Snowboarding at Gautefall

Last night me, Lars, Vegard and some other guys went to check out this ski hill in Gautefall because it is free there on Tuesday nights from 4-9.  Since I had gotten all my stuff, and I was using a more or less extra board of Lars's, I was more than ready.  We got going a little later than we wanted, leaving just after 3:30, and got there around 5.  Unfortunately I didn't bring my camera, because it usually dies in the cold weather, and it was dark once we got there anyways.  But, it was a beautiful drive over there.  The landscape really is totally different from what I'm used to.  I've been to mountains before, but it is usually in the summer, so mountains and mountain driving in winter is completely new.  Where there are mountains there are also valleys, and it seems like half of the roads and place names have 'dal' (valley, dale) in them.  There were a few key factors which caused the drive (about 80 km, just under 50 miles) to take well over an hour: salting of roads is limited to main roads between main towns; the same roads that aren't salted are quite narrow; the roads are windy!; oh yeah, and we stopped for like 15 minutes for gas and munchies.  

There was only one run that was open (i.e. lighted) when we got there.  It was 1 km long, and pretty much just a run.  There was little 'terrain' and no man made obstacles (except for a jump a few kids made).  That was fine however, since I was getting used to entirely new equipment.  Better yet the equipment didn't cause me many problems at all.  I did have a humbling fall within the first 15 seconds, but I blame that on adjusting to the board!  The rest of the night I had fun carving down the hill goofy and switch.  There was one sort of bump along the side of the hill that I tried a couple of backside 180s off, but never rode away, unfortunately.  On the final run as I was pressing my tail down in some powder to get a good hard carve and spray some snow I somehow caught my nose (how I caught my nose by leaning back I don't know) and did the classic caught-the-nose-in-deep-powder front flip in which I lost my hat before my head hit the snow, and I got an earful of snow, which was cold.  I just cruised down the hill after that, since it was the last run.  We did have some problems with the heis ('lift') as it kept shutting down.  Thankfully it was not a chair lift, and nobody got stranded.  Afterwards we watched some handball in the Chalet (lodge, warming house, whatever you call it) as Norway has been doing well and is in some sort of final and apparently important round(s).  

All this time, I had not really eaten anything since noon but a banana and an apple and a few waffle cookie things, and we were starving.  It was just me and Lars on the drive home, and it seemed to go a little quicker.  The saving food and alliteratory delight of the night, was the one dollar weiner when we got back to Bø.  It was 10 kroner, so over 1 dollar but under two, and definitely cheap.  But it had ketchup and honey-mustard sauce on it, and after that long of not eating and also exhausting myself, it was WONDERFUL!.  Due to the exhaustion I of course slept extremely well, except for when the fire alarm went off sometime between 3 and 4.

It's now about 3:00 in the afternoon, I just finished my lunch of baked salmon, boiled potatoes (quickly becoming an easy-to-do favorite) and some green beans that I had left.  Time to do some studying and go to class at 4:30.  

p.s. sorry for the lack of pictures

Routine?

I would say that I'm in my routine now.  My bedtime has stabilized, I'm waking up before my alarms(!) and getting stuff done.  As you may have gathered from the last post, I'm getting quite a bit of work for the lit class (I'm finishing a book that we're hearing a lecture about, in Norwegian thank goodness, on tirsdag, or Tuesday as some call it) but it's going more or less well.  However, I suppose I'll really find that out later.  In sliding into my routine, it's also been nice to find that me and Christian (from Christiansand) eat breakfast about the same time a lot of mornings.  I was able to chat with him for a while last night and even longer this morning.  I learned some handy new words and phrases which is always great (I can now 'gjøre narr (av)' or 'make fun (of)' people or things, and learned some new emphasizing adjectives, because you always need more of those).  He thought it was particularly curious that I was involved with rodeo for 9 years and we proceeded to talk about country music and southern and western accents, always a good time.  I also learned that there is a difference between 'sur melk' and 'milk som er sur'; that is 'sour milk' and 'milk that is sour'.  Apparently there is a beverage called 'sur milk' which, according to Christian, old men drink and it is 'forferdelig', terrible.  If 'melken er sur', then you just have sour milk.

Where's the mountain?

Well, I am thoroughly excited to have just gotten my snowboard pants and boots that I ordered not at all long ago.  I can now shred it up in Norge.  There's a mountain, Lifjell, about 10 minutes drive from here.  Other than that there's a handful of pretty good mountains, all about an hour from here.  The other great thing is that the snow is on the mountains until April, so they say.  At any rate, everything fits, and I am now good to go.  I was shopping on a bit of a budget, so I sort of took what I could get, but I think I got some good stuff....

..... the pants are preeetty memorable, and the boots are black.

In the world of school, well:  I've been here for a couple of weeks, and Norwegian is getting progressively easier to understand, the holdups being not knowing words; however, as of right now, I think I've had equal amounts of instruction in Norwegian as I have in Danish and Swedish.  For my Norwegian Literature course (instructed in "Norwegian"), we are now having ultrapower lectures on Tuesdays and Thursdays (on Tuesdays now from 9:30 to 4:15, with a few breaks, and a longer lunch break, and on Thursdays from about 10:30 til 4:15 with the appropriate breaks.  On Tuesday the main lecturer was Danish, and spoke...Danish!  Yesterday we had a seminar on literature from Fantastic to Fantasy (older to modern).  We were of course thrilled to find out the lecturer with the most speaking time (two 45 minute slots) was not only speaking Swedish, but was from Iceland, and didn't speak it as a native language, which made it a little "vanskelig" (hard).  The hard thing about the Scandinavian languages is that they're similar enough, that understanding of the three mainland languages (Danish, Swedish and Norwegian) is assumed if you know one of them.  They talk to each other in they're own languages.  However, for a foreigner this is a touch tough.  So instead of the situation with the Romance languages or the continental West Germanic langauges (Dutch, High and Low German, and Frisian, amongst others), where there is generally no mutually intelligibility (the typical criteria for being considered a 'language') and one would learn another language if he was going to teach or communicate with others speaking that language, the Scandinavians mostly don't bother learning another of the Scandinavian languages (which would be very easy), and assume you'll understand.  

The rest of the seminar was great; it was wonderful getting to hear from Nils Ivar Agøy about Norse elements in Tolkien's works, and meeting him afterwards.  I plan on talking to him at some point about aspects of translating Tolkien's works, something that I've always been curious about since reading a deal of the Lord of the Rings in Dutch (a translation which Tolkien had many complaints about when it came to nomenclature) and now working my way through Nils' translation of the Hobbit ("Hobbiten, Eller fram og tilbake igjen"; recognize the title?).  I hope that it's an enlightening conversation if it happens.

Desverre poler jeg ikke

A ton of snow today!  It just started really coming down.... I guess we're supposed to get about 10 inches or so.  I ordered snowboard pants and boots yesterday, so I am eagerly awaiting them so that I can get out and snowboard.  Lars has an extra (definitely used) snowboard that I can use while I am here, which is excellent, and saves me a lot of money (EVERYTHING is more expensive in Norway).  I think we might go and fool around on our snowboards today.  I think I'm waiting for Lars to wake up, which he estimated would be around two.  We went to a Velkommen til Bø party yesterday, hosted by the international students in order to get to know each other.  It was fun, and I certainly didn't meet them all, but quite a few, and some new Norwegians.   We started the night by meeting at Heather Fromsouthdakota's place and playing some euchre.

I definitely won that round (or whatever you call it), just so you know.  I had a hard time convincing them that I wasn't taking a picture of my hand just because it was good.  

Then we went on to Nicole Frommankato's place, and from there to the Breisås common area, where everybody was.  It was a good time, talking all to loud to all too many people.

With two of the Slovakian girls, Lucia on my right, and Zuna the left. 

We got back about 3 after the hike from Breisås to Gullbring, in which Lars found some sort of pole/staff, and the question of the night became:  'Poler du?';  'Do you pole?' to which I replied, 'Desverre poler jeg ikke.'  'Unfortunately, I do not pole.'

Eventyrlig!

Today was a very gorgeous, pleasant temperatured, and snowy day.  Seeing such, me and Chenoa (apparently the only ones who didn't have class) went for a hike on some of the trails behind one of the residence areas.  We got out sort of late, just after one, and finished sometime after four.  The trails were really nice....

....and icy......

That's just one of the many places we fell down.  The big spot is mine, and the slide marks are Chenoa's.  

We walked up hill most of the way there (much easier going) to a few lakes.

Once on the lakes we sort of wandered on various paths, ended up going in a few circles in attempts to get back to Bø (in our defense there we signs pointing in various directions telling us that they would take us there).  In the end though, we made it fine and it was a truly 'eventyrlig', which can sort of mean 'adventurous' and 'fairlytale-like' which is a perfect word for the hike.  When you read a lot of fairytales it seems like characters always lay down on a nice bed of 'heather' on the forest floor.  Now where I come from we do not have that at all, and I'm always like, hmm, heather....right.  Well it turns out that it's very pleasant looking! 

The nice looking green floor is all a bunch of heather I think.  Between all of the straight shooting pines and the here-and-there birch trees, it made for some pretty neat woods to walk through, and, I think, made up for not being able to see the mountains due to snow.  We did fall about 30 times all added up between the two of us.  Mostly on the way back when it was down hill and on the 'easier' (looking) path.  So I got back and ate (three) fried potatoes and green beans, had some bread and margarine (ugh, I accidently got margarine) and a glass of milk.  I was looking forward to this meal since I had went out and boughten some salt, pepper, and garlic and pepper in a grinder.  It didn't let me down.  Then me, Teddi, Sarah, and Gustie ate 2 liters of icecream between the four of us and watched Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It was a good day, and I'm about to have an amazing night's sleep, I think.  I am thouroughly worn out.

Food

Just a nice short blog about my food.  For breakfast it's typically a brødskive (bread slice) with pålegg (toppings).  I  must say that my all time favorite is bread and butter with very thin sliced gouda on it, but I haven't found gouda here yet.  So, lately it's been bread, butter, sliced cheese (I think swiss?) and a salami slice; it's really good.  I was told that about the most Norwegian (modern?) pålegg is this mackerall with some sort of sauce in it.  Here's my breakfast from this morning:

I also made my whale today.  It was basically like steak, but it tasted like whale.  And whale tastes like steak, but a little fishy.  It's not really fish, but there's no other way to describe whale.  At anyrate, it was a flavor (and smell) I'm sure I'll never forget.  There're some foods that are great until you get to the aftertaste... whale is not like that, at least what I had.  It hits you, and then you're like... oh, not soo bad.  So, tonight it was hval, kokte poteter (boiled potatoes), sopp (mushrooms), and sauce (don't know the Norwegian for that, failure I know).  

Some furiously boiling potatoes.

And finally the end result:

So, do I recommend it?  Well, whale can't be eaten in too many places, which was my motivating factor.  So if you're in Norway or Japan, I would say go for it.  It's pretty decent, and if you like distinct tasting meats, I'd say here ya go!

I also had my first (I think) uncooked fish last night.  There was both smoked (I think that means uncooked, it was soft at anyrate!) salmon wrapped in lefsa with cream cheese, and also pickled salmon.  I would have to eat more to evaluate it, but it certainly wasn't repulsive.  I think I could probably get to like pickled salmon, it was pretty strong tasting, which was definitely a good thing.

So I think I'm going to continue my food experiments; if all else fails, I still have spaghetti and frozen pizzas that I can buy here...

It's been one week since I got here

And what do I think?  Well, it's definitely pretty.  The trees have been sort of perpetually covered in either frost or snow since the sun doesn't get too high to melt much.  Speaking of sun, the days get longer quicker right now than back home, I think.  Today the sun came up at 9:11 (this is in Oslo not Bø) and will set at 3:39.  Mid February it will be coming up about 8 and setting about 5.  On my last real day here (June 14th) it'll come up at 3:55 am and go down at 10:41 pm.... long day!  And I don't expect to be rising with the sun!  

Anyway, those aren't my thoughts about Norway.  One of my friends asked me if it's like Richland Center... it sort of is.  Both towns have about 5,000 people, and the only radio station is country (even in Norway I guess), which I haven't listened to yet.  Everybody seems really nice, if I drove a car around in the country I might be able to know if everyone waves to each other or not, so for now that one goes untested.  In the immediate area it's kinda just hilly, but there are mountains, which we definitely don't have in RC.

It was mostly a farming community I was told (though it still looks like it mostly is), but now a lot of the people work for the Høgskolen.  One thing they don't have is a lot of churches, but they make up for it in age for sure.  There's an Old Church and a New Church, so they call them apparently.  The Old one was built before 1300 for sure, and the new one at least 200 years ago.  I'll maybe post the exact dates when I go there, this is just hearsay right now.  Another great thing about here is the well water, it's tasty!  It's a clean area, so in that regard it's different than RC because it's not really industrial (I don't think that there're really any factories that I've seen).

They say their 'Gs' here.  So in words like 'farlig' or 'ferdig', which we were taught to say 'farly' and 'fardy', they say 'farlig' and 'fardig'.  Kinda cool.  Some of the pronouns are pronounced different as well, but I'm sure I'm way more interested in that than y'all.  The 'Back in Bø' party is tonight at the student club 'Kroa' (not sure what it stands for), and I hear it's supposed to be a blast, so hopefully that's good.  Also whalesteak is tonight, pizza last two days, hopefully it smacks good.

Hvalbiff!!

Whalesteak!!

Yes, that is what I bought today.  On Lars's recommendation I bought hvalbiff (sounds like valbeef), with some mushrooms, sauce, and potatoes to go with it.  So I think that's what I'll have tomorrow; tonight it's a pizza.  The only real Norwegian food I've been eating so far has been knekkebrød and brunost, a cracker type bread about the size of a graham cracker and brunost means brown cheese, but it's spreadable, so it goes on the knekkebrød.  

I had my first class today, and it's taught in Norwegian.  There are other exchange students in there, and so thankfully the teacher took her time in saying what she needed to say, so when there was a word I didn't know, it was typically understandable enough that I'll be able to go and look it up.  And now I'm really forced to do a lot, I have over 200 pages (in Norwegian!) to read for NEXT Wednesday, yippee.  We have to read the first part of "Kristin Lavransdatter", a historic romance.  She actually suggested that we read it in both Norwegian and English, but I'm not sure there's enough time in anyone's day to do that.  The most exciting part of the day, was finding out that there will be a seminar on the 21st about fantasty literature, and one of the guest speakers will be Nils Ivar Agøy, member (chair?) of the humanities faculty in Telemark and the translator of the Hobbit into Bokmål, the main standard language in Norway.  Since I knew of him before I came, I was hoping I would somehow get to meet him, and so I of course went and bought a copy of his translation today and can hopefully get it signed when he is here.  I actually didn't think that I was going to find a copy; at the bookstore there were a lot of copies of the Hobbit in Nynorsk, the other standard language in Norway (and the administrative language in Bø), but I got the only one in Bokmål.  So!  it was a good day.

It's warming up now, and I guess we're supposed to get more snow tomorrow.  I was also just informed that we're eating tacos and playing more euchre right now.  

shortest day ever

Well, I went to bed at 2 am after saturday night, and woke up at 2 this afternoon, now it's almost 7, and I'm probably going to be asleep sooner than later for sure.  When I woke up I didn't know if it was 10 or 3, the sun was slanting into the trees outside of my dorm, but I had no idea which way was east or west.  Turns out it was nearly the latter guess, so I thought I'd better get up.  

                                   

Met up with Sarah and Teddi to walk around a bit, and we walked (to far for the cold) to Teddi's dorm and played some euchre, decided we were spent, and me and Sarah walked back.  As I was walking around Bø, I did find out that young Norwegians (I'm thinking especially locals since they know the town) like to drift in and out of roundabouts (probly since it's snowy).  As I was walking up a street I saw about 3 cars in a row drift out of one, and then later I saw a spectacular drift as a guy started _way_ before the roundabout and slid perfectly into it without hitting and surrounding curves.  We were impressed.  

At any rate, I skyped my probably overanxious parents......

.....who had still not heard my voice since leaving, and that was all I've done on this uneventful day, so you're probably wondering why you're reading this?  Well, there's better stuff to come, og det er jeg sikkerpå.  

I Norge, og trøtt

Well, as the title says, 'In Norway, and tired'.  

I left Madison on the 2nd at about 2pm (supposed to leave at 11:30 am), the rest of my flights left and arrived on time, and I got to Norway about ..... mmm when the sun came up.  It was great to get to Frankfurt and finally hear some flippin Norwegian as I was waiting to board the plane!  And now I'm surrounded by it and trying to take it all in and understand it.  Once in Oslo it was still about a two hour train ride to Bø (that's a mid front rounded vowel folks, like 'o' and 'e' at the same time), where we were met by Lars and (H)anne (not sure if there was an 'h' at the beginning, but there was definitely an 'annuh') who drove us to our dorm (Gulbring).  I am now unpacked, showered, tooth-brushed, and still tired.  A little later it sounds like I'll be able to meet some people, which should be good, and hopefully I won't speak any more English.... hopefully.  Unfortunately I got off on the English foot with Lars, but I've introduced and talked briefly with one other person in Norwegian, so!  I have much to learn, quickly!  But I'm ready, and being ready is the best time to learn.  

Just a few cool notes: 

Norwegians like open faced sandwiches, if I had forgotten that for 15 seconds I was instantly reminded when on the plane to Oslo the man sitting next to me, upon receiving his chicken sandwich, removes the top piece of bread and proceeded to eat it.  I might have, but I needed the extra calories, which is why I'm actually eating a CLIF bar as I write this.  

Another note: not being in rodeo doesn't mean you can't wear Wrangler jeans here.  That is, apparently Wrangler makes some stylish pairs of pants over hear, that don't say '20X' or 'Cowboy Cut' on them.  

More to come, but I'm off to meet people