Norwegians speaking English, and syvfjellsturen

Creds to Devin for this picture! haha

Norwegians speaking English, and some other language observations:


-You know how in english, when someone asks "are you not going to the beach anymore today" or "aren't you going to jump off that bridge", neither yes or no works as an answer? Like "No, I'm not NOT going....wait, I mean yes, I am not....going." Norwegian actually has a word for that! They have "Ja", "Nei", and then an inbetween word, "Jo" for all those confusing double negatives.

-That's one example where they have a word we don't have, but for the most part it seems they have a smaller range of words to use than we do. The word "nydelig" (google translates it as "beautiful") is used to describe everything from people to food to scenery. Or "deilig" (delicious) is used for food, scenery and experiences. We wouldn't say that both our hot chocolate and our ski trip were delicious, but they do that here.

-Norwegians are generally very good at english, but sometimes they have little expressions they use where they translate directly into english from norwegian. For example:

• "I'll follow you" instead of "I'll come with you"
• They often replace "V" with "W", so things become "werry good" and you "waccuum" instead of "vacuum"
• The "TH" sound sometimes gets replaced with "T", so you get "tank you" 
• "Fun" and "funny" are the same word in Norwegian (morsom), so people will ask "did you have a funny time?"
• "I will learn you this": they often confuse "to learn" with "to teach"
• 
  

I'm starting to notice more and more that I have to actively stop Norwegian word order from coming out when I speak english. Just for fun, I'm going to try and write a little dialogue in english, but translated directly from norwegian.

-Hei, how goes it?

-It goes good, I've been out and jogged in the nature.


-Sounds good out! I have been bad today, I have infection in the lungs. Thus have not I done some thing outside of cozying me in front of TV

-Uff da! that sounds not funny out. Good bettering to you!


-Thanks for that! I have actually taken enough medicine that it does not pain. So have I big cozied me today! Delicious to just take it with easy.

-Not worst! Saw you what her with the big black boots had on her yesterday night? Her who has program on the TV? Have not you want on those boots?


-Jo, I have very want on those boots! But soon become it summer, so shall I rather use money on sandals.

-That sounds smart out! Now must I make dinner, potatoes and fish tonight, like usual. Hope you are soon healthy like a fish! Perhaps that was a bad comparison! In any case, we talk!


-Yes, we do that. Have it good!

I've yet to meet a Norwegian who talks anything like this, but give me a couple more years (nahh, months even) in Norway and it'll be me!

7fjellsturen:


On Sunday Inger and I  hiked over the 7 mountains around Bergen. (They're all around 350-600 m above sea level, so not like, enormous by Canadian standards, but plenty big enough for me!!) I guess paying to hike all day in the rain is an appealing prospect to Norwegians, because there were 8000 people hiking at the same time. It's called the 7 fjellsturen (you can do a 4 mountain one as well) and basically you pay for a card that you clip at the top of each mountain, and when you get to the end you get a t shirt. They don't even time people, and you can start whenever you want. I still find it a bit of an odd idea, but it was neat to do!

We started around 6 am, and I finished around 4 pm. Inger (host mom) finished an hour or so later. So all in all it took me about 9.5 to 10 hours, and I never stopped for more than 10 minutes! I don't think my legs have ever been so tired!

The first three mountains were muddy and wet, and then the weather actually cooperated a bit, although it was still cold.

 Top of the first (at like 7:15 am)

Coming down from the first- it was like a muddy slip and slide! When the sun came out a little bit people actually started cheering. And the guy in front of me started loudly singing a norwegian song about wearing sunglasses. 

 Top of the second

And top of the third.

Shoes are getting muddier

After the third we had to cross through the city to start up the highest, Ulriken:

Ulriken from the bottom and top.

By this point I was starting to get a little tired, and we were joined by the people doing the 4 mountain hike. You could tell who was doing which by how high up on their pants there was mud.

As we were walking up the road to the start of the trail a ridiculous looking tourist bus passed us. On the side and back it said "you haven't experienced Bergen til you've been up mount Ulriken" and some kind of ENJOY Bergen's highest mountain quote. I doubt I was the only person it drove by thinking "enjoy?? hah!! as if".

After I came down from Ulriken I was pretty much sleepwalking, but being passed by kids and grandparents forced me to keep walking.

From the fifth, looking back at the third mountain.

Somewhere along the top there were random people dressed up as.....trolls? wizards? who knows. It was funny though.

I eventually made it to the end, got my t shirt, and then had to wait an hour for the train. I don't think I could've walked another 100 metres after that! 

All in all it was about 35 km, here's a map:

I'm still a bit sore today, although not too bad! Glad I got to experience something so Norwegian!

On monday night I had my final presentation for the rotary club here, and then I switched back to my first host family, who I'll live with for the last month. I had planned that before I switched to live with Jon and Inger; there was absolutely nothing wrong there! I'm so thankful I got to live with them for 6ish months!! Takk for meg  =)

Have it good ;)

What I'm going to miss

Aside from, well, everything:

• The word "koselig" and everything that goes along with it
• Smågodt
• Weekend breakfasts, with bread, knekkebrød, eggs, kaviar, brunost and jam, and so many other toppings I could never fit into one meal
• Drinking way too much coffee
• Being foreign and people's reactions when I answer "ja" to "forstår du ka eg sier?
• The challenge of speaking and understanding another language
• Spotify
• Meeting so many new people, and just using "well, I'm the exchange student" as a shield to be braver than I normally would at home
• That bread slices go in a basket before you eat them
• Spending hours laughing on skype with exchange students cause we have nothing better to do
• giant blocks of jarlsberg cheese, brunost, waffles for dessert, too much chocolate, and all the other good stuff that's made me gain weight this year
• Thinking and dreaming in norwegian
• Randomly putting up paper and painting on the walls in art class since we have no teacher
• Laughing at ridiculous ads playing on the radio while getting ready in the mornings
• Walking to school during sunrise, and home at sunset
• Everyone I've met here, whether I see them every day or just ran into them a few times
• Hearing my name misprounounced in so many adorable ways.
• "Jeg heter Lauren" "KAA? Maureen? Naureen? Laurie?" "LAUREN" "Laureeeeen?" ...close enough haha
• Reading someone else's name and having no idea how to even begin pronouncing it. And then forgetting the name right afterwards cause it was so different
• English teacher: "Lauren, you don't even have to be here today" ...ok! 
• Licorice...!
• "you're from Canada - so you play hockey right?"

This is just the beginning! although I'll have to do a "things I won't miss" post too. Ridiculously narrow roads where you better hope your bus doesn't meet a car going the other way, for example. I have a feeling that list will be much shorter though.

Og jeg må bare si, Tonje sin siste blogg post egentlig inspirert meg å skrive dette, selv om det jeg skrev var egentlig helt annet. Hun har en kjempe fin blogg, og dette innlegg gjorde meg til å smile hele tiden mens jeg leste den :)

17 Mai - Norges nasjonaldag

Yesterday was Norway's national day, simply known as "17 Mai" Before I talk about that, I'm going to post some pictures that haven't really fit in any other posts, and just some nice pictures of Norway in general. Just a little preview of this gorgeous country before explaining how they celebrate the creation of their constitution.

From Arnanipa

Above the city, on the way up Ulriken

Top of Ulriken

Bryggen in Bergen

Lyngseidet, in Northern Norway

Bergen in November

Christmas morning

Kvamskogen

On May 17, 1814, the Norwegian constitution was signed declaring Norway to be an independant nation, although it was still under Swedish rule at the time. A big part of the celebration are the "tog" (literally, train) or parades, that take place all over the country. Kindergardens and different community groups parade around, and lots of people dress up in bunads, national costumes.

I went out on the night of May 16th; it's a common night to go out and party, as well as the last night of Russ celebrations. On the 17th we went and watched a bit of the parade in Arna, then visited some family of my host family. 

It was pouring rain a few minutes before the parade started, hence all the rain gear

Different regions of Norway have different bunads, old fashioned dresses/suits for men. They cost like $5000!!! 

Some pictures of bunads from google, since I didn't get many pictures:

A picture from Wikipedia of the children's parade in Oslo

A random dressed up kid getting russ cards from a russebil

Russebil

The bigger parades in the city were earlier in the day, but we just made it to the smaller one in Arna. There was an impressive amount of people walking in it, considering that it was raining like crazy right before.

Host parents and me

Afterwards we went to my host parents son's parents in law (got that?) for a very Norwegian meal of Rømmegrøt and "spekemat". 

They like to pair foods together here; when you have baked salmon, you have cucumber salad. Raspeboller (thick potato flour balls) go with bacon and kohlrabi. 

I don't entirely understand this combination though, dry papery flatbread with salted meats, and sour cream custard with sugar, cinnamon and butter. You don't actually mix the meat and flatbread with the grøt in any way, but they always have the two together. 

Spekemat

Rømmegrøt

The first time I tried Rømmegrøt, in October, I wasn't exactly a fan. I wrote this in my blog post:

"Eating Rømmegrøt (sour cream porridge) for the first and hopefully last time. A thick custard of sour cream, milk and flour, which would be fine as a small amount of sauce with something else, but an entire bowl of it was overwhelming! You sprinkle sugar and cinnamon on it, and if you're a true norwegian, a giant glob of butter (typical). It was like eating a bowl of cheese sauce/cheese cake filling/glue."

A giant bowl of cheese sauce/cheese cake filling/glue? not so appetizing sounding haha. I've had it twice since then, and grown to like it, I just have to take less and put lots of sugar and cinnamon. Maybe the dry bread and salted meat they eat with it are meant to counter the sweet fatty custard? It's a mystery to me.

May 17 is a big deal in Norway, and it was neat to see! Now I need to go try and find a cheap Norwegian flag on sale that I can get people to sign before I leave. 

I just got my Norwegian "heldagsprøve" or test results back, and got a 6! That's the highest mark you can get, although I'm pretty sure I had slightly different marking criteria than the others haha. The question was "what does it mean to be Norwegian?" and you were supposed to compare two texts, but I mostly just talked about my own experiences. It was actually kind of fun; as you can probably tell from this blog, I love writing about my impressions of Norway.

At one point I confused the word for "influence/affect" (påvirke) with "arrest" (pågrep), so wrote "...Norwegian culture is arrested" instead of "...Norwegian culture is influenced". haha oops

One last language note, when a kid asks if they can hold your hand, they say, literally translated, "can I rent you?" I love little strange translations like that.

So that was 17 Mai. I'm so glad that I've had the chance to be a part of this country for a year!!!

 

Stockholm!!

Proud to say I just went for a run in Sweden. Which makes that my fourth country I've gone for a run in. Not all that impressive, but when you consider I've only ever been to four countries in my life (and you can probably guess which ones), it's not so bad.

Borrowed shoes and ski socks, good enough!

There's fairly cheap plane tickets here, so I took advantage and came to visit Pallavi, an exchange student from the US living just outside of Stockholm. For 180 swedish kroner (a little under $30) I got a train/bus/tram pass that works everywhere in Stockholm. They have a really good public transportation system, and the past four days have been a blur of popping down and up from the underground, running for trains, taking giant escalators and being glad I wasn't figuring out the system on my own. It's all still a bit amazing for me, having never even been on a train before I came to Norway. I'm sure this is nothing compared to bigger cities though.

Giant escalators (yet another thing that is probably normal to most people, but I got really excited about and had to take an extra trip up and down for the fun of it)

Here's a map by the way, showing where Stockholm is. Bergen is on the west coast of Norway, a bit further north than Oslo. I had no idea Stockholm was on the opposite side of Sweden before I booked my flight and bothered to look up where it was.

We came back to her host families house to drop off my backpack, before taking the train back into Stockholm. My first impression of the neighborhood where she lives was....IKEA!! And their bathroom has a shower with no walls or curtain (but inside a bathtub), so the water sprays all over the floor (which has a drain). Can't say I quite understand this. It's a beautiful neighborhood though!


We went back to Stockholm and wandered around stores, then bought mcflurries and went down to see the water. I tried to ask for a mcflurry and a cup of water in swedish (just saying "vatten" instead of "vann") but got answered in english.

Being around people speaking Swedish is like going back in time to, say, November. When I could understand, but it took full focus and concentration, I couldn't just listen passively. After an hour or so of dinner conversation my brain just wants to scream "ok, that's enough, can't I just relax for a bit?" and smash itself on the table. But head smashing isn't really a socially acceptable response. It's getting easier though, as I start to get used to the different sounds and words. For some words Swedish has this weird sound that's like "hcwoooo", which sounds more like skis on snow than part of a word. So it's mostly when that sound pops up that I get really confused. It's also really neat to be able to understand a new language, and to feel like Norwegian is easy to understand in comparison!

On Friday we woke up to go to Pallavi’s school, the main goal being to eat lunch there before going to Stockholm. Students in Swedish schools get a free warm lunch every day, and it was tacos, ground beef and salad, as good of a meal as you’d pay five or six dollars for in the cafeteria at home. 

At one point Pallavi went to get water or something, and I was standing alone in the canteen for a bit when a lunch lady came up, looked at me strangely, and said HEY! My first response was to walk away from her and hope to blend into the crowd, but she followed me, and I tried to play the dumb exchange student who doesn’t understand anything until I found Pallavi to explain to her who I was. Somehow she recognized me as being new out of 800 kids? Turns out I just needed a slip of paper saying I was allowed to be at school, they still let me eat lunch.

They got like half the letters in my name right? haha

We sat with two girls in her class who are going on exchange next year, one to Costa Rica, and one to Canada! She doesn’t know where in Canada she’ll be yet though. We went along to what I thought was going to be a Swedish class, but turned out to be in English. The school is laid out more like a summer camp than a school, with different buildings for each classroom, like cabins. So you have to go outside to go from class to class. It was a really nice layout, although maybe not so much in the middle of winter. 

They also don't use laptops in class like we do in Norway, so it felt more like a class at home. 

I got asked a few times in Sweden if I noticed any differences between Norway and Sweden. It's a hard question to answer for Norway and Canada, and I've spent a lot more time in them and seen a lot more of Canada and Norway than I have Sweden. One big difference between Stockholm and Bergen was the transportation, how they have way more trains and trams, along with the underground system. You also have to scan your card before you come into the train station, instead of the conductor walking along the train and checking everyone. I don't know if that's just a city to city difference though, and Stockholm's population is almost 4 times bigger than Bergen's. 

I also answered that things were more yellow and blue, and looked more Ikea. Which sounds stupid, but they  do! Like how the school is yellow, and in the picture above you can see that the garbage can is yellow too. And lots of the trains were yellow and blue too. The post boxes as well. And these signs:

We spent the rest of the day shopping, and ate "polar bread" with pesto and cheese for dinner on a park bench. It looked like this after a day squished in my bag, except a lot greener than it looks here:

And it tasted amazing! I'd missed pesto so much!

On Saturday we went to the royal palace:

 One of the guards - I said everything was yellow and blue!

 On the way to the palace

As close as I was allowed to get to the guard for a picture 

We walked a bit through the palace, which isn't where the royal family actually lives, but they come back and forth to do business, and the rooms are still used for special occasions. 

The only picture I got of inside; I just kept thinking it would be a really fun place to play hide and seek or tag. Don't think the other tourists or guides would have appreciated that though. 

Then we ate our pesto sandwiches outside on a bench, and happened to be in front of a wedding at a finnish church, which was just ending. So we got entertained by all the women trying to cross the cobblestone street in stilletos. Then a horde of japanese tourists came by dragging their suitcases, cameras around their necks, and not having much more luck with the cobblestones. I felt very un-tourist in comparison, which was nice.

We bought ice cream:

I may possibly have spent the equivalent of eight dollars on this double scoop of brownie and chocolate-orange ice cream... so worth it!

And then wandered some more around Gamla Stan and the other older touristy areas around it.

                                                                                                               

(Sorry for the giant gap that might be here, I can't seem to get rid of it)

Saturday night we visited Pallavi's first host family for dinner. This meant several hours of conversation with me speaking Norwegian and everyone else speaking Swedish. It got tiring, but it's crazy to think that we were speaking two different languages and (for the most part) understanding eachother! We watched the eurovision song contest, where the 25 countries remaining in the final round performed their songs (pretty much all in english), people voted, then they went one by one through how each of the 40 something countries voted. It took forever! People living in a country aren't allowed to vote for their own, and Pallavi's host parents were guessing how countries would vote based on alliances during the world wars and who was "friends" with who.  It was strange to see representatives from all the voting countries giving the results in English, I've never heard so many accents in such a short time! Azerbaijan won, of all countries, with Italy second and Sweden third. 

The big surprise on Sunday was.....that we could shop!! I've gotten fairly used to the idea in Norway that if you need something on a Sunday, you don't have much choice besides the gas station. Even if you just need some ice cream for dessert. We spent most of the day at the Nordiska museum, which has displays about Swedish life and history. 

It covered everything from a history of fashion, to food and dishes through the years, to the Sami (native people here). 

Map of where the Sami live/lived in Norway, Sweden and Finland

I'm not going to go into detail about everything we saw there, since this post is really long as it is, but it was really interesting! (And free if you're under 19). I think the reception lady was a bit confused when we spoke Norwegian and Swedish to her, and said we were from Canada and the US. Four countries going on at once!

Monday I came back "home" to Bergen, after taking the train and bus with Pallavi to the airport (she was nice enough to get up at 6 am and travel the hour and a half by train and bus to keep me company and make sure I didn't get off at the wrong place).

So that was my weekend in Stockholm. It was amazing!!

A few more pictures/random observations:

• You could text vending machines to order stuff from them!

• They have giant wheels of knekkebrød, as well as the normal squares we have here:

• And they had butt rests at the train station - too high to sit on, but just for leaning against - smart!

• Speed bumps = farthinder:

• With Swedish, it often happened that I wouldn't be able to read a word or phrase on a sign, but when Pallavi read it out loud I would understand. It seems like written Swedish is further from Norwegian than spoken Swedish. I don't know if "it often happened" was a weird way to phrase that or not - I tend to invent weird sentence structure now and not be able to tell if it's correct or not.
• On one random street they used flower boxes instead of speed bumps; you had to drive a little obstacle course of flower boxes!

I got home after about 6 hours of travelling, only one of which was on the plane. Train-bus-plane-bus-train-bus-home. Lots of switching and a fair bit of walking, but it's really nice to be able to travel for so cheap, and not be reliant on people driving me.

Today was Norway's national day, I'll write a post about that later. One last picture from Stockholm: