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.