Week 9 : Høstferie og Drammen

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...