Checkout challenges, lots of nerdy language rambles, and a new house

It’s definitely a unique experience to be an English speaking exchange student in a country so proficient in English. It can seem almost impossible to gain a level of Norwegian high enough to override people’s tendencies to switch to English, especially when shopping and talking with strangers. In small exchanges, like waiting in line for the washroom at the shopping centre or the minibank, I can usually keep my cover. I just come across as slow and hard of hearing, as I’m always getting people to repeat themselves. 

My most impressive experience posing as a Norwegian came about two months ago, while I was out running. I ran by an old lady struggling to haul a backpack and several shopping bags up a set of stairs, and she asked if I could help. I took her backpack, and we walked together for about seven minutes to her house. She spewed Norwegian at me the entire time, full speed, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had no idea what she was saying, especially since she was of the older generation who likely wouldn’t speak much English.  I understood bits and pieces; the conversation seemed to switch from an account of all her medicines, to seasickness, to her grandchildren. I just followed her cues; laughed when she laughed, and gave sympathetic mhmm’s here and there, and prayed she wouldn’t stop talking. In that kind of situation you dig yourself into a hole with every minute that goes by to the point where you can’t admit you don’t understand without looking like an idiot. Thankfully we reached her house, she said thanks, I said you’re welcome, and I ran off.

When it comes to talking to salespeople in stores or the teller at the bank, however, this style of bluffing doesn’t work; nor would it be very effective. You can’t just sit down across the desk from the bank teller and let them talk; obviously you have to say why you’re there. While I’m at the point where I can generally get my point across in Norwegian; all it takes is my pronounciation for them to switch to English. 

The tipping point where it’s easier for both parties to converse in a foreign rather than native language is off balance when you’re an English speaker. It doesn’t matter if you know how to say what you want and could do it with only a couple mistakes; there’s no second chance once they realize you’re foreign. I can see their confusion when I say the wrong gender for a word, or pronounce something wrong; they can’t quite place me. I keep thinking about when I worked at Safeway, how if a customer came in with an accent it was irrelevant as long as I knew what they were saying. Not that my French is all that good, but I would never consider switching to French automatically if a customer was struggling with English.

It makes every trip into a store a linguistic adventure, which certainly keeps life interesting! An awkward touch-and-go territory is treaded into whenever a discussion with a salesperson goes further than the routine:

150 kr

Okei

Pose? (bag)

Nei, takk

Kvittering? (receipt)

Nei, takk

Hadet

Hadet

You could probably figure out that sequence without any translations, it’s pretty obvious.

Now that I can read most Norwegian, and understand a good amount, I tend to wonder what it used to look and sound like to me. I often look at paragraphs and wonder how much the average English speaker would pick out, just because of similar words.

“Plussgrader og regn gjør at isen på Haukelandsvatnet i Arna ikke lenger regnes som farbar, opplyser Bergen kommune tirsdag. Haukelandsvatnet er det eneste vannet i Arna kommunen sjekker isen på.”

Take this section from the local newspaper; so many words resemble English. I had to look up "farbar" (passable). Plussgrader: plus degrees. Regn: rain. Isen: Ice. Ikke lenger: no longer, etc. I'm not going to translate the whole thing; I've already gone way past my norwegian quota on this page for today. It's pretty clear what they're saying just from those few words, however. It  takes time to learn the vocabulary to understand the entire thing, and spoken norwegian is another story, but english speakers definitely have a head start here!

....I don't know where I'm actually going with this. One more nerd moment before I move on to other things. Remember the training exercise called "fartlek"? Where you alternate sprinting and easy running; the one whose name we all used to laugh at?

(The majority of people probably have no idea what I'm talking about....I'm setting new records for rambling in this post!)

Anyways, it literally translates to fart (speed) plus lek (play). I think it might be swedish, but close enough. I got way too excited when I noticed that. Not so much the translation, which is simple, but the fact that I could suddenly understand a word that used to be so foreign. These kind of epiphany's are rarely interesting to other people, so I apologize. Just thought I'd share anyways =)

Time for some observations, 5 months in:

-If you go to the bank, bus station, police, etc, and want to talk to someone who works there, you go to a little machine which spits out a number, then you wait until your number flashes up. It’s much more organized than just standing in line; but it would be confusing if you didn’t know about the machine. Since their place in line is irrelevant, people tend to just mill around the desks rather than forming any kind of pattern.

-Several times in school when the teacher is away, another teacher or the rector has come, told us what to work on, then left us alone for the rest of the class without checking up again. A bit of a jump in trust from school back home.

-That situation in history/philosophy class today led to me and Emma looking up random places on google street view. I showed her Nelson, and she commented that the cars looked different. I never really consciously noticed it, but I guess it’s true, there’s much less range of vehicles here. I rarely see pickup trucks, or hippie vans, or old beaters. There are less vans too. The majority of people seem to have expensive looking medium sized cars ( I say expensive looking because I know next to nothing about cars). The range of colour is less as well; the majority are dark.

-It seems to be more common not to have a dryer, and to let clothes air dry.

-You can get your driver's licence when you're 18, and there's no passenger restrictions like with the "N" in BC. It seems to be a lot more expensive, as you're required to take a certain amount of courses before the test.

That's all I can think of right now.

I switched host family's yesterday, and everything is going well. I'll finish this post with some pictures of my new house. 

My life, in a suitcase, three backpacks, a laptop bag and two extra shopping bags. And you can't even see the ski bag. I've acquired a fair bit of stuff since I came here!

 Off the deck of Jon and Inger's house

 Cosy new bedroom

 Out my bedroom window

 Kitchen

Living room

Congratulations on making it to the end of this one! (Or just skimming for pictures and not finding very many). 

5 months in Norway tommorow! Crazy how fast time is going

natta =)

Just another blog post

Random note before I get going:  I decided I want to start writing more in Norwegian, and that this would be a good place to do it. Since this blog is mainly intended for people back home to hear what I'm up to though, I'm not going to clutter up this part with Norwegian. So, I added a page up top ^^ where I'll try and write a bit in Norwegian and put a few pictures up as well, but this is still the main blog. I don't actually know what I'm going to write there; I just thought it'd be neat to have a Norwegian section on here. If any Norwegians feel like correcting what I write, go for it! It'd be very much appreciated.


I also added a map of Norway, which should be beside the Norwegian page. I clearly have way too much fun playing around on here when I should be doing more important things, like writing essays and packing.


This post is a mixture of parts I wrote over the past weekend, so it's going to be a lot of confusing jumping around. I don't have many pictures, because my cell phone is in a bad mood and doesn't feel like connecting to my laptop. Oh well. Here goes...


January 7th


So I’m sitting in my second host family’s cabin right now, in the ski town of Geilo, about a four hour drive and three hours by train from Bergen. They have an AMAZING cabin (a house really) close to both downhill and cross country areas.

Looking out the front door

 I guess I better do some explaining when I say “second” host family; this definitely doesn’t mean there was anything wrong with my first!! A part of the rotary program is that you live with more than one host family; the majority have three. I’m only going to have two, which I’m very happy with. I haven’t actually switched yet, but I met my second family on Wednesday and they invited me to their cabin this weekend. I’ll probably move sometime in the next week; they live really close to Tord and Helene, so the switch should be easy. I can always just walk back to visit or play the piano! Everything was great at Tord and Helene’s and I’m so grateful I got to spend the first half of my exchange there. I would have been completely happy to live there the whole year, but it’s also going to be neat to try something new and have a change. I’m really lucky to have two great families here willing to let me live with them. Every exchange student wonders what their host families will be like, and it’s scary to get off a plane to live with people you’ve met only through email. I can definitely say I didn’t have to worry about anything!  My second host parents are Jon and Inger, and they have three sons, only one of which still lives at home. Right now it’s just me and the two parents at the cabin

Jon waxing skis

On Wednesday I switched out of math and into English, and I’m really glad I did. I didn’t really try in math, since it was mostly self directed assignments on topics I’d learned before. It’s nice to have a class where I’m able to explain words instead of it being the other way around. After only one class I also realize I don’t know English as well as I think I do. There’s a lot of words I tend to skim over and understand in context, when I’m reading, but can’t explain when they’re singled out. “Assets” and “commodities” were two words I thought I knew, but could only define very vaguely. I’m excited for the class though; as much as I want to learn Norwegian, it’s nice to be able to express myself better and completely understand one class. It’s called “International English” and everyone’s level of English is high enough that it doesn’t seem to be a grammar class. We spent the last class researching world events in groups, then presenting them to the class.

January 8^th

Today I learned I have no sense of direction whatsoever. I thought there was some part of my brain that could at least distinguish between circles and lines, but apparently not. I managed to ski a 10 km loop around a lake, coming nearly back to where I started, while being convinced I had gone in a straight line. I had been told it was a loop, but I figured I had missed the turn off, so I kept going until I came to a church and went a bit past. By this point I was confused, because I had been told it was a 10km loop and as far as I could tell I had gone more than 5 km, and should have been going back the other way. I knew I was out of shape, but not so out of shape that it could take me an hour to classic 5 km! So I kept wandering around, and had one woman ask me for directions, to which I responded I had no idea where I was myself. I decided just to go back the way I came, so I kept on plodding back towards where I’d come from; until I eventually saw the church again! I stopped in my tracks (literally); I don’t think I’ve ever been so disoriented. Maybe this picture will illustrate it better:

That actually makes even less sense than my description; but I guess it shows just how confused I was? 

January 9^th

We’re sitting in a tunnel, waiting for a car that comes and leads groups of about 20 cars through a section of road with bad weather. We’re at the high point before you go down towards Bergen, and there’s not much to do, so I’m writing this. Obviously there’s no wireless inside a random tunnel, but that didn’t stop me from trying to open facebook out of habit. I think we’re the unlucky car which will be at the front of the next chain, so we have a while to wait. It’s kinda strange in here; the walls are rough rock, and it’s dark except for the headlights and a chain of yellow lights on the ceiling. We just started moving again, and it looks like we snuck into the end of this chain, and we’re just coming out of the tunnel right now. A train of cars with hazard lights flashing, driving slowly through a blizzard. It’s strange to type in the dark when I can’t see what keys I’m hitting.

In the tunnel.....

Chain of cars....although I guess this really just looks like some squiggly lights....

Today I went downhill skiing for the first time in two years. I still remembered how, and we stuck to a short groomed run that wasn't very challenging. Jon and I didn’t go for long; maybe six runs, before coming in. I switched to my skate skis, and did a loop around the water before we ate lunch and left. Today reaffirmed that I’m one of those strange people who prefers cross country skiing to downhill. I honestly find downhill more challenging, being strapped into heavy equipment and trying to turn while your legs fill up with acid. It is fun, and I definitely enjoyed it today, I just like cross country better. I realize it doesn’t make sense, to find it easier to propel yourself uphill than sit down and ride up, men sånn er det. Switching from downhill to cross country equipment is so liberating, and this time I knew where I was the whole ski. It was pretty obvious the trail turned 180 degrees and came back on the other side of the lake; I’m not sure how I missed that yesterday. Norwegians seem to have some kind of unspoken dress code when cross country skiing; the large majority were wearing black pants with blue or red jackets; I felt out of place in a black shirt and tights with a pink headband. It was so nice to skate again!

It took about six hours to drive home, because of the hour long wait in the tunnel, and the slow driving. Now it's Monday evening, and that sums up my weekend. I'm switching host families tommorow, and should really be packing rather than writing, but this is more fun.
Here's one last picture to finish it off; just another random picture of squiggly lights  inside a tunnel. I'm clearly not very good at holding my camera still, and I definitely had a picture shortage for this post if I'm resorting to ones like this!

The end!

...for now 

=)

Godt Nyttår!!

Well I’ve been a slack blogger, haven’t written anything since last year! Ok, that joke is getting really old.

The past week, romjul, has blurred in my mind into a mix of sleeping, visiting and running. I don't remember exactly what I did each day, and I won't bore you with a play-by-play either. I trained several times with Ida, including some sprints with Tord on Monday, and painful stair running intervals on Wednesday. Both our legs were shaking when we tried to do planks/bridges after that! On Tuesday Tord and I went for a quick ski on a groomed track about a fifteen minute drive from here; it was gorgeous! Cold and sunny; there's a loop that's about 4 km long, which is lit at nights. I think I had a huge smile on my face the whole time; the first real ski of the year is always amazing. I managed to fall twice; slipping on some ice and sliding smack into a family; and tripping over my own skis and faceplanting into some powder. Clearly my downhill skills haven't improved any since last year.

On Thursday afternoon I got a package from home (thanks guyss!!), which took over a month to get here since Mom and Dad sent it on some random ship that came through the Northwest passage, or something like that. It was filled with an assortment of things wrapped in newspaper and old wrapping paper I recognized from our collection at home. 

New pyjamas....just in time, my old ones were full of holes :)

My stocking from Opa and Oma's house, filled with little gifts, including a chocolate orange!

Book from Shawn

Helene came in when I was opening this one, she was like "Oh, a candle." I started laughing when I realized what it was; pumpkin and evaporated milk to make pumpkin pie!!

The funniest gift was definitely Shawn's second, very generous one. Here is some "spending money" from him:

Yep, fake Norwegian money printed out; including some cut out coins :) The envelope was decorated with sound advice and motivational quotes; he seems to either have become suddenly good in Norwegian, or else gone a little google translate crazy; I'm leaning towards the latter. 

Wise words from Shawn:

(after google translating some of them back to find out what he actually meant...not that it really became any clearer :P )

-Remember to eat cheesecake

-Listen to the ear

-Don't accept potatoes from aliens.....ok? hahah

-Support water bottle producers..I'm guessing you meant reusable ones?

-Don't eat too much cheese.....hmmm, too late!

-"breathe"

-Never drink sasquatch milk, it can contain traces of bananas

Well, thanks..haha

I wish I'd thought to skype home while I opened these, cause I was laughing really hard by the time I finished reading that. 

New years was really fun. There were family and friends over for dinner; we had pinnekjøtt again, same as on Christmas eve. I think turkey is the traditional thing to eat on New years here; we had it for dinner on the first. Dessert was a marzipan fish with chocolate in the middle (typical Norway, even fish for dessert! ) and a really neat stacked cake called something like kransekaker? It looked amazing, and tasted really good too.

Marzipan and chocolate fish

Cake :)

 I skyped with Kim, Marlies, Tegan, Carli and Alli after dinner, who were all over at Kim's place. So nice to "see" them! They were treated to "frere jaques" ( in norwegian) on the piano by Liv. Then I went to a new years party with some friends. Midnight was crazy here; everyone went out in the street and started hugging eachother and wishing eachother a happy new year, and there were fireworks going off everywhere!

I just finished watching part of the tour de ski on TV;  I get way too excited when I see Canadians in the races, especially when we do well and the announcers actually mention us.

It’s interesting to see the world from another country’s perspective, and especially how Canada and the US are represented here. Just like at home, there’s a lot of American news in the papers and on TV; it’s a pretty similar amount to what I’m used to. Canada pops up here and there, mostly in reference to the Vancouver Olympics. When I use the word “mostly” there, that implies that there’s a lot of Canadian news here. Which there isn’t at all. I’ve seen a full page spread on the Alberta oil sands in the paper; I think that's the most I've seen. Not the best way for us to be represented. Otherwise, people here seem to see Canada as a country with nice scenery, with lots of bears to be hunted and fish to be caught. When asked what they think of Canada, the response is usually something like “umm….hockey, and skiing, yeah, winter sports I guess.” I just did a quick facebook survey; the first things that came to mind regarding Canada were:
-Ice
-Snow (x3)
-Justin Bieber
-Polar bears
-Me....hahaha
-Inuit in igloos
-Bear hunting
-Cold
-George St Pierre (had to google that one, he's some kind of martial arts artist)
-Hockey (x2)
-Our flag
-Jay from top model
-Curling
-Neil Young

 That was pretty entertaining :) I guess before I came to Norway, I knew it was one of the Scandinavian fingers, and that it was cold and had lots of good skiiers, but not much else!

I also notice that I really have no idea what’s going on in the world anymore. I try and “read” the paper most days, but I can’t just skim the stories and get the idea behind them. It takes much more effort to read an article than in English, so I usually only read it if the picture or title really catches my eye. Same goes for news on TV; if I really focus I can make out the idea of a story, but when it’s just playing in the background I don’t pick anything up.

Well, I think that sums things up. Back to school tommorow. I don't have too many pictures from the past week, but here's some pretty fireworks (not taken by me...I'm nowhere near that skilled, nor did the fireworks look like that on New Years)

Godt Nyttår alle sammen! Happy New Years everyone!

For lack of a more original title....Christmas in Norway!

God Jul alle sammen, Merry Christmas everyone! This post is pretty self explanatory, and if you're hungry right now, you should probably go get something to eat before you read it. I think the majority of pictures involve norwegian food (as usual, really). There's not really any other way to introduce this, so I'll start from the beginning.

Last week we had a "test" in art; we had five hours to come up with a viking inspired design and make a pattern out of it. I figured I'd be done in half an hour, but it took me the full time! Definitely a different test than I'm used to; it was kind of stressful to finish in time, but also fun. We weren't allowed computers, so we had to base if off what we printed off the day before. This is what I came up with:

I finished school on Tuesday; we had a class of art history and then a little Christmas concert type thing in the gym. Tord and Helene's daughter Ida, who is studying architecture in Trondheim, came home on Tuesday. She was in Haiti since the summer helping to build a bakery. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to pronounce "Haiti" normally again; I've heard it said by Norwegians so many times that I read it as Hay-EEE-tea now. Anyways, we went for a nice snowy run together, and I don't remember what else happened that day. 

Wednesday we met up with Tord's granddaughter Sarah, who is seven, and her dad for lunch in the city. Then Ida, Sarah and I went Christmas shopping, and ended up sitting in a cafe drawing Christmas cards for each other. I went to the theatre? Cinema? I don't remember what I usually call it in english, with Ida and her friend on Wednesday night. It was strange to see a movie in english; I completely forgot where I was until it was over and people started speaking Norwegian around me again.

Sorry, this post is starting to sound like the stories I wrote in grade one; "and then I went to school, and then we had math, and then I ate a meatball sandwich, and then I went home and played treasure mountain, and then, I went to SLEEP". Although a good portion of the stories I wrote then were more like " and so, Victoria and Shawn and me went into the dinosaurs mouth, and I went straight to the gallbladder! Shawn went to the toes, and Victoria almost got eaten up! Then we escaped and played in a box. Then it was Christmas holidays! YAY YAY YAY." Yep, I filled a whole page up with "yay" in one of those yellow duotangs.

...The point being, I'm not doing a very good job of transitioning between ideas here, but oh well. We'll get to the food soon and you'll forget about that. 

Thursday here was lille juleaften, or little Christmas eve, and the 24th was juleaften. We set up the Christmas tree on lille juleaften; it was pretty similar to back home. We even put little plastic apples all over it ( although maybe that's a standard thing to do?) The Norwegian flags were the only noticeable difference, and the fact that the tree was real, not plastic.

Tord putting on the lights

Ida and Helene decorating

With all the presents!

Around 3 pm on Friday we ate grøt, rice porrige. You eat it with sugar, butter, cinnamon and raisins. An almond is traditionally hidden in the porrige, and whoever finds it gets a marzipan pig. Torbjørn, Tord and Helene's son, found it.

Table set for grøt

With sugar, cinnamon and butter....yumm

Jens, Margaret and Liv came over afterwards, and the space under the Christmas tree got completely filled up. The table was set again for dinner, and we had pinekjøtt (lamb ribs, I think), kohlrabi, cabbage, and sausage for Christmas dinner. The newspaper the other day had a breakdown of what percentage of Norwegians eat what for Christmas dinner, but I don't remember all the foods or figures. Pinekjøtt is more of a western thing, I think; pork and lutefisk are also common Christmas foods. 

Pinekjøtt and sausage

Dinner table with Liv the dancer :)

As soon as the last plate was empty, Liv was allowed to open one present. Once everything was a bit more cleaned up, the real present opening began. It was almost exactly the same as home; presents passed around and opened (for the most part) one at a time. It took from 8 pm til around midnight. I've mentioned it before..but I'm definitely very lucky! I got quite a stash of presents; earrings, gift cards, hand knitted socks, a scarf, buff and headband, more socks, in general much more than I expected, and much more than I gave out too! My present from the Rotary club deserves special mention; they already do SO much for me, I was so surprised to get a present from them too! I got a sweater from Oleana, the factory here in Arna that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts. Yep, the factory Michelle Obama has a sweater from, the sweaters I was afraid to touch because they were so expensive and good quality. It's definitely something I will treasure from Norway, I'm still kinda in shock. 

Om det er noen fra Rotary som leser det, tusen hjertelig takk, det var en utrolig fin overraskelse, og jeg er VELDIG glad for alt dere har gjort for meg!!

That was the only sentence in this post that doesn't have squiggly red spelling error lines under it; I use my norwegian school computer almost exclusively now.

Hand knitted socks from Evelyn, and a lovely angel from Liv

A little bit of home in Norway; Plate for Helene and Tord, cookbook for Evelyn, and butter tarts I made last week. Sorry the picture layout is so weird; I gave up on trying to make the little pictures line up without randomly shooting up to the top of the page, popping up in the middle of a chunk of text somewhere else, or disappearing altogether.

 Oleana sweater from the Rotary Club

 My pile

 Liv and her new ski boots (both her and Margaret got cross country ski packages)

When we were done with presents, and all the wrapping was cleaned up, everyone sat around and talked until about 2 am. I'm used to finishing with presents in the middle of the day, not when it's dark out. Not that that really matters; it was really neat to celebrate a Norwegian christmas! Today is the first Juledag, and the period from now until New years is called romjul. Since it hasn't happened yet, I don't know what it's like, but I get the impression it's a time for people to relax after all the Christmas rush. 

This morning we had the biggest, and probably best breakfast I've ever had. It was basically everything you could possibly put on bread, plus more. It's not even physically possible to try even a fraction of all the possible combinations you could put on your bread. It makes me think of permutations and combinations in math class again...how many possible combinations are there with five kinds of cheese, three kinds of bread....I don't feel like listing it all; a picture will do it better! Regardless, it's a LOT of stuff to put on bread, and really healthy too. I like this way of fancy breakfasts with whole wheat bread and toppings better than how it's done at home actually; with pancakes and really sweet toppings. Not that i have anything against pancakes and waffles!!

Gorgeous Christmas morning

 With cozy new socks :D

Cheeeeesssee 

...and meat

 Salmon, eggs, liver paste, meat, pickles, beets, tomatoes, cucumber...I said not to read this if you're hungry!

Yummmm

Liv (Tord and Helene's seven year old niece) got new skiis and boots for Christmas, so we went outside after breakfast to try them. I'm seriously having trouble writing right now by the way...my brain keeps giving me norwegian words, and I keep telling it "no, you're writing in english, you'll just confuse people if you throw in norwegian words, and it's not like you can even write all this in norwegian and still make sense." It isn't listening to me so well though, so it's a little bit of a fight. I've noticed over Christmas though that I can generally follow the thread of a conversation at the dinner table and such, and in general feel like I have a better idea of what's going on. Even without being able to say all that I want to in Norwegian, it's just nice to understand better.

Anyways, that's not what I was talking about. 

Liv and I went out and tried her new skis, and I used mine as well. I brought last year's training skis with me, and it was really nice to ski again. I've managed to stay somewhat in shape with running, but I didn't realize how much I missed being on skis. We went once around the house, then started building a quinzee. We didn't get past piling up the snow though.

Taking a break

We ended up going with Margaret (Liv's mom) down to a meadow below the house, and sledding/skiing up and down a really nice sledding hill. They went home after a bit, and I went back up to the house, switched to classic skis, and found some grip wax. There were some ski tracks on the old railway, and I classicked along there for a bit. I can't figure out how to conjugate "classic" to past tense, so I guess it's gonna stay as "classicked." 

Skis! I missed you guys

Past the old train station

It's definitely a good thing i didn't bring my racing skis here; I definitely put a few new scratches in my old ones! It wasn't really a workout; I kept pace with a couple going for a casual walk along the road parallel to the tracks, but I think I worked off a tiny fraction of breakfast, all in time for dinner!

Dinner was grouse that Tord caught, with potatoes and carrots and gravy, and cloudberries with whipped cream for dessert. I don't even understand how they manage to produce so much amazing food in such a short time! Might have something to do with all the food shopping and preparation they've done in the past few days, and the stockpiling in both fridges. I've documented the upstairs one, but while I was skyping with Shawn at 3 am yesterday in the garage so I wouldn't wake people up, I looked in the downstairs one. And, of course, took pictures.

 Stash of whipping cream

 Yeah, there's four containers of sour cream....in the backup fridge

 Three things of butter; there was four earlier

There's definitely no starving here

Well, that was my Norwegian Christmas. It was very koselig! 

Hope everyone, wherever you are, had a merry Christmas! And for all you back in time across the ocean, that the rest of Christmas day goes great as well.

The cute little mouse Liv made says Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Edit: Tord and Helene ( host parents) were reading this, and pointed out that I wrote "pinekjøtt", the correct spelling is "pinnekjøtt". Pinekjøtt literally means tortured or tormented meat. We got a good laugh out of that one  :P