Jul, Nytår, og Ski Tur

I guess I'm long overdue for an update on this. I promise to start updating weekly again. In fact, I'm going to tell you the day you can expect the next post. January 24th. There you go, write it down on your calendars because I will have another posted on that day. And I'm building a queue on the photo blog I have, so there should be at least 3-5 photos a day from now on.
So the we last left off a few days before Christmas, when my "break" had just begun. After school ended, I think I took one day of rest, and then I started spending some time with friends. I went to Kristiansand one day to visit another exchange student and see this light show. We ended up hanging out at McDonald's for a while because 1) we are just so American and 2) I was almost out of money and even though it's more expensive than in Norway, it's still the cheapest food around.
Norwegian Christmas traditions are different than American ones. For one, they celebrate mainly on Christmas Eve. And another, Christmas is about four days long.
The Christmas celebrations start four to five weeks before Christmas with Advent. Even though Norwegians are not religious people, they tend to do things that are very religious, but without any hint of religion behind the reason for doing it. The four Sunday's before Christmas we lit a purple candle. I was told it's really just an excuse to eat candy.
Also we have the Julecalendars and all the Jule products. All Norwegian children have a Julecalendar, which is a calendar that parents hang up on the first day of December, with 24 present hanging from it. Everyday until Christmas Eve you open the one for the day up in the morning. Along with those Christmas themed products and food start filling the store in October and November. Special cheeses, meats, candy, ect. that you only eat before and around Christmas. The most popular of which is Julebrus, or Christmas soda. I honestly do not understand why they only drink this around Christmas, it is definitely one of the best things Norway has to offer drink-wise.
Now for my Christmas, all the craziness officially began on the 22nd of December. (This is not including the few Christmas brunches and dinners we had the weekends leading up to Christmas..) My host dad's parents came to live here for the holidays and we start the little traditions. On the 23rd or "lille julaften" we put up the Christmas tree and decorate it. The 24th is when we did most of the celebrating. We had a big Christmas breakfast, and then a havegrot or rice-porridge lunch at my host mom's moms house, and then a big Christmas Eve dinner. We all dress up and watch TV Christmas specials all day until dinner. Then after dinner we open the presents one-by-one, and then have desert. I got a bunch of ski stuff and warm clothes that I really need for the rest of the winter, and a really nice Norway necklace with a stone where Arendal is on it. I gave my host family a homemade "How to Make Thanksgiving Cookbook" because they liked Thanksgiving so much.
On the 25th or "the first day of Christmas" we had another big breakfast, and then another big dinner with my host families extended family side 1. I called it Thanksgiving 2, because almost everything we ate, we had at Thanksgiving. By the way, I have officially brought pecan pie to Norway. On the 26th or "the second day of Christmas" we drove up to Asker, which is about 3 and half hours away and just South of Oslo, for another dinner with my host families extended family side 2. There I got the interesting opportunity to see if I could understand the 3-year-olds version of Norwegian. Nope, I can't. But that's okay, I don't think Norwegians can either. But anyways, we drove back that night because my host mom had to go to work the next day.
From that point on we had one day of rest, and then I hung out with my friends during the day and went to dinner parties with my host family every night until New Years. Then my host sister left for a sailing trail in Italy, and I had two days to rest before school started.
I want to note that I was actually excited to go back to school and be with all my friends again and have my daily life in Arendal back. And this is a huge contrast to how I felt when I had to come back to Arendal after going away in the beginning of the year from places like Language Camp. Back then it was coming back to struggling to talk to people and make friends and understand. And this time it felt almost the opposite of that.
This past weekend, I went with my host family to their cabin in the mountains to go skiing (cross country). We went up on Thursday night and stayed until Sunday. My host family said I really impressed with how well I did my first time on skis. The second day we went 4.1 kilometers on the skis, and by the end of the day I could go down the hills without tracks on them and not fall at all. They said that I'll probably be pretty good by the end of the year judging by how much I improved in one day.
The best part about being at the cabin was all the snow, one day when we were walking back to the car and I was off the skis, I walked off the track of hard snow to try to get onto the road and ended up stepping in the loose snow. One second I was walking and the next I was buried up to my hip in snow.
On the last day at the cabin we went sledding down the mountain. As in, we took sleds up the mountain on a ski lift and then rode them down a winding path down the mountain. I did not figure out how steer the sled until the 3rd time down. I think I fell into the 4-feet deep snow drifts on the end of the track about 10 times in 40 minutes. The worst one is when I literally tumbled halfway down the mountain with my sled and ended up "swimming" in four and a half feet of snow next to the ski lift, about 20 feet away from a track. But the last round down, I figured out how to steer and was actually pretty good...until I swerved the sled to try not to hit someone on the bottom and ended up being flung into the hard snow. That fall is probably the reason why half my thigh is now yellow from old bruises from my first sledding experience.
And that is all for my first time on skis. There are pictures on my photo blog.
Last weekend was also my 5-month mark in Norway, and we had a new exchange student come to Arendal. I think these two things combined have reminded me on how far I've come in these past few months. Everything is so completely different now than when I first came that it is hard to imagine that it has only been five months, while at the same time is hard to imagine that I've already been away from Florida and living in a another country on my own for 5 whole months. Time is confusing when you do something like this, everything seems to be too long and too short all at the same time.
The first few months that I lived here in Arendal were really difficult. I don't know if I ever admitted that on here, or even to myself until long after it was over. I had a lot of trouble making friends simply because Norwegians are closed-off people by nature, and I was super uncomfortable just going up to people and talking because of the language barrier, and the fact I barely understood or spoke Norwegian made just jumping into a conversation with my class impossible. And even when people would come up and talk to me, I think it was usually out of pity for me being the new foreign girl who doesn't know anyone, rather than because they were actually very interested in hanging out with me. I hated that, and I hated that I always was so quiet and could never really act like myself, but there was little I could do about it. Of course I tried, and pushed myself really hard to make friends, even though it made me uncomfortable. And unlike most exchange students, I didn't have another exchange student anywhere near to me to run to for support or friendship when I was down. In a lot of ways, I was all on my own for a while, and one of the hardest parts of the year. But over time Norwegians warm-up to you and everything just got better. Now I feel like I have a really good amount of friends, that are friends of me because they like me and not because they pity me or think I'm lonely and they're doing me a favor. I feel like I'm myself all the time, with my host family, with my friends, and even when I meet new people. I'm comfortable speaking Norwegian to my friends, even though I don't think I'm very good, and speak more Norwegian than English at school now (and everyone says I'm doing good!). I feel like I can always find something to do, or someone to hang out with, and I feel like most people really do like me or think I'm interesting here. Of course sometimes I get quiet or uncomfortable, but that's not a part of my daily life anymore. Probably even less so now than I was in Florida, which was stupid. I don't think I'll get as shy as easy as I used to when I'm back in Florida, because I've had to deal with that shyness in a new place, with a new language, a new culture, and surrounded by new people.
It's funny how when you take away everything you've grown up with and throw yourself into a new place you find that you discover new things about yourself. Being in Norway I have learned a lot of things about myself. One of them being that I can't sleep with socks on. I never knew this before because I never wore socks in Florida, but bare feet are weird in Norway. Another is that I don't actually hate Florida. It's all I ever knew, how could I hate it? I just hated some of the choices I had made there, and their consequences.
I've also learned that I probably always had some minor form of social anxiety, but never had to really deal with it until I came here. I've never been too comfortable around people in general, and I was not that person who goes up to people to try and make friends. I wait for people to come up to me. I would get nervous with new people and never knew how to deal with it. But you can't sit around and wait for people to come up to you on exchange, especially in a country like Norway. You'll never make friends, and without friends the year is almost guaranteed to suck, at least in my opinion. But I think I have been getting better with this since a few months before I left Florida, because that's when I started to realize how many friends I had there and how happy I was with them. Then at Pratt I made friends almost instantly, but that was easy because that was art school, and everyone had so much in common. But Norway was a whole other challenge, and learning how to feel comfortable here is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, and also one of the best things I have ever done for myself.
So I'll see you next time.
Check my photo blog if you want pictures!