It`s the same big dipper in Canada and Norway...

Just a random picture of the welcoming committee when you enter Tord and Helene's house. I figured some kind of picture was necessary before the writing begins :D

Well, its 12:35 on a Friday morning, and i should really go to sleep. But I’m in a writing mood, and it’s this time of day when I write best. Either that, or I’m just too tired to recognize when my writing more resembles a bunch of letters and words drawn out of a hat than coherent sentences and paragraphs. Regardless, I’m going to keep writing. That way I can almost guarantee I’ll be late for school tomorrow, despite only having a three minute walk. My cell phone has one alarm set for 6:35, and one for 6:47. As a result, I wake up to the first, and turn it off. Wake up what feels like three seconds later to the next, and here is the mistake: turn this one off as well. My reasoning is usually something along the lines of “well, it’s not even seven yet, and I don’t have to leave til eight. Therefore I can sleep for a couple more minutes”. You probably know where this is going; “a couple more minutes” doesn't exist. I don’t think it’s possible to fall asleep at 6:48 am, and wake up at 6:50. Or 7:00. Or even 7:15. Especially when it’s dark outside, and the house is quiet. So I wake up, thinking nooo not AGAIN, this morning it was around 8:15. Makes getting to school on time a bit difficult, seeing as school starts at 8:05. Until they invent time machines, I’m out of luck.

Today I woke up, went upstairs, and made knekkebrød with liver paste and jarlsberg cheese for lunch. All the cheeseknives were in the dishwasher, so I was left with potato peelers to use. Didn’t work so well; the cheese just curls up into the slicer and the slicer steers itself off the block of cheese. Leaving awkward tracks that look like someone tried to slice cheese with their fingernails, not to mention I’m left with scrawny little bits of cheese on my sandwiches for lunch. This process didn’t help me get to school any earlier. Oh, and did I mention I put liver paste on them? Voluntarily? My food tastes have definitely broadened since I left home.

Random little thought, but I tried to write liver paste as one word, and spell check wasn’t impressed. In Norwegian, though, it would be leverpostei. In English, we tend to use the space bar on the keyboard regularly. Not so with Norwegian; the language is full of ridiculously long words that are hard to pronounce. By the time you reach the end of the word, you’ve forgotten the beginning! This makes for some awkward pronounciations. Try: “menneskerettighetsorganisasjonene” – the human rights organizations. No space bar required; you never have to lift your pen from the paper!

I love how it’s always the little details that surprise me the most, and are so fascinating. I was running with Tonje this evening, and it was clear and cold out. We both noticed the constellation in front of us, and I pointed and mentioned it was the big dipper. In my English-centric view of the world, I never imagined it could be called anything else. It shouldn’t shock me; of course they wouldn’t name the constellations the same. But it’s the same big dipper as in Canada, so it never occurred to me that it could have another name! I learned that in Norwegian, it’s “karlsvognen”. 

With some miming and discussion about shopping carts and trailers, she decided the best English translation would be Karl’s wagon. Google translate says Karl’s cart. This probably isn't a very exciting observation for most people, but I like any excuse to draw bad pictures in paint, so here are my interpretations :)

Well, those were my ramblings from a few days ago. Now I'm going to be even more confusing, and jump back in time again. 

Last week I started volunteering with the after school program here for elementary school kids. I basically spent an hour playing tag, soccer, and piggy in the middle with 6 and 7 year olds, who were really cute. It was good for my norwegian, to try and talk with people who can't say more than "my name is" in english, or at least don't let on that they can. It also made it hard to communicate; one girl asked me about 6 times who I wanted on my team for soccer, but I didn't know the word for team (lag). It sounded to me like she was asking who I wanted to be on my log...I thought maybe she wanted to pretend to be frogs? Needless to say I didn't understand. Another little girl was quizzing me by pointing to things in the gym, and getting me to say the english word, and she pointed to the climbing bars over to the side. I answered that we don't really have a specific word, but I would call them climbing bars or something like that. She looked at me and said "I thought you spoke english, but you don't because you don't know the word!" She finally concluded that I don't actually speak any language at all. Sometimes I feel like I agree with her. 

Last Sunday Jens, Margaret and Liv came for dinner, and we had Komle, what seems to be a traditional norwegian dish. It's the second time I've had it here. I think it's amazing how many unique meals norwegians have, for such a small country! When I think of Canada, I think poutine, which I rarely get the chance to eat, and maple syrup, which isn't exactly a meal. Maybe because Canada is more a mix of different immigrant and native groups, rather than a more homogeneous country like Norway? Anyways, back to dinner...

I like the mix of facial expressions here

My attempted description of this picture:

1. Kohlrabi stuff...at least thats what they called it, I'm going to have to google kohlrabi to find out what it actually is. The first time we had it I thought it was cauliflower
2. Komle - boiled thick potato balls, with bacon in the middle
3. Lamb? I don't actually know what kind of meat this is
4. Pølse (sausage)
5. A drink that tastes like buttermilk, but is thicker.
6. Bacon: tastes different from bacon at home though, less, well....baconey. Not exactly the best description....

Overall it's a pretty different meal than what I'm used to; the komle are really rich and filling. I wouldn't say it's my favorite thing I've tried here; I think it's more something you grow up with; Liv can down five komle when I'm full after one. Regardless, it's neat to try new things, and still a good meal!

So now it's a week from last Sunday; yesterday I did some shopping and went to a party. Today I slept in, and have spent the day watching cross country skiing on TV (cause it's ALWAYS on, it's crazy!), playing the piano, and being lazy. I've been trying to teach myself to play the piano again, after 3 years without taking lessons. I can play some of the songs in my Coldplay book again, and printed off some more to learn. 

I got the birthday and Christmas cards Grandma! Thank you soo much! I haven't opened yours yet Mom and Dad, but Grandma's didn't say anything about waiting! :D

New boots: early birthday present from my host family! Tusen takk :D I`m so lucky

Well, I think that`s all I have to write for now. Life is good on this side of the ocean, hope everything`s well back home! Last blog post as a 17 year old, and a month and four days til Christmas.

Hadet bra fra Norge <3

A Trip WAYY up North, and a Giant Santa Claus

Morning in Lyngseidet, near Tromsø. Keep reading  (or at least scanning) to see a map of how crazy far north this is!

Somehow it's November already, not entirely sure how that happened. It feels like it's been 3 weeks, rather than nearly 3 months. The bruises on my knees are proof that it's no longer summer; our driveway is slick with ice and frozen snow. It's 4:15 pm now, and the sun is down, although it's still light out. The clock fell back an hour a couple weeks ago, so now it's light when I walk to school again. The past couple days I've left the house just at sunrise, and the entire sky was glowing pink and orange on my (very short) walk to school. It's colder than usual for here right now, and snowed over the weekend, so we've switched from soggy wet swamp to winter again.

...And that's the weather report, not a very exciting way to begin a blog post!

Two weekends ago Emma, Karoline, Tonje and I were going to go skating at a rink in the city, but when we got there (after sprinting after and missing the bus, and getting off at the wrong bybanen stop), it turned out there was hockey practice going on. So we went back to the sentrum, and went shopping instead, which was just as fun. I have two pictures to show from this adventure:

Florida bybanen stop, in Norway.  "Next stop, Florida"

I want this shirt! The ostehøvel, or cheese slicer, is apparently a Norwegian invention,as several people have proudly pointed out to me.

I tried out training with the track team here for the past two Mondays, which was a really good workout. It was confusing though, as the gym we were in looked just like central school, and everything felt like ski training a few years ago, besides the fact that it was in a different language, and I didn't really know anyone. I found it interesting that the people there only really spoke Norwegian to me, with very little English. I think if I was forced to use Norwegian like this more often, I would learn it quicker. I haven't decided if I'll continue with it or not; I'm not interested in competing, it's just nice to have an organized practice. Soccer is on the same days though, and right now I'm leaning towards that, but we'll see!

Back home I never appreciated how nice it is to understand what's going on around you. It's going to be a shock to come home and have the buzz of background noise become intelligible again, to hear English in the grocery store, to answer the phone without fearing the rush of Norwegian and awkward explanations that follow. It's frustrating to be in a group, understanding bits of the conversation, but not enough to join in. It's like a constant stream of sound that runs by, the challenge is to snag enough words to piece together an idea of what's going on. Answering is another story. As a result, I do a lot of listening.

I also find it frustrating how quick people can be to switch to English when I don't understand what they say the first time. Usually when I don't understand, it's because:

-It was too fast; people don't say "space" after each word, of course, and a simple sentence sounds complicated when it's said like a jumbled detveitikkjeeg, written (det vet ikke jeg, I don't know). I was trying to think of an example to use there, when Helene walked by and said that, so there you go, a real life example.

-I don't know one or a few of the words in the sentence; if someone says, say, "do your toes hurt", and you don't know the word for toes, there's no hope of understanding, unless they point to your feet at the same time. Even then, there's a lot of room for misinterpretation. I can't think of any situation where someone would ask you if your toes hurt, but still...

-Sometimes people will say something where I completely understand the language used in the sentence, but don't know what they mean by it, or what they're actually talking about. This can easily happen in English too; it isn't restricted to a foreign language.

In all these cases, an English translation of the entire sentence doesn't teach me anything, and often all it takes is a slower repetition in Norwegian, or a rephrasing, to understand. This is something I need to remember to ask people to do, as I'm getting to the point where I'll understand the Norwegian, and maybe just need a few words translated, rather than the entire thing. I realize that when someone switches to English, they're just trying to help, so it's my responsibility to explain this. 

Everything is going well, although my mood tends to go up and down more dramatically and unexpectedly than at home. It can be hard starting off new in a different country, and there have definitely been times where I wondered what I got myself into. I have a great host family and rotary club though, and everyone at school is really nice, so I've been very lucky. There are times when I miss understanding and get frustrated, and times when I realize where I am, and that I'm learning a new language, and get ridiculously happy. The latter is way more common, and life is pretty much great! I manage to work through small problems by talking to other exchange students on facebook and skype, who can relate to everything, whether it's buying a scarf without speaking English, or comparing embarrassing moments and misunderstandings. 

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to Tromsø with my host family, and that's what I did this past weekend. We actually went to Lyngseidet, a little town about a 2 hour drive from Tromsø, near the Swedish and Finnish borders. Oh, and above the arctic circle! Being so close to Finland, and so far north, was really exciting, we were about as far north as Inuvik is in Canada! I think it's time for a map, so people from home can get a perspective on what Norway looks like, and where I've been. So, I made this:

Bergen is where I'm living, and WAYYY up there, is Tromsø. Sweden doesn't even go that high up!

We flew from Bergen to Oslo, then Oslo to Tromsø, where we met up with Torbjørn, my host parent's son, and his girlfriend, Camilla, who go to University in Trondheim. Tord's brother in law picked us up, and we drove about 2 hours to Lyngseidet. 

The weekend consisted of a lot of visiting, which for me meant listening to a ton of norwegian and trying to understand it. When there's three different conversations going on at once, and I don't know the people and events they're talking about anyways, it's pretty hard to follow. A couple hours of trying to understand can be pretty tiring! We also ate a lot of food, and drank a lot of coffee. I didn't know it was possible to eat pretty much 5 meals a day, plus snacks! 

All that food inspired me to go running, so I went for two gorgeous runs along the road at sunrise (which wasn't all that early, about 9:30 am). Picture time!

A snack in the grocery store, tørrefisk, crunchy dried fish

Food, accomodation, and.....roosters?

Apparently the world's largest and ugliest santa...I find the largest part a bit hard to believe, but who knows? My cell phone battery died before I could get a picture of the front

Morning run :)

Ferry on the way back to the Tromsø airport

On Saturday I played, guess what...scrabble of course! with Tord's brother in law and his 12 year old grand daughter. This time, for once, it was in English! It was also surprisingly harder than I thought; I would see Norwegian words before English ones. I managed to win, but not by much, the 12 year old girl was really good at english. It was really entertaining; trying to explain that "caked" really IS a word in english, that I didn't make it up, and that it isn't a verb for baking a cake. Tord's brother in law was really skeptical, so we had to look it up in the dictionary. It was set up for Norwegian though, so the proportions of letters and points was pretty weird. It's hard to find an english word when you're stuck with three K's and a J, whereas in norwegian there's plenty of possibilities, like "kjekk." That's one of the great things about learning a new language though, is that you learn about your own as well. I never realized how little we use the letter K compared to C, which there's only one of in Norwegian scrabble.

When I get home, the first things I'm going to buy are a waffle iron, and scrabble!

It was a very koselig weekend, and so neat to be SO far north. We saw a bit of northern lights one of the nights, a light green glow behind the mountains. We flew home on Sunday, and got home at 1 am Monday morning.

That brings me up to the present, and speaking of presents, I got the birthday package from you guys, mom and dad! I'll try and wait to the 25th to open it.

Happy November 9th from Norway! :)

I added a column on the side as a list of new things I've done here, some of which may be mundane, but as Robert Brault (whoever that is) says:


 "Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things."

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 :)

Train Trips and a Glimpse of Winter

I've been trying to write a coherent paragraph for the past 5 minutes, and decided I can't introduce everything I've done  since my last post and still make it understandable. So, no thesis statement here, I'm just going to jump right in.

The week before last was Høstferie, or fall break, so i had no school. I spent the week sleeping, eating, running and shopping, in that order. Pretty great way to spend a week! I don't have much exciting to say about it, but I'll post some pictures I took while wandering around on a sunny afternoon:

Random cute mailbox...they have a lot of original ones like this here

Gorgeous day.....before the snow came

The next Monday I took the train across Norway, to Hamar, which is about an hour and a half away from Oslo. It was really neat to get a perspective on the landscape between Bergen and Oslo, as I've only flown between the two before.

The only picture I managed to get of the fjords, as we darted in and out of tunnels on the bus

Up above the trees going through the mountains - so barren!

I met Abby, an exchange student from Wisconsin, and we took the bus to a small town called Løten. I stayed with her host family for the night, and we had moose stew with flatbread and tyttebær jam for dinner. We had some sort of chocolate jello with vanilla sauce for dessert, it brought back memories of language camp! The next day we biked to Løten Lys, a candle factory. It was a jumble of rooms and displays that I can only describe as completely random. A cave with a fake crocodile, polar bear scene, factory, massage chair that clamps your legs so you can't move, various dining tables covered in candles, christmas scenes, stuffed animals....
We spent the time in a really mature fashion; taking pictures with star candles for eyes, posing with the polar bears....you get the picture. Unfortunately all the pictures are on her camera, so you get these:

These are candles! Pretty sure I would never burn it if I bought it

Not really worth putting up, but I thought this was funny! Crazy massage chair that clamps your calves in, in a candle factory,,,

We biked back to her place, then walked back into town so I could catch the bus back to Hamar. We realized we were late, so started running, which isn't easy with a full backpack; I was getting pushed up and down more than going forward. Halfway down the street the bus passed us, and I must have looked so ridiculous bouncing along that the bus driver stopped in the middle of the street and let me get on.

I met Sonja in Hamar, and stayed at her relative's place until Friday. Some highlights, because again point form requires far less effort than trying to compose sentences:

-Running along Lake Mjøsa (the biggest lake in Norway) in the sun

-Buying a container of crunchy Nugatti (think nutella mixed with toffee and crunchiness with just the right amount of salt), sitting in a cafe in the mall and feasting

-Evening pasta, carrot and nugatti feasts, prompting Olav to say that we eat too much....possibly true :P

-Finding pink rollerskiis in a sports store 

-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. Definitely a new experience! 

-Cheap jeans on sale!

We got a few strange looks...

On Friday we took the train back to Arna, and simultaneously traveled from fall into winter. There was increasingly more snow as we went up through the mountains, it was a huge change from five days before. There was four languages going on at once in our section of the train; I could listen to german and french passengers, speak english, and read and listen to norwegian.  I find it interesting taking the train as opposed to the greyhound bus in Canada. On the bus you stop for smoke breaks and washroom breaks, but the train just keeps on going. There's a tiny washroom on board, and you have no other choice if you have to go. The train stops briefly at each station, but if you're not standing there ready to get on, you'll miss it. I reached page 100 of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" in Norwegian on the train ride, an accomplishment I'm proud of :) Now, for more pictures:

Looks like the arctic...

Along the way

The highest station the train goes through between Oslo and Bergen

There was still snow by the water when we came into Arna, and we decided to walk home from the train station rather than pay 25 kr for the bus. This morning we went up Arna Nipa, and climbed up into so much snow! We've had the shoe dryers in our runners all day and they still aren't dry. It was gorgeous up there, sunny with fluffy dry snow. And what happens when Sonja and Lauren go, well....anywhere? Jump shots of course!

Snøøøøøø

As if I don't have enough pictures of this view....here's another!

....of course

When we got back, Tord and Helene had just returned from a funeral in northern Norway, and we ate spaghetti at 2 pm. I'm not sure if this was meant to be lunch or dinner; the eating schedule here still confuses me.

I just finished another norwegian scrabble game with my host family, with me and Sonja working together as a team. She's picking up norwegian really fast, understanding and speaking way more than I did after 9 days in Norway, even if she doesn't think so :P

I think that sums up my past two weeks in Norway, during which I reached the two month mark! Lots of cooking, eating, exercising, shopping and adventuring; life is good! I also got my personnummer this week, so I can finally set up a bank account here, buy a bus card, and actually be a registered student at school. Speaking of school, I'll be starting again this week, after 2 weeks off. I can't believe it's October 24th already...2 months and a day until Christmas! Although apparently they open presents on Christmas Eve here, rather than the next morning. They already have Christmas stuff in the stores here, I keep hearing about different Christmas traditions, and can't wait to experience a norwegian Christmas.

....But now I'm getting way ahead of myself, and I'm also done with my ramblings for the night, although I guess it's morning now.

I'll leave you with a nice snowy picture that makes it seem much closer to Christmas: