Week 7 : I can't think of a title so I'm just not going to have one.

So I decided to write this a few days early because I doubt I'll get a chance to do it on time. Next week is my Språkkurs (Language Course) with all the other new exchange students in Norway. It's on fjord, basically in the middle of nowhere, in a place called Kinsarvik. Tomorrow morning I'm going to Kristiansand to hang out with Brock (an exchange student from Canada) and stay with his family for the night, so we can catch the bus out of Kristiansand to language camp on Sunday morning. Then we have about 6-8 hours on buses through the mountains to Kinsarvik, which is a little east of Bergen. Then I have 6 days of language camp, and then 2 or 3 for another Rotary Conference.
So this week nothing happened, well maybe something did but I don't remember. I went on a walk with my host sisters choir/club and it was very nice, and I went to another Rotary meeting, and I was very tired all week for whatever reason.
Since I have nothing to really report on, I'm going to talk about Norwegian school. School here is much more relaxed than American school. There's not many real rules, and if you don't show up to class they don't really mind. School is your responsibility here, kinda like college. Oh and we get to use computers during school "to take notes" (well that's actually what we use them for, but I don't take that many notes because 1. I can't read the handwriting and 2. I won't understand much of them and I'm never tested anyways). Like right now I'm in Norwegian class typing this while the rest of my class writes essay in Norwegian. I really don't have to do much in school here.
These are the classes that I'm taking:
Math 2P: This is the easiest kind of math in Norwegian school. The reason I was put in the easiest math when I was supposed to be in AP Calculus this year in Florida is because when they first asked me if I'd like to have Math I said "not particularly", but then they needed to have more hours in my original schedule so they just threw it in there and said "we'll just give you the easy one then". So now I'm seriously learning what I learned in 7th Grade Algebra. It's really easy even if I don't understand what the teacher is actually saying, I just lok at the number and know what to do. We had a test today in that class and I finished an hour early, and all the problems were in Norwegian (the way they right numbers is a bit different and their were word problems).
History and Philosophy: This is one of those classes that I don't understand most of the time, unless I listen really hard. But I basically just read my Norwegian book in class unless it's some rare occasion where we have a handout in English (and therefore I have to explain some phrases), or where we do group discussion and my group wants to speak in English.
International English: I like this class a lot because it's really interesting to me to learn about America and English speaking people and countries from a Norwegian point of view. The class is in English so I always know what's going on, and I can do the work really easily. I try to help sometimes, but it's getting more difficult to spot grammar mistakes and know what sounds right because of all the Norwegian I'm taking in. But I obviously still do pretty well in that class, and it's nice to understand something a few hours a week. This week we had a substitute and I decided to see if I could go the week without her figuring out I was an exchange student, and maybe get her to compliment my English or something. Yeah...it didn't work. I guess with my accent, being able to pronounce every word correctly, and answer almost every question is a give away. She figured out that I knew all the vocab after about 10 minutes and asked me what nationality was when someone else didn't know. When I answered she took the opportunity to ask me what my nationality was, which I answered with "me?" *nods* "I'm American." She didn't look surprised.
Photography and Printing: I also like this class because I it's one of those classes I can actually participate in. We take pictures of certain things and learn how to edit them. Right now it's not really a challenge because we're basically learning Photoshop, which I've been using for years both in class and at home. So far we've done a self portrait and now we're making labels for apple products.
Sociology: I just switched into this class from Spanish this week, and I've only been to one hour of it. The teacher doesn't even know I'm in the class yet or that I'm an exchange student. So really have no idea what this class is like yet.
Norwegian: I obviously can't participate in this class. I think we're learning about Nynorsk (the other writen form of Norwegian), or Icelandic, or Old Norse or something that confuses me so much when I try to understand. So I read my Norwegian books in this class.
History: I don't understand this class either so I read my Norwegian books some more. This class, gym, and Norwegian I have with my "real class" 2STTE, which I guess kind of relates to a homeroom class except for I don't see them everyday, only when I have one of those classes.
Gym: I prefer Gym here to the one I had to take back home. We play confusing games that I have to have my classmates explain to me in English after the teacher explains them in Norwegian, but it's kind of fun. The Gym I had in Florida was literally running around a track or practicing sit-ups for an hour everyday. Here I have an hour a week of playing a game or doing aerobic kind of things. Last week we played "a Danish ball game" that was basically every man for himself dodgeball in a small in-closed gym. You just ran after the ball and tried to hit as many people as possible with it, which was kind of scary because there are more boys in my class than girls and they hit hard. If you got hit then you go jump rope on the side until the person that hit you got out. We also did fitness testing. This consisted of: seeing how high you can reach when you jump, how far you could skip in three moves, sit-ups, and push-ups. Unlike American gym, I did pretty okay in this.  On the Norwegian scale of 1-6 (1 basically being a 0%, and 6 a 100%) I got 3 5's and a 2 on push ups (of course...).
Other than these classes, I used to have Visual Art and Architecture but I switched out for my own reasons after about a week. I also had Spanish until this week, but I switched because it's extremely difficult to learn a language I don't remember anything of in Norwegian. I ended up getting the two confused a lot, and most of the time didn't even know what language the lesson was being taught in. Also the teacher was a little crazy and didn't understand that I couldn't understand the lessons and didn't remember any of the Spanish I had taken before, and he was one of those teachers that's gets angry when someone doesn't understand (not just me, but everyone else too). So I'm happy to be out of there, because by the time I did understand the Norwegian part, I would have been super behind in the Spanish part of the class.

So I guess that's it for this week, I'll probably update again after language camp unless I find the time during it.

Week 6 : A Turn Around

Since I didn't really do anything worth writing about this week, I'm just going to focus most of this on things about Norway that I want to talk about. But I am going to say that I started off the week in a bad mood; I was tired but I couldn't sleep, and just basically annoyed by everything. But around Wednesday night, I got sick of being in a bad mood and constantly mentally complaining to myself about dumb things. So I guess I decided I was going to do something to turn my mood around, and start off the next day as a good day. When I woke up on Thursday morning I saw that I had made a list on my computer about what I can do to be a better exchange student. So I made that day a good day, and I made the next day a better day. And even though I didn't do much this weekend, it was still a good weekend.

But anyways, time to talk about some aspects of Norwegian culture I find interesting or different.

Language: Norwegian is a very...interesting language. It looks very strange to someone like me, who really only knows English, and a little Spanish. It's a whole bunch of K's and J's and V's, and Ø's and Æ's and Å's of course. I would say pronunciation is the hardest part, and it's taken me until about last week to get a good grip on it. This has become confusing because I now I can look at an English word and almost immediately think of the Norwegian pronunciation. Sometimes I can hear a word in Norwegian be able to work out the spelling, which you would know is very difficult to do if you've ever seen a Norwegian word and then heard it. But the cool thing about Norwegian is that it is closely related to Swedish and Danish, and Icelandic (kind of, Icelandic is techinically Old Norse). So closely related in fact, I can understand some Danish and Swedish already. 

The other day my family and I were watching this show, and they were speaking something that sounded like a very strange dialect with regular Bokmål Norwegian subtitles. I could understand all the subtitles, but understanding the spoken part was difficult. Just as I was getting ready to mentally complain about how I can read Norwegian perfectly hard but listening to it so hard, my host mom told me it was actually Danish. Then I got excited because I was understanding some Danish. It sounds funny though, Norwegians describe it as 'it sounds like they are speaking with a potato in their mouth'. 

Also, this week my Norwegian class watched a movie in Icelandic with Swedish subtitles. That's what I mean about the languages being so interchangable. I could understand some of the Swedish, and a tiny bit of the Icelandic was familiar, but I gave up after 5 minutes because I didn't want to confuse Swedish with Norwegian.

Although this week I was kinda lazy with my Norwegian (I'm not really sure why...) I'm going to be asking my host family to stop speaking English with me soon. I know enough that I think I'll be able to manage. I'll probably still speak a good bit of English at school though. Right now all my friends speak Norwegian to me and to each other at lunch or during class, because generally I can understand. I'm free to join in and speak in English or Norwegian, and they'll answer me in Norwegian. Like the other day I sat outside with some girls from my class and they had a 30 minute conversation in Norwegian, and I could tell you at almost every point in the conversation what they were talking about. I call that progress!

Food: A month and a half in and I'm still confused by Norwegian food. It's very different from American food but I can't exactly explain how. They don't have snacks like we have, if you're hungry you have a sandwich. The food is healthy in general though. I'm not sure how to explain this, so I'm just going to go through the day describing how we eat. 

For breakfast I have yogurt, but you can also have smørbrød. Smørbrød literally translates to 'butter bread', and is basically a piece of bread with butter and a topping. The toppings range from liverpaste, cheese, jam, shrimp, fish, salami, ham, nutella, peanut butter, ect. 

This is also what you have for lunch in your matpakke. I usually have 2 smørbrød's with cheese, wrapped up in greaseproof paper. My school cafeteria also has sandwiches you can buy, 'pizza' (it doesn't really look like pizza), fruit, and yogurt. My favorite kind of yogurt here is called Go' Morgen, and it's some kind of yogurt with a topping on the side that you dunk in.

If I get hungry during the day sometimes I'll go get a yogurt at the grocery store, and every once in a while chocolate. Norwegian chocolate is amazing, so good in fact, I don't think I'll ever be able to eat American chocolate again. In comparison, American chocolate sucks.

Within an hour of when I get home we eat dinner. This is different every night, but it usually is fish and potatoes. I think I eat potatoes at least 6 out of 7 nights a week. I am not exaggerating.

Other 'typical' Norwegian foods include: brunost, knekkebrød, Norwegian cheese, and some others that I don't remember. Brunost is brown cheese, but somehow isn't technically cheese at all. It doesn't taste like cheese at all though. I can't describe the taste, but some people say it is like caramel and peanut butter. Brunost is a hit or miss with both exchange students and Norwegians, you either love it or hate it. I have decided I like it. knekkebrød is dried bread that you put butter and a topping on like smørbrød. It's loud and hard, and also healthy, but I like it. And then there is ACTUAL cheese, which I have been told is called Norwegian cheese. It tastes exactly like Swiss cheese and even has holes. Either the Swiss or Norwegians are confused.

Also I have to mention that milk is a really big deal here. I think my family buys more milk than bread, and that's saying something. And school people go buy these tall milk cartons in the cafeteria and take it back to class and drink it like it's the coolest thing in the world to do. I explained it to Emma over Skype today as "people carry cartons of milk around here like it's their swag or something". I think that was the perfect description. 

One more thing, before I came here I read that Norway is largest consumer of frozen pizza in the world. After having been here for a month and a half I would like to confirm that. I was also not surprised when I found out that the average Norwegian consumes more pizza than any other those of any other country in the world.

There are way more, but these are the ones that have been on my mind the most lately. If I can next week I'll write about prices and school and such. It's late here and I'm going to bed. Or maybe I'll come back and add more to this tomorrow during my free period. We'll see how it goes.

Week 5 : Oslo

Well this is the first time that I've sat down to write one of these and had no idea where to start. It's hard to have to write this on Monday because since it is a new week, it feels like last week is over and at the back of mind. Sunday afternoons are perfect because I'm writing about that week, but it's so close to being over that I don't feel like the post will be missing anything. But I didn't have the choice to do it yesterday because I didn't get back from Oslo until 10 at night. Now I feel like I have to dig back to remember what last week was like. It was a busy week last week, or at least it feels that way.

The week actually started off with me writing my last post on Monday night (duh if your someone like my parents who I know reads this every week you probably already knew that) ANYWAYS I'm mentioning this because something significant happened when I finished writing that. I went downstairs because I was hungry and I felt like I had been isolating myself in my room (writing that journal) for too long. So I cut myself a piece of bread and brown cheese with the special cheese cutter thing that looks like a shovel, and went to go eat it at the kitchen table. While I was eating my smørbrød (pretty sure that's what it's called...), ignoring the loud Norwegian coming from the other room, and looking out the window at the little red and yellow houses across the fjord (that's what I call it, I don't actually know what it is) as the sun began to go down, I realized that I now live in Norway and my life has become pretty Norwegian. Yes, it took me almost a full month of living here to realize that. And I can't explain what I mean when I say "my life has become Norwegian". Trust me I just tried to type it out 3 times but it just won't come out the right way. All I can really say is that I feel like I've adapted to the Norwegian ways of doing things, and do a lot of them now without a second thought.

Moving on, three things stick out in my mind when I think about last week. 1. I was very tired, probably from barely sleeping at the Conference that weekend. 2. All the classes in the Barbu building of my school were moved to the other one. This made me late for some classes, and "accidently" miss some others because the only teacher that said anything about it, said it in Norwegian. Also I had to walk up the steepest hill ever more times in one day than anyone should ever have to. 3. I studied A LOT of Norwegian. I reached a point where I realized I knew more than I thought I did, and that I could understand a lot of written Norwegian and some spoken. Then I figured out I could write in Norwegian and I was so excited I just wanted to learn more and practice all the time. So I started having small Norwegian conversations at school, spending all my classes hardcore studying my Norwegian books because suddenly they were so much easier to get through since Norwegian was becoming more familiar to me, and spending all my free hours in the library reading and translating Norwegian books. I've started translating my thoughts into Norwegian sometimes, and even automatically think some things in Norwegian now.

However I've sadly backpedaled a bit in the last few days with Norwegian because I was in Oslo. I practiced some whenever I spoke to Aase because I have to speak Norwegian (and she just realized I can understand her and speak the other day) but that's really it because I was so tired. Learning a language takes a lot of focus and effort, it can be very exhausting. For instance today I am so tired I didn't even try to study my books, I made it a "trying to understand spoken Norwegian day" a.k.a. listen to my teachers for 10 minutes and then spend the next 20 zoning out and so on. 

ANYWAYS, I went to Oslo this weekend with my host family because Ole had a sailing competition in Oslofjorden. We stayed at my host mom's brothers house (though she didn't come because she is in Scotland) because he lives right outside the city. We spent most of Friday afternoon driving to Oslo and dropping Ole's sailboat off at the place where the competition is held. On Saturday and Sunday, my host dad, Aase, my host mom's brother's family, and I toured through Oslo. We saw almost everything, from the roof of the Opera House to the main street to the new castle and the old fortress. Oslo is very unique. The city has so much variety. Every area of the city is different, it's a nice mixture of very old buildings, and very new, modern ones. Other than saying that I can't even begin to describe it. Oslo is just so different from any city I have ever been too.

There's actually a lot more I'd like to say, but I think I'll wrap this up here. I really want to comment on things such as Norwegian food and restaurants, school, prices, ect. but I think I'll save that for another time when I haven't already written so much.

Week 4 : Valg og District Conference

Hei hei. Dette uke jeg har vært til Langesund for en Rotary konferanse. Jeg møtter alle utvekslingsstudentene i mitt distrikt. Der har også en lokalvalg i Arendal. Jeg har også møtter min tredje vertsfamilie.

Yay I can make sentences now! I'm not sure if that's right but at least I tried. But anyways a lot has been going on this past week. It is local election time in Arendal so the campaigns are in full swing. Last Wednesday we had this thing at school where representatives from all the political parties (there are A LOT) set up tables in the gym, they walked around passing out pamphlets with information about their party and all the students could go around and ask them questions and stuff. Of course I just followed my friends around and nodded like I understood when someone told me something about their party. But I took all the pamphlets because they may be interesting to read one day when I can understand them. Now there were some students who genuinely cared about the elections, and others who just collect candy. All the parties have baskets of candy they give out and from what I understand students go around collecting the candy, and basically the party with the best candy wins the school elections. Anyways on Thursday my class had the school election instead of gym, and this long survey thing after. I just voted for the party in the middle of left and right (by the way Democrats are generally more conservative than the most conservative Norwegian party) because I didn't understand anything about the different parties. And then I had to take a 20 page long political survey...in Norwegian. Someone offered to translate for me, but it turned out that I actually understood about 90% of it.

Then on Friday during lunch one of my friend invited me to join this thing called Grønn Barbu, which I don't complete understand but I think it has to do with something environmental and political. It was basically just everyone putting a green hand print on a really big poster.

Friday afternoon I left for my Rotary District Conference in Langesund. There I met all the other exchange students in Southeastern Norway and some Rebounds. Suprisingly I am the only American in my district. There are 3 Canadians, 2 Australians, 2 Brazilians, 2 from France, 1 Mexican, 1 Argentinean, and me. But most of the Rebounds were Norwegians that had gone to the US, 1 to Florida, 1 to New Hampshire, and 2 to California. And then 1 to France, 1 to Canada, and 2 to Australia.

It was a fun weekend. On Friday afternoon we just all hung out and got to know each other. We stayed in the back of the lobby and played games like ninja. On Saturday morning we got up and had breakfast, which  confused me at first because they had a really good and varied Norwegian breakfast when I'm used to really gross American continental breakfasts that consist of stale bagels and cream cheese packets. After breakfast we had to prepare our presentation for the Conference. We learned 2 songs in Norwegian and practiced introductions (also in Norwegian) and then it was time for lunch. After lunch we put on our Rotary blazers and did our presentation. We started off by walking in carrying flags from countries all over the world (since I'm the only American I didn't have to fight for mine), we set them down and began our introductions. It wasn't too hard, we basically just said our name, age, country we're from, where we live in Norway, and the club that's hosting us in our native languages and then Norwegian. Then the oldies (people from the S. Hemisphere that arrived in January) did speeches in Norwegians, and also some of the Rebounds spoke about their years. Then we sung "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes" in Norwegian, because the older Rotarians get really happy when they see young foreigners attempt to do things in Norwegian. And then we sung some kind of famous Norwegian song. And we finished off by singing "It's a Small World After All" and carrying our flags out.

And that was the end of our Rotary obligations for the weekend. In the afternoon we all went on a trip into the open sea on an Old Rescue Boat. It was very wet and wavy and some people got really sick, but it was fun and had a really great view. When we got back to the hotel we went swimming in this huge pool that the hotel is famous for. It had a few slides, a wave pool, and a couple hot tubs. Part of the pool was even outside, which was cold. Then we had dinner and went back to the lobby to hang out and play games for most of the night. I don't think anyone went to bed until about 2 AM. And the thing was, was that neither did the Rotarians. They all stayed out in the lobby until very late. At one point a bunch of us went back to the rooms to hang out because answering the same questions about how we like Norway and school gets old fast.

In the morning we had breakfast and hung out in the game rooms and some in the pool until it was time to go home (our homes in Norway that is). It was a good weekend and I'm excited to see everyone again at language camp at the end of this month, along with the rest of the inbounds in Norway. I also met some people that are kind of close to me, so I can take a bus to hang out with them some weekend. There's one rebound to California in the town right next to Arendal, and 2 inbounds in Kristiansand about 50 minutes away by bus.

My third host dad took me home with him because my current host family were at a reunion near Oslo. So I got to meet his wife and son who is my age. It was a really nice afternoon and I'm sure I'm going to like living with them. They're all really nice and fun, and live a 5 minute ferry ride from the city. You can actually see the town across the water. We watched this show that's new here in Norway called "Alt For Norge", it's a game show where Norwegian-Americans come to Norway to compete to have a chance to meet with their Norwegian family. All the tasks are them having to do typically Norwegian things, which is really funny for both Norwegians and myself. Firstly, because they all flip out at most of the things and refuse to believe it could be considered "typical". And secondly, because they found some of the most ridiculous Americans I have ever seen.

But to sum this up, it's been a good week and a fun weekend. And now I am very tired because I've barely gotten any sleep. I'm going to Oslo this weekend, so like this week, I won't have a post by Sunday.

Ha det for nå!