dialects here. How you can literally cross a bridge and people will be talking differently. The Bergen dialect apparently has a German influence. I think I got lucky with where I was placed, as far as dialect go, as confused as I was at first. We don't have to roll our R's here, just kind of choke them, and people talk with more of a similar rythym to english. In the east they speak really bouncy, for lack of a better word, and it seems hard to know when to go up and down. Also, we have the added bonus here of only having two grammatical genders! I didn't really pay attention to this until I was just in Oslo with the other exchange students, and someone asked why I said "klokken" instead of "klokka." For some reason we're pretty much the only city in Norway to have just neutral and masculine, no feminine gender. Makes life easier for me!

That's all that comes to mind for now.

It was feeling like Spring, until Winter decided to give us another visit over the past few days. A few last pictures from this morning:

Below the school