Well, well. Yesterday was my birthday, and it was definitely a blast! It is always good to go in with hazy expectations. I just wanted to go out to eat with some of the Americans and eat some pizza. Well!, they surpsised me with a couple of cakes and three candles to blow out (my idea to light and blow out two of them eleven times didn't happen) before we made our way to the pizza place (that I don't know the name of). We had a nice crew, I think all of the Americans and one Italian guy came. Now the pizza place is great, not only because they had a pizza buffet that we could go to town on, but they also have folk music and dancing on Wednesday nights! So, I (we) ate some pizza and listened to the music and watched the (admittedly older) other people get going dancing, and then finished up and joined in. It really is super fun. The regulars are really great about dancing with us and teaching us how to do things. There are also a couple of Norwegians our age who are getting into doing it too, so it felt good not being the only new person! One of the older men, who was very good at dancing by the way!, also sang a couple of ballads, which is very rare nowadays, yet very very cool. I wish I could've understood more of what he sang. The first one definitely involved a boy, girl, and a priest, and a joke I didn't get; the second one I zoned out just listening to his voice, and didn't catch any of it, unfortunately. I hope to hear more that I can understand (and remember to pay attention to!). By the end of the night I was getting the feel of the rhythm of both the 'gangar' (an easier beat) and the 'springar' which is a little harder. I think we're going to plan on going back on Wednesdays; it really is a blast, and hardanger fiddle music and dancing was a big part of Telemark (and especially Bø) culture for a long time, and still is.
After dancing and pizza we went to Gullbring (the dorm that I live in) and watched Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. It was my turn to read the scrolling introduction, and did it in my best Cartman impression, which I'm pretty sure was terrible, but funny. Went to bed quite late afterwards, considering that I needed to wake up at 6:30 this morning.
And today, we went to Rauland! Rauland is one of the campus locations for the Høgskolen i Telemark, they focus on Folk Music and Art. We got to see people making instruments such as accordions:
We also got to see people making some very thin, crispy, unoffensive tasting flatbread:
The last thing that we did for the day there was listen to a Slovakian violin/fiddle group play a lot of music and do a sort of workshop where people could play with them. Chenoa played with them during the second half, and seemed to enjoy it. I got a short video of them:
We were able to dance to a couple of the songs, and we even go tot sing! Very fun time. It was also really cool, I guess the (0r a?) fiddle instructor at Rauland is arguably the best fiddle player in Norway. He just recently one the Landskappleik, which is a national competition for folk music. So, it was a pretty fun couple of days, with many fiddles and dances. I am now fully exhausted.
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