A lesson on brunost and lovely Bergen weather

I'm sitting on the couch having an inner war with myself whether or not to go for a run. The rain is whipping by in horizontal sheets outside, and I think most of our snow is melted again. Last night all the side roads were solid ice with a thin layer of water on top, and I'm a little hesitant to go out and check how they are today. Mostly just because I'm lazy and would rather tell you guys about brunost than go out and get soaked. I'd rather be here: (excuse the angry face):

Than out there :

So, I'm going to start this post off with a lesson on brunost, or brown cheese.

I’d heard a bit about brunost before I came to Norway, but really didn’t understand what it was. Cheese is cheese, right? Soft, hard, whatever; you still eat it on pasta, with crackers, and on your ham sandwiches. You would never eat normal cheese with strawberry jam, or on waffles. But brunost is no ordinary cheese. Actually, it's not really cheese at all; it's made from the whey instead of the curds. (I don't actually know anything about cheese making; the only thing I know about curds and whey has to do with little miss muffet and a spider)

 

At my first breakfast here in Norway I was encouraged to try it, and thought it was just normal (although brown) cheese. So I tried it with tomatoes; first and last time I've done that. It's more common to eat it with sweeter things, like jam. Ever since I tried it with raspberry jam and toast it's become one of the staples in my diet here, for better or for worse. There was definitely one day where I ate this combination for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 

So if it isn't cheese, and you don't eat it in a normal cheese-like way ( if such a generalization even exists), what is it? A mixture of milk, cream and whey boiled until the lactose caramelizes, turning it brown. I don't want to do too much internet research on it, because I know I'll come across its nutritional information somewhere, and I really don't want to know that! I would describe it as tasting like caramel and peanut butter, but it doesn't really taste like that at all.

Fløtemysost was most often in the fridge at Tord and Helene's, it's mild and has lots of cream. It's made from cow's milk.

Gudbrandsdalsost is stronger, and made from a mixture of goats' and cow's milk. My best translation of the package is: The brown cheeses from TINE (brand) are some of what makes norwegians norwegians. These særnorske? cheeses have traditions back to Anne Hov's original recipe from 1863. I can't figure out what "særnorske" means; google translate gives me "weird norwegian", "relatively high" and "relatively sharp" depending on how I type it in. None of which really make sense. 

 

The last major category of brunost from TINE is Ekte Geitost ( real goats cheese). It's made from, well, obviously goat's milk, and is the strongest tasting. 

At first I only really liked the milder fløtemysost, but I've grown to love the other two with jam as well. Bread isn't even neccesary!

I think I'm going to go out and give running a try now. I told Devin (exchange student near Oslo) on skype that if I hadn't seen lightning or falling trees by 3:00, I would run. It's 2:56 and doesn't look like either of those is going to happen. Although there was thunder and lightning a few weeks ago while it was snowing; I didn't even know that was possible!

Hopefully I'll come back alive to finish this, preferably intact. If not, well, my last written words were about Brunost, so not a bad way to go. 

Well, I survived. It was pretty anticlimatic actually; the roads were bare now and it was only drizzling. It was my longest run in a while, an hour and twenty minutes or so. 

On Friday I helped with the SFO (after school program) again; I think I mentioned it before. The kids, who are around 6-8 I think, have gym time after school for an hour as long as there's enough kids to run it. On Friday there was only five, but instead of sending me home until next week, the leader said I could just take them on my own. I was a little nervous; it's one thing to play with them when there's another leader in charge, and quite another to give orders on my own. With kids I can't just say things in english and know they'll understand; I have to figure out how to phrase things in Norwegian, or mime it. Luckily I got an easy group; four girls and one guy who were thrilled that I was willing to drag them around the floor using a hockey stick. Exhausting, but pretty easy entertainment. Alternating that with jumping randomly off benches onto mats and playing disorganized floor hockey easily took up the hour. When we had a few minutes left and had cleaned up the equipment, I tried to suggest we play tag, but didn't know what it was called in Norwegian. I asked one of the girls what it was called by pretending to tag her, and she said something in Norwegian that I didn't catch. They all seemed excited to play, and one girl told me they needed a ring to play with. One ran off and found a screw, and they sat me down with them in a circle on the floor and started singing. Not exactly the game of tag I'd expected; I was pretty confused. It ended up being a "duck duck goose" type game where one runs around the circle and puts the screw (or ring) in anothers hand, and then they open their eyes and guess who has it. 

I still have no idea what "tag" is called in Norwegian. 

Regardless, I was happy to make it through the hour without any major miscommunications. The next communication challenge came on Saturday, when I took the train to the city to go shopping.

I have a bus pass which Rotary pays for, which you buy every month on the bus or at the station. I bought mine for this month on the bus, and the bus driver gave me a receipt without a "valid until" date on it. I asked him about it, and he said nahh, it's fine, see here, a green light comes up when I scan it, so it's valid! I was a little skeptical of how it would work on the train, but long discussions in Norwegian aren't really my strong point so I let it go.

I forgot about it until I was on the train yesterday, and the conductor was coming around checking tickets. I tried to explain that you could see the date I bought it on the reciept and that the bus driver said that was all I needed. She told me I hadn't activated it yet, and went into a long winded explanation about bus cards being like bank cards, which didn't make much sense. She said if it wasn't valid, I'd have to pay 1000 kr. I said I didn't have any money with me, and definitely not 1000 kr, so she took the card and said to come to the station when the train had stopped. So I went in, annoyed at the bus driver I'd bought it from, trying to figure out how to explain myself in Norwegian, and thinking about all the things I could buy with 170 dollars besides a little slip of paper. They checked the card, found out it was activated and valid, and gave me a new receipt. The end, nothing dramatic. I figure if they had tried to make me pay, I could have switched to english and played the clueless exchange student card, but as it was I'm pretty proud they never noticed I wasn't norwegian. 

So that was the beginning of an eventful Saturday which also involved running on the ice, in the dark, in the pouring rain ten minutes to the shopping centre and ending up soaking wet. I didn't plan very well and assumed I had lots of time to get ready, then realized we were meeting earlier and there was no bus for half an hour. Then our  ride wasn't even there yet because of road closures. Gotta love Norwegian weather! I met Tonje from my class at the shopping centre where we waited to be driven to Eirin's. We got kicked out of the centre into the rain just as our ride arrived. The rest of last night more than made up for the day though; a relaxed fun "jentekveld" (girls night) with the girls in my art class. 

That brings me up to date again. 

Oh, and my host family has a walk in fridge. Reminds me of all the hours I spent working in the freezer at Safeway, although warmer and way less crowded.

I'll finish off with some more brunost to make you hungry   =)

I've also updated the norwegian page up top, so feel free to comment and correct it! Jeg lærer mye når folk korrigerer meg, og jeg vet at det jeg skriver er ikke helt riktig. Så ikke være redd for å skrive en commentaire! 

takk!

=)

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 :)

La vie quotidienne

My last few posts have described special trips and events I've done while here in Norway, but I haven't said much about day to day life. I thought that writing a post about everyday life here sounded more interesting than learning norwegian verb tenses, so here goes. I don't really have any relevant pictures, so I just walked around the house and took some randoms, including an attempted translation of the foods in our fridge, which I'll stick in to break up the wall of text.

It's starting to feel slightly like fall here; a few leaves are turning yellow, but it's mostly still green. Theres a lot of rain; every day on the weather page of the Bergen newspaper there's a section called "Sol i Bergen" which says how many hours it was sunny/clear the day before. It's usually between 1 and 2 hours, although I've seen it drop down to 8 minutes! The moments when the sun breaks through and the mist clears are always unexpected and that much more special.

View towards Osterøy right now, happened to catch a moment when it cleared a little bit

School is very similar to Canada, yet even more relaxed. I'm used to the idea of taking responsibility of my own learning, and that is taken to yet another level here. There is no phone call home if you miss school; and nothing seems to happen if you show up halfway through class either. You could realistically spend an entire class on facebook or watching a movie; having laptops in class opens up a whole new world of distractions. Despite all this freedom, kids still seem to learn. I guess it's more like the real world; if you want to do well in school, you have to prioritize. The relationship between students and teachers seems to be very respectful; I have yet to see a teacher get mad at a student, or vice versa. When asked to close their laptops, everyone does without complaint.

Random note: almost every classroom has a "Smart board" but I haven't seen it used yet; the teachers seem to prefer chalkboards and projectors.

I'm starting to understand a bit more in my classes, especially when the teacher writes notes on the board. Generally I'll understand some words and phrases, and occasionally the general idea of a topic. Other times, still more often, I'll get stuck on one word, get lost, and have no idea what's going on. The exception is french class, although I'm starting to get really confused between norwegian and french! When I have to translate something from english to french, I'll usually translate to norwegian without thinking.

It's been really interesting to learn french through a different language though, and hear the pronounciation that comes from learning it with a norwegian background rather than an english one. One of the hardest things in classes at home was the french "R", but since Norwegian has a similar sound on it's R's (at least in this part of Norway), people don't seem to have trouble with it. Right now we're watching "Entre les Murs" in french with norwegian subtitles. It's strange to look to norwegian subtitles when I don't understand the french speaking, but between the two languages I can mostly understand.

A sampling of umbrellas

We only have gym class once a week here, but when we do, it's more serious than back home. We've gone to the track here twice, and once we did 10 x 200 m sprints. I'd never gotten a real workout ( besides maybe the beep test....) in a gym class before . Yesterday we did orienteering, which meant climbing over fences, dodging cows, and trekking through the mud to find the orange ballooney things with clips to punch our papers with. We got confused with the map though, because there is two Garnes Videregående schools, and missed 4 of the points. You never would've gotten a gym class outside like that at home, especially not at the level where everyone has to take gym. Norwegians seem to be more intense about going outside though, no matter what the weather. I went for a run last week around 8 pm, and it was pouring rain and getting dark. I still saw about 7 other people running, a soccer game going on, and a bunch of people out walking in rain coats and pants. Whenever I go by the "Barnehage", which I think is the equivalent of kindergarden, the kids are outside in full rain gear biking on these funky little tricycles and playing in the forest.

Shoe dryers....these are in my runners almost constantly when I'm not using them. They don't blow air,  they more just cook them, but they do the trick!

On a typical day, I wake up to an extremely irritating beeping from my cellphone, that is more of a loud honk than a beep. I should really change the sound, but it's effective. I usually fumble with the touch screen and change the time on the alarm to give me an extra 20 minutes or so of sleep. By the time I go upstairs, Tord and Helene have both left for work; they're both gone by 7 am. I usually have yogurt and jam with whatever fruit and nuts I can find, and toast for breakfast. School starts at 8:05 am, so I can leave around 8 and get there on time. Classes are an hour and a half long, with 10 minute breaks between classes and a half hour lunch. We also get a five minute break in the middle of class, which usually seems to stretch to 10 or 15 minutes. I get out at 1:30 or 3 depending on the day, and either run or help make supper/go on the computer until 4, when we eat middag. I'm still amazed how much potatoes and fish we eat, but not in a bad way. Around 6:30 we have coffee, often with chocolates, nuts or cookies. I spend most of the evening watching TV, going on the computer, trying to learn norwegian, and sometimes playing scrabble with my host family.

Cookies :)  I use chopped up chocolate bars; my family didn't know what chocolate chips were.

The Fridge:

I was looking for things in the house to take pictures of and post, and decided that, for once and for all, I'm going to google translate the contents of the fridge, and find out just what all the mystery condiments are.

1. Rips syltetoy - currant jam

2. Pickles

3. Tomato puree

4. Blueberry jam - Best in yogurt, and second best ( after raspberry) with brown cheese

5. Pickled herring number 1

6. Pickled herring number 2

7. Pickled herring number 3 - I don't know what the differences are, I haven't tried them. 

8. Skinke Ost - ham flavoured cheese in a tube....haven't tried it

9. Bacon Ost - bacon flavoured cheese in a tube

10. Tytteberry jam I think, kinda like cranberry sauce but the berries are smaller, we eat it with meat

11. A blend of butter and margarine "du trenger bare bremykt"

12. Camembert cheese

13. BROWN CHEESE....aka brun ost...aka YUM

14. Jarlsberg cheese

15. Liver paste

16. Smoked salmon

17. Yogurt

18. Bacon postei? Not really sure what this is, but it obviously involves bacon.

19. Gonna guess this is soy sauce, based on the asian characters

20. Some kind of oil? Heart - go is the direct translation

21. Beet salad

22. The remains of lasagne which seemed to have some kind of meat fat/butter replacing the tomato sauce. It was...interesting

1. Mackerel in tomato sauce
2. Ekte remulade - google said this is "real remoulade" Helene said it's like mayonnaise with cucumber in it.
3. Caviar in a tube - finally tried this one, it's not all that bad. Sweeter than I expected.
4. Some kind of salsa
5. Ekte majones - real mayonnaise?
6. Fish pate of some sort
7. Some kind of medicine
8. Grainy type mustard
9. Some other kind of mustard - based on the colour anyways
10. "leaves from the forest that taste like garlic" says Helene
11. more mayonnaise
12. Some kind of plant vitaminey thing
13. Vanilla cream that we have with fruit...soo good :)
14. Garlic sauce

There. After getting up to check in the fridge about 7 times, and having to explain why I'm documenting their fridge, my host family must think I'm a little crazy. They definitely thought it was funny, if nothing else.

Well, my coffee's getting cold
snakkes :)

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 :)