Well I guess I could have written this last night, I really wasn't doing anything special. But something about the sun starting to come down so early, and then coming up late in the morning, just makes me tired. When I first got here the sun went down around 10 at night, so I was used to going to bed while the sun was going down and then waking up long after it had risen in the morning. Now it goes down around 6:30 or 7, and comes up around 8:15 when school starts. But unlike when the sun would go down early some parts of the year in Florida, here I live on the countryside and when the sun is down here, everything is pitch black and silent. But anyways, let's talk about last week. Last week was cold, almost everyday the grass was almost white with ice in the morning, as well as the windshield. Some days it dropped below freezing in the morning, and several parts of the country got snow. I also think that last week was one of my best weeks in Arendal since I arrived. I guess I had some sort of renewed sense of confidence when I started back up at school on Monday, because I was talking and joking with people, and was more like myself than I have been since I arrived in Arendal. And it paid off. Before I knew it, friends from school were asking me to do things after class or on the weekend. Not that they weren't doing it before, but it felt more genuine now. More like they really wanted to, rather than they just felt sorry for me because I didn't know anyone. I made a few new friends this week, and got closer to a few of my classmates. I was invited to a party/bonfire, that ended up getting canceled because it was only 2 degrees Celsius outside. But there will be other things like that in the future, which is beginning to really look up. Or maybe I'm just being optimistic. I like school now. I know a lot exchange students really don't, and just skip all the time. But school, for me at least, is a place where I get to talk with my friends and kind of just relax. I guess I'm lucky to be in Norway, because the school here uses computers 24/7. So if I'm tired or bored or just don't feel like talking I can pull out my computer and put my mind elsewhere. So I'm never really that bored at school. So this week I did a few things. I joined the gym, because it gives me something to do on days where I previously had nothing to do, I spent a lot of time walking around Arendal during Trykk og Foto taking motion pictures with my class (I think it's cool that we're let loose on the city to take pictures), I went shopping with a girl from my Historie class and bought a hat because I think it's time to get one of those, I went on a walk around Hove (where Arendal hosts a HUGE music festival every summer) on Tromøya with my host mom and Happy, my host dad took Aase, Ole, and I to a modern carnival at the culture center, and I hung out in Arendal with Sunniva from my English and Math class.
Today on the ride home from school, I noticed that everything that used to be green is now orange and red. I had seen a little of this in Drammen and Oslo, but it didn't really stifle my excitement that it really looks like fall now in Arendal. I'm excited for the snow to come, but I can wait a bit if it means I can have a while longer with all this bright orange and red trees.
Tomorrow I'm going to Aase's school for half of the day to help with English class, which I think will be very interesting. This weekend I think I'm visiting my next host family, and then the weekend after is Halloween! Now normally this wouldn't be a big deal in Norway. But I'm having a Halloween party weekend with my exchange student friends! Marina, Mackenzie, Brock, Calvin, and Anne are all coming down to Arendal to stay in the little cottage next to my house with me and watch scary movies and do Halloween stuff. I might also go to a Norwegian Halloween party that weekend, depending on if my friends come on Friday night or Saturday morning. Oh yeah and I move families Sunday afternoon after they all leave. So that should be a busy weekend.
So all is well here, I'm doing good and I think this "cultural adaption" thing is well underway
Well here we go, even though I feel like I just wrote one of these, I guess it's time for another update. As I said in my last post, I spent a few days in Drammen with my exchange student friend Mackenzie. My bus got there early Wednesday afternoon, and Mackenzie and her host sister met me at the stop. We walked into the middle of Drammen to catch another bus to her house, and we bought hair bleach on the way on impulse. We spent the day at her house, not including a bicycle ride to the store (we actually walked the bikes half the hills and we didn't feel bad about it because we scaled a mountain last week) and a failed attempt to get kebab at 11 o'clock at night. It was nice though because Drammen's pretty in a different way than Arendal. I love how every place I have been in Norway is the same and different at the same time. I can't even tell you how many "wtf?" moments I've had since I've gotten here. Like on the way to the store we passed through a neighborhood that looked exactly like typical suburbian America. Or at least what you would expect that to look like, but probably only exists in movies. Going through Drammen also made me feel like I had taken a time machine back to the 90's, because it reminded me of old cartoons. Except for that the whole city smells like beer. But I swear sometimes it feels like Norway is 15 years behind, and also 20 years ahead. On Wednesday night we decided to bleach parts of our hair, mostly on impulse. So we grabbed the bleach (which direction's were in Swedish, Finnish, and German, no English) and went into the bathroom. I only really touched up the part of my hair that I had bleached last year, Mackenzie went for what she called "borderline what the hell did she do" look. Later we told everyone it was the bleach fumes that made us throw bleach at her head until it turned orange... We also decided we could never live together because we would have no one sane to keep us from doing stupid stuff. Anyways, on Thursday Mackenzie and I went into Drammen. We spent a good hour walking around looking for food. We found an Asian market and I bought Pad Thai for later, and ended up carrying it around all day. We were going to get kebab but we saw a sign for a 10kr cheeseburger at McDonald's and ended up in there staring at the menu for fifteen minutes until one of Mackenzie's friends met us and convinced us to go somewhere with better hamburgers. So of course, we split a kebab at the hamburger place, and then went to a cafe to get coffee and sit where it was warm. During the 3 hours we spent in the coffee shop, we met a famous Norwegian who had been on Eurovision and took a picture with him, Mackenzie's friend's friend joined us, and Mackenzie and I told them stories about Language Camp until they probably thought we were crazy. After that, we hung out in Drammen by the water, bought another kebab (they're the cheapest food you can get a.k.a. $12-21) hung out in the library, and walked around a lot until about 9. Then we went back to Mackenzie's house, watched Gilmore Girls and Glee online, and fell asleep. On Friday her host mom and sister took us to Oslo. We saw the Opera House, Frognerparken, and shopped on the Main Street. We also found one of the only Mexican food restaurants in Norway, which was very exciting for both of us. And by the end of the day Mackenzie had bought over $100's worth of socks, and we both had matching Oslo shirts, Norwegian flag underwear, and Norwegian flag socks.
On Saturday I took another 3 hour bus back to Arendal and slept most of the day, excluding taking a walk because the weather has been really nice. Today it's been rainy, but I still went on a 2 hour walk in the woods with my host mom, Aase, and Aase's friend. We may or may not have gotten lost, I'm not sure. All I know is that we spent a good amount of time not walking on trails.
Things are getting busier and busier though. My host parents told me I could host a "Halloweenfest helge med andre utvekslingsstudentene" go Google translate that if you can't figure it out. I'm switching families soon after that, and my friends and I have planned a weekend in Oslo, I may be back in Drammen for Mackenzie's birthday, another Rotary weekend, and maybe a trip to Denmark sooner or later.
All's well for now, and I'm actually excited to go back to school tomorrow. Now just to remember what my classes were again...
Hei there, it's been a while since I've wrote. I know I'm later than I said I'd be with this, but I had been so busy, and hten just so worn out. Right now I have just gotten on a bus to Drammen to visit my friend Mackenzie, and I'm really happy because the bus ticket was $20 less than I was expecting.
From what I remember, I left off here on Friday the night before I left for Kristiansand. On Saturday morning my host mom drove me to Kristiansand, where I would stay with Brock, an exchange student from Canada, before we took the bus to language camp the next day. The day went something like this: I got to Kristiansand around noon. We took a 30 minute bus back to his house, walked 15 minutes, dropped my stuff off at his house, and another 45 minutes back to Kristiansand. He showed around the city, we went shopping and I tried not to spend to much money but bought a $25 dollar scarf anyways. We met up with his friend and went to a cafe, I tried not to spend to much money again but probably spent over $20 on food during the day. We spent an hour in McDonald's because it was warm and 10x nicer than any McDonalds in the US or Canada, then we took a bus to a youth group because I wasn't old enough to go to the party that afternoon. We played a game about North America with a bunch of Norwegians. And lost. Badly. I accidently started reading Danish and translating it to English. We had to wait 40 minutes in the cold for a bus. I decided I like the bus better at night in Norway.
We stopped in Kristiansand, where we had to wait another 30 minutes for a bus. And we passed by the party I'm not old enough to go into and heard "Ellen why aren't you 18 yet? It's okay. But why couldn't you just be 18?" for the rest of the night. Then we took another 30 minutes back to Brock's house, and 15 minutes walking in the dark in a creepy farm town. A dog started barking at us and I made the mistake of telling Brock I'm afraid of the dark. Then we went to bed and woke up 10 minutes before we were supposed to leave in the morning.
We rushed to the bus and got on it to go to Odda, the other exchange student in Kristiansand, Eduardo, wasn't there when he was supposed to be. But luckily he got on the bus an hour into the verrrrry long trip. We had 4 hours to Haukeli, and a 2 hour wait for cthe next bus there. In Haukeli we all paid ~$25 for the worst hamburger I have ever eater. It tasted like old people. Then we got on the second bus to Odda where we met up with 8 other exchange students! 6 of the other newbies in our district, and Mackenzie, who was the first person I ever talked to via facebook who was also going to Norway, and Anne, who I flew to Oslo with. Then it was about 2 hours to Odda, and I can guarentee the rest of the bus hated us. Norwegian buses, no matter how full, are always dead silent. One girl on the bus told us she would never forget that bus ride. We all got stuck in Odda for about 2 hours because the bus they told us to get on didn't exist, and finally they sent someone to pick us up and take us the 1 to Kinsarvik where the hotel was. So we started at 8:30 in the morning and got to Kinsarvik around 7:30 at night. Needless to say, we were all tired and hungry when it was time to meet the other exchange students.
So all I remember from the first night of camp was that the food was so bad I didn't even eat it, and we found a really creep gas station that was open late and had lefsa and Solo. And when I say creepy I mean it, it felt like I was back in America. The first full day of language camp two important things happened. 1) I realized I was not going to learn anything new when the teacher wrote 1-10 on the board and started slowly saying "en, to, tre, fire". 2) Calvin let Mackenzie, Anne, and I into his and Brock's room. So of course we pushed their bed together and found Brock's colone and sprayed it on ourselves as a joke. The entire day we smelled like Brock, and his room smelled like a 60 year old man until they cracked a window open. The colone was Obsession by Beyonce, I feel like this is important to add in. This may also have been the day where we thought we were in the middle of nowhere and the nearest actual town was over an hour away, but we stumbled into a village of small children at 11 o'clock at night. There were 10 year old's running around the streets and having little parties in cabins with no sign of adults anywhere. It was the freakest thing ever because we kept trying to speak to them in Norwegian but they ran past us like they couldn't hear us. Eventually we corned them and asked them questions in Norwegian and they answered in Enlish and ran away cursing at us.
On Tuesday I don't remember much, except for that we took a three hour hike to a waterfall in the afternoon with My partner was Gustavo, who is from Brazil but has a French accent when he speaks English. At the waterfall we took a bunch of pictures and then switched partners to walk back with. At first I was paired with Calvin until I told him "Jeg skal snakker bare norsk til deg hvis du er med meg." Then I switched to Imogene from Northern California. On tuesday we also found a store with actual food and I made a bet with Mackenzie about how many apples I could eat in an hour during class. I ate seven and threw them up later. And that night we started a trend of staying in each others rooms until 2 A.M., which continued even when they started telling us to be in bed at 10:30 and ended when 3 of us were found in a shower and one under a bed on that last night.
On Wednesday we just had more class and hung around the hotel, some of us opted out of swimming in the afternoon and played Go Fish or Gå På Fiske Tur in Norwegian. On Thursday we went on a trip to go for a BBQ and Go-Karting in the mountains in the afternoon. It was fun to see the people who had never driven before ending up in the grass after one loop, or Mackenzie who hit a tire so I stopped my car to point and laugh at her and then drive away.
On Thursday we had class and played weird Norwegian ballon and stick games outside. On Friday the oldies came for the Conference. We also visited a silverware making factory and jumped into the freezing fjord. On Saturday we scaled a mountain and more. In the morning they told us we were going on a hike, but then we got on the bus and they told us we were not going on a hike. Then we got to this place where they gave us harnesses and helmets and still did not tell us what we were doing. Then they brought us to these pipes going straight up the mountain and told us we were going to climb up. So we scaled the part that wasn't straight up using ropes and wires (it was pretty steep though). And when we got half way up we stopped at the point where it literally became a straight up and down rock. From there we climbed about 150 feet up a wooden latter attached to the rock while attached to a wire. Then we got up to this platform attached to the rock face, the guide pointed at a bunch a staples going vertical across the rock face and said we'll go across that. So we spent about 45 minutes climbing across that. And Mackenzie and I were the most afraid of heights, so of course we went first. But the guide said we did good and after 15 minutes I got comfortable with the fact I was attached to a rock face with nothing below me. Oh and did I mention we were on the edge of the most beautiful fjord in Norway and there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
It was one of those things you never forget. And sadly I don't have a picture of myself, but I stole a picture of Ane doing it to give you the basic idea of what I'm talking about here. When we finished climbing up the rock we hiked some more through a cave and to the top to eat lunch. We hung out there for a while and then hiked a trail back down to the bus. We just hung out for the rest of the night and ran around the hotel. At one point I refused to speak English and had a 30 minute conversation with the Rotarians in Norwegian.
On Sunday we went to the Rotary Conference to do this presentation we spent all week working on. Everyone sang a song or danced. I sang "Alt for Norge" with some other Americans and Candanians. Mackenzie and Anne rapped, the French girls sang a song in French, the Brazilians danced, the Argentinians and Ecuadorian danced, the Austrailians sang about Vegemite, the girl from Taiwan sang a song in Mandarin, and everyone ese acted out the Norwegian version of "Little Red Riding Hood".
After that it was time for all of us to go home, which was really sad because we probably won't see each other until March, and we may never see some of the oldies again. A lot of people cried. I'm not gonna lie I teared up a bit, which was the first time I cried in Norway not counting that time I got mascara in my eye. You forget how easy it is to talk and joke with people when they are native to English. Norwegian's are great and everything but they have a different sense of humor and I'm just beginning to understand everything that's going on easily. So before, if I didn't pay close attention, I could easily drift off in my own little world for hours. And it's not that difficult to go a day without laughing once.
We went with the other exchange students on South Coast to Haukeli, and of course we had an hour and a half back in Odda to get candy and kebabs. When Brock, Eduardo, and I said our goodbyes to the last of the exchange students it was sad. The last 4 hours of the bus trip Eduardo slept and Brock and I looked at all my pictures and talked about how awesome everyone is. And when I bought a hot dog at the rest stop and had to tell the lady what I wanted in Norwegian without her switching to English I felt like I had come farther with my Norwegian this week. Especially when we met someone on the bus who spoke no English and I started translating what Brock and Eduardo were trying to say to her. So I'd like to say I came out of this week a little different then I went into it.
So spending a week with exchange students, who all relate to you in so many ways it's crazy, makes everything suddenly feel easy again. And you feel more like yourself than you have in months, you can basically say whatever you'd like again. No one cares. But then saying goodbye is hard, knowing you're going back to real life is hard. Because everyday life here is an effort. And me saying that is in no way me implying that I don't love Norway and love my life here. But it is difficult because none of this is easy, and every moment is a new opportunity to push yourself and it's important to take advantage of that. But then you spend a week laughing and talking more than you have in the entire 7 weeks I had spent in Norway prior to camp and then you have to realize it's over. You get a taste of how easy everything is, and then you to go back to a place where it's simply not and it's hard. But I know I'm still adjusting to school and my life here. I can see how far I've come and how worth it it all is. Every difficult moment is a new opportunity to grow.
And I can see how much this place has changed me, I'm a different person than I was before I spent that month in New York. And I'm a different person than I was when I stepped on that plane to come to Norway. I've been exposed to more things than a 16 year old normally is. I feel more mature now, I actually do not have any friends here or from New York that aren't at least 7 months older than me, most of them are at least a year. But most of them say they don't even notice how young I am, and some don't even know. Every person I've met since I've been here has changed me a little bit, gave me something to thing about, and altered the way I see things a little bit more. And I am happy with this.
Well now I'm still sitting on this bus to Drammen to spend 4 days with Mackenzie hanging out and maybe a day in Oslo. I've been planning a few trips to friends in Norway, and some out of Norway. But we'll see how that goes. I start school back up on Monday and I'm excited to see how it goes now that I can speak more Norwegian. Things are starting to calm down and speed up at the same time.
1 hour down, 2 more to go. And wow I just found out this bus has wifi.
I'll write again this week when I'm back from Drammen.
Here are some videos from Language Camp:
And my pictures are here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2315321676932.285731.1066157508&type=3
Well I guess I could have written this last night, I really wasn't doing anything special. But something about the sun starting to come down so early, and then coming up late in the morning, just makes me tired. When I first got here the sun went down around 10 at night, so I was used to going to bed while the sun was going down and then waking up long after it had risen in the morning. Now it goes down around 6:30 or 7, and comes up around 8:15 when school starts. But unlike when the sun would go down early some parts of the year in Florida, here I live on the countryside and when the sun is down here, everything is pitch black and silent.
But anyways, let's talk about last week. Last week was cold, almost everyday the grass was almost white with ice in the morning, as well as the windshield. Some days it dropped below freezing in the morning, and several parts of the country got snow. I also think that last week was one of my best weeks in Arendal since I arrived. I guess I had some sort of renewed sense of confidence when I started back up at school on Monday, because I was talking and joking with people, and was more like myself than I have been since I arrived in Arendal. And it paid off. Before I knew it, friends from school were asking me to do things after class or on the weekend. Not that they weren't doing it before, but it felt more genuine now. More like they really wanted to, rather than they just felt sorry for me because I didn't know anyone. I made a few new friends this week, and got closer to a few of my classmates. I was invited to a party/bonfire, that ended up getting canceled because it was only 2 degrees Celsius outside. But there will be other things like that in the future, which is beginning to really look up. Or maybe I'm just being optimistic.
I like school now. I know a lot exchange students really don't, and just skip all the time. But school, for me at least, is a place where I get to talk with my friends and kind of just relax. I guess I'm lucky to be in Norway, because the school here uses computers 24/7. So if I'm tired or bored or just don't feel like talking I can pull out my computer and put my mind elsewhere. So I'm never really that bored at school.
So this week I did a few things. I joined the gym, because it gives me something to do on days where I previously had nothing to do, I spent a lot of time walking around Arendal during Trykk og Foto taking motion pictures with my class (I think it's cool that we're let loose on the city to take pictures), I went shopping with a girl from my Historie class and bought a hat because I think it's time to get one of those, I went on a walk around Hove (where Arendal hosts a HUGE music festival every summer) on Tromøya with my host mom and Happy, my host dad took Aase, Ole, and I to a modern carnival at the culture center, and I hung out in Arendal with Sunniva from my English and Math class.
Today on the ride home from school, I noticed that everything that used to be green is now orange and red. I had seen a little of this in Drammen and Oslo, but it didn't really stifle my excitement that it really looks like fall now in Arendal. I'm excited for the snow to come, but I can wait a bit if it means I can have a while longer with all this bright orange and red trees.
