meetings, books, skateboarding and more

Well, despite not having written anything last week, I DID actually do stuff.  

I was thrilled to have been able to talk with Nils Ivar Agøy about aspects of translating Tolkien last week.  We met on Tuesday at about 10:30 in the morning, and chatted for an hour or so.  He gave me an article/talk which was published by and he had given to the Dutch Tolkien society Unquendor in June 2006.  It's called "Things to remember when translating Tolkien" and he gives his opinions on not only what is good to keep in mind when translating Tolkien, but ideally who should be translating Tolkien, in his opinion.  

"So the ideal translator should be well versed in North-West European history, cultural and linguistic history, mythology and folklore, not to mention Tolkien's personal biography as well as the Bible and Roman-Catholic theology and ecclesiastical history.

A tall order!  This may be a good time to declare that I have never had the pleasure of actually meeting that fabled creature of myth, the Ideal Tolkien Translator.  But the above approach is broadly the one I aim for myself."

Not only did I get to talk to him, but he told that he could show me some books that might be of interest to me if I could drop by his house some time.  So this last Monday I stopped by, and saw definitely the biggest private library of Tolkien books that I had ever seen in person.  There were many interesting and rare books there, and I got to see a copy of the Return of the King signed by Tolkien.  Not only did I receive a lot of information and general knowledge about things Tolkienian (Tolkienian is the proper adjective), but he saved me the trouble of going out and buying a few items that I was planning on buying anyways.  He was too nice.  I do have more questions for him, of course.

Last week I also went snowboarding one more time, with Lars and Marcos, at Kongsberg.

That was a pretty good time, and then when we got back to Bø there was a disco at Kroa so we ended up going there.  Marcos said that he needed to do something standing up anyways, since his butt hurt to bad to sit down.  Disco was good, and then we went back to Lorenzo (one of the Italians)'s kitchen to play Texas Hold'em.  Not only was it fun playing cards, with him, Fabrizio, Marta and Nuria, Kirsten, and maybe one more person, but Marta (a different one, his Norwegian neighbor) made the best spaghetti ever.  Ever.

Aside from meeting with Nils, this week also got to skateboard!  There were some guys skatin in the hotel parking lot, so I stopped and talked to them and one of them let me borrow his board (like borrow until I'm not here anymore).  So now I have a board, though I'll be buying a new deck soon, just because, and I have some guys to skate with as well.  That was most of the fun stuff that has happened this week.  Today I read aloud in literature class, a poem in Nynorsk, which went allright actually (I think).  I don't read Nynorsk aloud too often, or possibly ever.  Now I'm just preparing for a test tomorrow, and pleasure reading.  

It smells like spring

Today I saw more geese, white geese of some sort.  The snow is nearly off the sidewalks and road, and it smells like spring.  

Howya like them apples

So today is Chenoa's birthday, and yesterday we sort of fested ourselves, since everybody leaves today for Dublin.  When I say sort of fested, I mean we cooked a lot of food and then were really lazy.  I left my room about 1:30 yesterday to head to Bø senter to meet up with Gustie, Heather and Chenoa and study.  Afterwards we decided to do a little grocery shopping and then go up to Breisås and cook and watch a movie.  (I now have to say that Friday night I had seen Marcos, one of the Spanish guys, cooking his entire dinner in oil, which gave me an enormous desire to finish of my potatoes in oil, so I bought some oil to fry my food in.)  Well, lets just say the cooking took a while.  I had just boughten some cooking oil, and Chenoa had a bunch of vegetables to get rid of, so what did we do?  We deep fried everything.  First there were just a bunch of potato chips and potato slices, then it was carrots, then onions, and garlic, and cabbage, and even apples (thinly sliced).  The only thing that was, meh, was the cabbage.  Everything else was delicious after a little deep frying.  The potatoes were treated with some salt and garlic salt, but everything else just stayed as was.  After we cooked the garlic everything came out with a slight garlic taste, which was great.  While we were finishing satisfying our deep frying desires Heather was busy making apple crisp, and also Chenoa was cooking soup with the vegetables that didn't find the oil.  The soup was fantastic, and so was the apple crisp.  Being so super full, all we did then was watch Star Wars Episode V the Empire Strikes Back.  I was doing good until like a little over half way through, when I started the typical nodding off, but I managed to sufficiently wake myself up after a little while.  Then it was a reasonable bed time and studying (and cooking potatoes in oil) today.

Busy Week

Between homework and unplanned activities, this ended up being a moderately busy week.  Tuesday after literature class me and Kristina got together figure out what we were going to expose about the story "Riksvegen Vestover" by Kjartan Fløgstad in class then next day.  'Riksvegen' is sort of equivalent to a U.S. highway.  It means 'kingdoms way', so it's an administrative classification of road.  Why name a story about a road?  Because most of the story is about a taxi driver driving a drunken sailor from Oslo to the west coast of Norway, and then at the end the taxi driver sleeps with the girl that the sailor was rushing to get there for.  Discussing it turned out to be more fun than I thought, probably just because I got to speak so much Norwegian.  Kristina is from Germany, though originally from Russia.  Her Norwegian is a very northern dialect (she went to school in Lofoten when she was 16), so it was fun to hear her talk.  After doing that I had precious little time to run back and get a few pieces of bread before going back to school to teach my SiTel employees some English.  I really enjoy tuturing, but it is frustrating on some levels.  First of all I need to bring more materials, which I didn't last week.  Second of all, we are only meeting like seven times total through the semester, which is not even close to often enough to learn much, and puts you in an awkward position trying to decide how much they need to do their jobs, and how much you can teach in that time, and what learning pace they can handle.  So this time we went over question words and very simple verb conjugations.... Judy Thorvik, who is helping coordinate this whole shindig thought that just teaching them sentences and phrases would be the best idea to start with for the ones who didn't know as much.  I agree that it's decent to have some sentences that can get you by, so we did do some of that.  The main problem with memorizing sentences is that you're memorizing something that is constructed and not something that can construct; and besides there's no way that we could go over all or even most "expected" sentences.  So at anyrate, I decided to teach them as basic of grammar as I could, that could produce as much as possible, which I think is ideal.

Wednesday was studying, and then me, Sarah and Fabrizio went to Kroa to watch a soccer game, Manchester United (who won) vs Internazionale (an Italian team that Fabrizio didn't like).  We cheered for Manchester and they won, so good night eh?!

Thursday I had normal classes, and like normal me and Chenoa went and got our international coffee day waffles (with jam) and coffee during the break in our poetry power hours.  At 4:30 we played volleyball at the Gullbring gymns, which was pretty fun.  It had been quiiiite a while.  Later that night Sarah, Fab(r)i(zio), Adam and I went to Nabo (pronounced 'nabu', short for Den Gode Naboen, the good neighbor) to hang out and we all swiped some of Adam's nachos, with permission.  I left first, because I wanted to wake up early and get to studying the next day.

Friday I did get up fairly early, before seven, to get going and study.  I've decided that if I just wake up early and head to school and start studying I get way more done.  So I decided on a paper topic for my Telemark culture class, 'Deep Ecology', got some books about it, put footnotes in what I have written so far about the Bø dialect for Writing Workshop, and renewed some books.  Later we went over to Grivi because JP, who is from Madison and I had met a couple of times, had just gotten here for spring break.  So it was nice seeing another Madisonian.  Lorenzo is all about playing Texas Holdem so we played that for quite a while (not for money of course), and I still suck.  Today, I have put a load of laundry in, and will soon be heading to go meet Gustie and Heather at the Bø shopping center to study, cause there's internet and tables and coffee.

Another week

There were no trips or extra special activities this week, but I thought I should report back nonetheless.  I have my literature class three times a week now, which is a lot.  Furthermore, Sigrid, who was doing the lectures regarding short stories, had a heart attack (she'll be alright it sounds like), and so now we have a young masters student from Oslo who is filling in.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays I've been getting a fair share of Nynorsk, as our professor, Olav, more or less speaks it pretty truly.  However, I felt good after getting quite a bit out of Thursday's lecture.  Next week me and the German girl have to talk about one of the short stories for Wednesday...yay.  

On Tuesday nights we've begun teaching SiTel employees English.  They come into quite a bit of contact with students who do not understand Norwegian, and there're about eighteen of them who are participating in it.  They assigned each of us about three of them according to how good they were at English and how good we were at Norwegian.  Mine were supposed to know little to no English, but it turned out that one of them knew quite a bit more than he reported.  Another one can form some sentences, and the other hasn't tried yet.  The one who hasn't tried yet has said that he never had English classes, and I'm not sure about the other two (well, I guess I know the "liar" took some a while ago).  So this last Tuesday we sort of went through and thought about the objects and rooms that they deal with on a regular basis (they are caretakers for the dorms, etc) like kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms, and objects found therein.  Wow did we cover a lot of words!  So now at least if they need some vocabulary to at least find out what is broken, they will have it.  This Tuesday I think I'll bring some grammar for them all, it's sort of necessary.  After "teaching" we watched episode four of Star Wars up at Breisås, whichI mostly slept through (in my defense I had just eaten) as Chenoa and Sarah took pictures and tried to do stuff to me.  

Wednesday we tried to go dancing again at the pizza place.  We got there, and it turned out that there was some sort of meeting going on amongst the people who are there dancing everyweek.  While we were waiting for the meeting to get over we played a round of euchre, and then I learned out to play Rummy.  Good time!  We finally started dancing at nine, to a different set of fiddlers, and I didn't stay too long, just for a couple of songs.  

Thursday I mostly spent studying until I had class at 1:30, and after class I did my usual evening studying. About 6:30 we had a taco dinner.  Me and Sarah bought stuff at Rema on our way to Grivi, and I found out that chicken hamburger is quite a bit cheaper than its bovine "equivalent"(regular is still better).  After tacos we played some Rummy, with two decks, and it took FOREVOOR.  There were only six of us, so I think it woulda been too difficult with just one deck.  

Yesterday I went to the library to get some materials on Ivar Aasen, the "creator" of Nynorsk, as I'll be talking about him on Tuesday in Norwegian class.  And then I spent the rest of the night jotting down notes about him and organizing what I'm going to say.  

Today I've only gotten out of bed, done a bit of laundry, and walked down to the Bø shopping center to do a few things.  No significant plans for the rest of the weekend otherwise.  And I've been beginning to think that I really need to do some weekend trips, unfortunately the next weekend is not any good, and the next weekend the whole group will be getting back from Dublin.  So!  We'll see how the planning goes, I do have time.  

Ned til elva igjen

Down to the river again....

Friday I devoted mostly to studying, sort of.  I devoted a chunk of my day to going to the library to figure out what I want to write about for Norwegian class (three pages due Tuesday).  On the way I picked up the mail which included a rent bill and a letter from the Bø Fiskelag (like the Bø fishing group).  I read through the letter from the Fiskelag, which I apparently get for buying a fishing license/card (I'm not sure if that automatically registered me for the group as well?) and decided to check out their website.  This was getting me in the fishing mood.  Still trying to decide on topic for my Norwegian class I decided then and there that it should be fishing.  So I quickly found the fishing section in the library, and began to read.  I was very happy to start building up my vocabulary of fish and fishing equipment (fisk og fiskeutstyr).  And of course after reading so much about fishing, it made me reeeally itchy to get out and go fishing.  So, without further at do I checked out a big book about fishing (should get me three pages worth) I marched back to my dorm, dropped off my backpack and headed to Europris to get a cheap spinning rod and reel setup.  It was 300 kroner, more than I thought it was gonna be, but not too bad.  It's eight feet long (much longer than the short trout rods that I'm used to) and the line is far too heavy, I think, but I haven't changed it yet.  It is also very collapsable, and I think it should fit in my luggage without any problems (if I think it's worth taking home at the end of the semester).  Now I wanted to go fishing, but this would have to wait unti Saturday.  Thursday night I had borrowed a couple of movies (Dinotopia and The Last of the Mohicans, which was definitely cheezy at times with its scenes that looked like the covers of a romance novel) and I watched both of them Friday.  Dinotopia in the morning and the last of the Mohicans that night.

  Saturday, yesterday I woke up and had a fairly Norwegian breakfast, made up of three bread slices: one with kylling postei (like leverpostei but chicken) jarlsberg cheese and roggebrood; one with makrell i tomat (mackerel fillets in tomato sauce); and one with butter and brown cheese.  At noon Chenoa met me to head down to the river to see if there were any trout in there.  It was cloudier than I was hoping, and a little chilly, but on the whole not too bad.  We took the shorter way to the river this time, and it didn't take too long.  There was one hole that I knew I wanted to check out, but I thought I'd try to get used to the rod and reel in a few other spots before I went up there.  I definitely need new line.  This stuff sort of pops off the reel if you're not careful, and it's hard to tie knots with.  I can't wait for fly fishing.  At anyrate, I didn't catch anything all day.  Not even a hit.  I worked a few 'spots' as best as I could from the bank and in near knee deep snow again.  I didn't even get any hits at that hole.  Although, as I was standing on a rock a little out in the water my foot slipped on the snow (you can't really tell if you're on a rock or between them with all of the snow) and my foot plunged into the river.  I was very thankful for my waterproof boots.  My ankle was the only thing that got wet (or cold at all).  I'm not sure if the trout are just really lazy and dormant in the cold weather, or if it's that they are somewhere else (which I doubt), but they did not seem interested.  I'm considering waiting towards the end of March to try it again.  Not only will it be warmer then, but maybe the trout will have decided to bite.  I also am anxious to be able to wade in the river.  I still haven't decided if I want to buy waders or wade in my clothes.  My clothes would save me money and figuring out what to do with waders when I leave, but waders would keep me dry.  In the meantime, I 'm waiting for "A River Runs Through It", the movie (in which they do NOT use waders), to arrive in the mail so I can be inspired to get out with my fly rod when the time comes.