Fall Colours and some Ydmyk Apple Pie

Random observations from looking in the dictionary: Apparently "ydmyk" is a word in norwegian, it means humble. Yndig means graceful, and ynkelig means lamentable. I don't even know how to go about pronouncing these...YINK-a-LIG? Probably not...

I'm sitting here eating a second helping of warm apple pie with ice cream, which I would say is second best after pumpkin pie when it comes to thanksgiving food. I was planning on making pumpkin pie for my host family, but it never occured to me that they don't eat pumpkin here. There was none to be found in either of the two grocery stores; plenty of canned fish and meatballs, but no canned pumpkin. The pie turned out amazing, the crust was a bit of a patchwork, but I still remembered how to make pie. Thanks Grandma!
It was the first time my host family had used their pie pan, and they'd never had apple pie before!

Yummm.....

Before I forget, I'm going to jump back in time a few weeks. Our art class took a trip to a fabric/clothing company here called Oleana. They make knitted women's clothing, and we got to tour the factory.  Apparently Michelle Obama has some of their clothing. We had a presentation, and I was surprised how much I could understand. I guess I was just having a good language day, but it seems if I keep myself from tuning out the language as background noise, it starts to make sense. 

I didn't take any pictures, but I'll post a few from the website. It's all really expensive, but I liked the patterns.

Last weekend Emma and Susanne came over, and brought some norwegian food they bought at the grocery store:

The chocolate cookies in the middle aren't norwegian, they're my recipe from home. The other stuff, going clockwise:

-Grandiosa pizza, norwegian frozen pizza. It tasted like, well, pizza, although it was made with Jarlsberg cheese. Some people put ketchup on it. It seems to be Norway's kraft dinner; cheap and easy to make.

-Bottom: Mormor's sjokoladeflarn, basically buttery cookies with chocolate in the middle. SO good dipped in coffee.

-Top: Lefse. Some kind of soft flat bread with a fake butter/cinnamon filling. I wasn't such a fan.

-Tom and Jerry's crackers, basically animal crackers. Yumm

-Norwegian chocolate milk. Way better than the slightly chocolate flavoured milk we get for our school breakfasts ( not that I'm complaining!) I don't think you can go wrong with chocolate milk.

-Candy :)

- A bag full of little cinnamon buns

On the topic of Norwegian food, I guess i better mention Fårikål. On Thursday we went to Helene's brother's house in Bergen for dinner, and that was the second time I've had the dish here. It's basically lamb boiled with cabbage and peppercorns, served with, guess what...potatoes. It's actually surprisingly good. It's pretty hit and miss trying to fish what you want out of the giant pot, without getting a giant hunk of bone or half a cabbage though.

This is what came up when I googled fårikål...poor lamb!

...but it actually looks like this, it does taste better than it looks!

On Friday our class went in to the city, visited 2 museums, and went to some of the famous historical sites. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and Bergen is amazing when the weather is nice. I didn't follow everything that went on; I was having a "zone out norwegian" type day, but it was fun, and neat to see some of the more famous places in the city. 

One of three churches in Bergen from the middle ages

Wandering through the streets

In between the old houses in Bryggen

Front of Bryggen

A history of rats...

TROLL!!

Dried fish hanging from the ceiling of a building in Bryggen, from what I understood they were used for oil.

Beautiful Bergen

Today I slept in, went for a run, then came home and ate another amazing weekend breakfast. I made the pie and put it in the fridge, then went "ut på tur" with my host family. We drove about 15 minutes towards Espeland, and then went up a narrow paved road, only wide enough for one car, through some farms. We came to a parking lot PACKED with cars, and there were cars parked all along the road as well. I never would've imagined seeing so many people out for a sunday hike! It was INSANE. I don't know why I found it that amazing, but I'm so used to trailheads with 5-10 cars parked there, and nearly empty trails, so this was a bit of a shock. We walked for about an hour, above the treeline, along a trail that was more like a road, to a cabin. I don't know how to describe it, but it felt different than hiking in Canada, and not just because of all the people. Everything just looked more...norwegian. More tights, pants tucked into socks, blonde hair, and Bergans ( a brand here) clothes.

They sold hot drinks at the cabin, nothing cold, because the water there had to be boiled. I had a cup of hot juice, not the most refreshing when you've just been hiking uphill, but it was good once it cooled off. They also sold what they call pancakes here. They're basically the same thing that I would call a crepe. The fall colours were beautiful, and I think it's time for more pictures:

You can't really tell in this picture...but all the glints way off in the background are parked cars

Host parents and I

Going down

Now that I look at these pictures, there's not really THAT many people. But it still felt like it! And now, subject change....

In the past couple weeks I've started really noticing how confusing it is to try and learn a dialect in norwegian. The written language is simple enough as far as bokmål goes, but it's really strange to write something so different from how you say it. For example, I learned this week that here they say "dere", a plural form of "you" as "dokarr"..or something like that. Do you see any connection? I don't. I keep finding out examples like that, where google translate is totally useless. Sometimes it varies from person to person too, some people will say "mye" ( much) as it's written, and some will say it the nynorsk way, "mykje". This makes it really confusing to try and imitate the way people say things, as there's no standard way. 

I find it fascinating though, how you can cross a bridge and have people speaking with a different accent. I can't imagine driving to Castlegar and having people speak differently, or barely being able to understand people from Vancouver, but that's how it seems to be here, because different areas used to be so isolated from eachother.

Well, that brings me up to the present, my bowl of apple pie and ice cream is long gone, and my coffee cup is empty now. I think this was one of my longer posts, although I don't think any could rival my first one about flying here...

I have the next week off school, for høstferie (fall break), and my laptop is getting really overheated and I'm way too warm now, so I think it's a good time to stop rambling.

Happy Thanksgiving Canadians! Eat some pumpkin pie for me!

Don't know what I'm gonna write about in this post yet....

I just wrote the title for this post (which is pretty appropriate I think) and then my pinky finger hit some specific key just as my other hand slipped and pressed another one, and the window I was writing this in closed. That's probably a sign that I shouldn't write this post, as I don't have much to say. But oh well, I'm gonna fight it and keep writing anyways.

Well. I finally vaccumed my room the other day, so when I lay on the carpet like I am now, I don't get covered in hair and dirt and unidentifiable bits of trees.

Speaking of unidentifiable bits of trees, the other evening I was really bored, and decided to take my camera and go for a walk, just for something to do. It was around 6:15 when I left, and after a few minutes I decided it would be really neat to be at the top of Arna Nipa for the sunset. I started going up, and I guess I'll put in some pictures to make this somewhat readable. It's strange how when you break up chunks of boring writing with pictures, or even spaces, it makes it easier to read, even though it's longer. It's like some kind of uphill salmon stream, like the ones with lots of flat benches so they can get over dams. I have no idea where that simile came from...it's not all that relevant...ok, it's not relevant at all. oh well. Anyways, pictures.

A section of trail

So when I got about half way up, I started stressing that the sun would be gone by the time I got to the top. The casual stroll then turned into powerwalking, as I realized it takes longer to walk somewhere then it does to run. Big surprise.

Nooo....I have to beat the sun!

I won the race though; the sun was definitely still there at the top. I guess it was more the sunset I wanted, than the sun itself. Regardless, I took some pictures.

After I'd taken pictures of  the full 360 degree view, I got to that point where everything is so beautiful, but you don't know what to do about it. Then I remembered that my camera had self timer....

I took a few of me standing still, but my instinctual need to take jump shots EVERYWHERE...on ferries, on top of mountains, off concrete blocks, in my basement, off the rock wall, at the Whitehorse airport (sonja haha), on skis..etc........won out.
If anyone was up there watching, enjoying a sunset snack ( alliteration, anyone?), they would have had an interesting and ridiculous show to watch. A girl sprinting frantically up to a rock, jumping off awkwardly, then running back. Again, and again. And again. And again. Through all this, I managed to get maybe two where I was actually in the air. Apparently I'm not too good at judging which high speed beep on my camera means JUMP.

I try....

...and I try.

And sometimes get lucky :)

Through all this, it never really occurred to me that after the sunset....it gets dark.  By the time I was halfway down it was really hard to see, and being really intelligent, I decided to run faster. I flat out sprinted anything flat or uphill, and calmed down a bit on the steeper downhill parts. I still managed to slip and slide down a slippery root, and land smack my side. I now have a nice big bruise on one side of my butt to match my scar from rollerskiing last fall...lovely.

When I got to the first set of houses, I decided there was no way I was going down any more trails in the dark, so I took the road back. This added on an extra 20 or so minutes of running.

So much for a short relaxing walk...

When I got home I realized that the inside of my jacket was plastered with bits of lichen from when I fell....and that's how I got bits of tree all over the floor of my room.  Oh, and random little happy fact, I dropped my cell phone at the top of the hike, and it came apart, and when I put it back together the camera worked again. yay :)

Soo...that was my adventure.

Random things I've noticed here after 7 weeks:

• They like their butter and cream. I thought I used a lot of butter/margarine on bread at home, but here they use it as an actual layer! Like how I would use peanut butter! A bun slathered with butter dipped into fish soup (made with lots of cream of course)..yummm

• On the food topic, they like to display the food. Bread/buns go in lined baskets for breakfast, not just a loaf of bread thrown on the table with a knife stuck in it. 

• Sooo many people ride scooters to school! 

• Telling time: if it's..say...1:20, you can say ti på halv to, which translates as ten before half two. I think it's really strange to use the number two when it's only just past one o'clock. Makes it seem much later than it really is. 

• I've gone grocery shopping twice in the past few days, just to the store down the road. Some kinds of food are actually reasonably priced! Bulk buns were 2 kr, or about 30 cents each, and a bag of muesli that would'be been about 5 dollars at home, was 3! I don't know why I found that exciting, because it wasn't even my money, but it's nice to know the prices aren't ALL crazy...even if most of them are.

• For dinner the other night we had grøtt, which I probably spelled wrong. It's porridge made from rice, that you eat with raisins, cinnamon, sugar, and of course butter. Evelyn (my host grandma) added cream and almonds to it, and it became riskrem for dessert the next night, with concentrated juice to pour on top. Sooo good. Apparently grøtt is what they put out for Santa here, instead of milk and cookies.

• They do this gasping thing, where they say "yeah", but while inhaling. It seems to be more adults that do it. At first I thought it was just something my family did, but the topic came up at language camp. We all had stories about freaking out the first time we heard it, it can sound like something is really wrong, when really they're just agreeing, or filling the space. 

Looks like most of my observations this time are about food...typical. I think I should challenge myself to eat a meal without some form of cheese and/or bread. I don't think it's possible, it's just too good :) 

Oh, and it has been sunny for an ENTIRE WEEK here! Every time I look outside I get a little shock, it's so gorgeous, although I better not get used to it.

Well...congratulations salmon, you made it to the top of the dam. Herreguddd that's a strange thing to say....I'm not even completely sure these salmon ladders exist.

Some pretty trees because i have a blank space to fill and don't know how to get rid of it.

Same as above...pretty sure there's some leprechauns in there.

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 :)

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 :)

Language camp, conference and sweden

I spent the past week in Halden for a week long norwegian language course, and Ski (which apparently is a place) for a district conference. Both are close to Oslo, but I really had no idea where I was. On Friday I flew to the Oslo Rygge airport, then took a bus to the train station, then got on the train which I thought went to Halden. I bought my ticket speaking norwegian (which basically consisted of "hva koster det" and "takk") and then smiled and nodded when the conductor told me something about a bus, which I didn't understand. Turns out I had to take a bus after the train to get to the Halden train station, I still don't know why. Luckily Devin happened to see me get on the train, otherwise I probably would've ended up in sweden or something, which I wouldn't actually have minded.

View out the window on the train from Oslo

Language camp was in a hostel next to a fortress which was once used to fight Sweden. It was a pretty random location, but interesting nonetheless. We met the other 20 exchange students in Norway, from Brazil, Ecuador, Japan, USA and Canada. North America was definitely well represented. It was really nice to speak english without fear of being misunderstood, and after a week with other exchange students I felt like I'd been on a holiday in North America. 

Devin, me and Abby being monsters

Part of the fortress (picture stolen from Kate)

Five days of lessons later, I knew a few more words, had gotten slightly more confident in Norwegian, and had a nice new book to work in throughout the year. I already knew most of the material we covered, but it was still a fun week. We watched two crime movies set in Bergen with english subtitles, one of which was called "The woman in the refrigerator." They made me see the city in a different light, and made me afraid to walk around the hostel alone for fear of looking up and seeing a dead girl hanging there. We ate a lot of mystery meat, bread, various forms of moussy desserts, and nugatti (similar to nutella).

Nugatti in a tube....yummmmmm

On Tuesday afternoon we took the bus to Sweden, which was about 10 km away. Clothes were slightly cheaper, and food was a fair bit cheaper. We went to a big shopping centre near the border; I don't actually know where we were. The first place we went was a giant candy store, and filled bags with assorted chocolates.

Crossing into Sweden...as uneventful as crossing into Alberta from BC

A small section of the candy store

This cost about 5 dollars :)

After the chocolate store, Abby, Noellen and I went to a salon and tested out the sample dyes in spray cans. I found out that pink makes my hair look moldy and gross, silver makes me look old, and gold doesn't show up. We left leaving a trail of sparkles behind us, without buying anything. A few hours of shopping later everyone met up at McDonalds, and I bought the cheapest thing I could; a cheeesburger for 10 kr. Then we managed to miss the bus back, and had to call a taxi which cost double the bus.

On Friday everyone took the train to Ski, where we stayed in a really nice motel for the district conference. It was really nice to have a shower that was seperate from the rest of the bathroom; in the hostel the shower sprayed over the sink, so we tracked dirty water all over the room. If you took the elevator to the second floor, it opened up on a massive shopping centre, which was pretty dangerous!

We met up with the students from Australia, New Zealand and Argentina, and spent Saturday planning presentations for the rotary members at the conference. We divided into groups; Aussie/New Zealand/Japan, North America, and South America. We sang the Canadian and American anthems, showed a slide show of our hometowns, and made up a poem/rap for both Canada and the US. "Everything is bigger in the US of A, we're just like Canada without the Eh"....etc. 

Saturday night was a formal dinner with all the rotarians, with the first meal I'd eaten all week that wasn't stuff your face buffet style. ( I managed to gain about 8 pounds during this week despite going for runs several of the mornings...yikes!)

The meal took about 2.5 hours, which was a lot of polite conversation in broken english with a bit of norwegian thrown in.

Roommates before the dinner: Abby (from Wisconsin) Me, and Sara ( from Colorado) ( picture stolen from Sara)

On Sunday we thought we were going for a hike, but we ended up going to a 900 year old church, some houses in the forest from the 1700's,  catching crayfish and riding on a steam boat.  It was a bit unexpected, but definitely interesting.

I travelled to the airport with Brianna and Caity from Australia, and Tre from the US. All three are living around Ålesund, which is on the west coast north of Bergen. In the airport I learned just how expensive food can be in Norway; I bought the "San Diego" at a random little food booth, and paid about 13 dollars canadian for a chunk of breaded chicken in a tortilla plate of nachos with "guacamole" (which, to be gross, looked just like the substance that came from the intestines of the fetal pig we dissected in biology), and a drink which I had about a quarter of before we had to go through security. I think I'll remember to pack food from now on!!

Overall it was a crazy fun week, but I'm glad to be back "home" in Arna.

Oh, and just thought I'd mention, Friday the 10th was my one month anniversary of arriving in Norway!!! :)