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.