Ch-ch-changes!

I think this will be my last post in this blog, simply because I’m back in the United States and don’t have much more to say. After being back home, though, I realized that I haven’t really sat down and reflected on the changes that occurred throughout my time at the American College of Norway. The two biggest changes, however, were changes in my teaching and physical changes in my body.

One of the biggest changes I saw was in my teaching. At UND, I usually have two classes per semester, and between the two, I have 44 students. At ACN, I had twice as many classes, ranging from fifteen students to almost 30! That was a huge change for me, as any large class can easily lose focus on the lesson or discussion during the class period. The key for me, though, was having several activities planned for each day, and those activities helped keep the class on-task.

Another thing that changed about my teaching was my workaholic habits. Being a hard-working person from North Dakota is almost expected—at least it was where I’m from—and I put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into my work. It gets to be a rough translation from working a long, tiring day of manual labor compared to teaching for three hours and then doing office hours—it just doesn’t seem like “hard work” sometimes, so I’d try to overcompensate and work late hours in the office just to live up to that North Dakotan expectation. While taking classes at UND, I quickly became a workaholic and didn’t really feel comfortable unless I was working on something, but at ACN, I started to plan things more effectively—and plan more breaks. Some days, I would work through the stuff I needed to get done, then take the rest of the afternoon off; other days, I would take the whole afternoon off and go for a walk in the forest instead of being cooped up in the office. I’ve come a long way from trying to grade twenty papers in a day, and I feel like I put less stress on myself that way.

Physically, a lot has changed from my four months abroad. Leaving North Dakota, I weighed around 275 lbs. I wasn’t overly happy with my appearance, and I certainly wasn’t happy with my health, since walking up the stairs in the English department at UND left me winded. I didn’t have a car in Norway, so I had to walk everywhere—to the school, to the grocery store, and back home—and all that walking and physical activity really helped. Even when I went on vacations, I would walk to almost every destination I wanted to see instead of taking public transportation; while I was in London, I walked everywhere, and I only took the tubes one time throughout my weeklong stay. Norway is geared for outdoor activity, too, so it was only a five-minute walk to get to the forest paths that I walked so many times.

My eating habits changed significantly, as well. I was talking with a student once about how the food was different between Norway and the United States, and he explained that Norway has stricter laws than the U.S. on what chemicals and preservatives can be used in food. Because of those restrictions on preservatives, the food in Norway is a lot healthier for a person, so eating pretty much anything in Norway was better than eating it in the U.S. Furthermore, my portion sizes shrank while I stayed my four months, partly because of all the walking, and partly because the food there is so expensive. Overall, I came back to the United States at about 235 lbs., a loss of 40 lbs. As I walk around in my old jeans, I can only wear them with a belt, or else they slip off of me; I got back to my apartment and pulled on a sweatshirt only to realize that it was loose and just hung off of me!

This experience was life changing, as I knew it would be. I find that I’m more proactive in problem solving instead of simply waiting for things to fix themselves, and that’s one of the best changes I made during the trip. Without this adventure, I wouldn’t have improved nearly as much as I did, and I’ll be forever thankful for the people I met, the places I saw, and the friends I made.

And thus concludes this blog. Thanks for reading! 

Well, I'm back again.

So I made it back to the United States, but not without a fair amount of hassle. I left my apartment in Moss at about 4:30 A.M. on December 17^th, and luckily, the RA for the college dorms gave me a ride with my suitcases down to the bus stop. He chatted with me a little bit, and as the bus approached, he went home for bed just as I was beginning my long trek home.

Getting on the bus was my first little hassle. The bus driver hopped down from the door of the vehicle and threw my luggage into the undercarriage of the bus, then I followed him onto the bus to pay for my ticket. I asked him for a ticket to Gardermoen, the main airport in Oslo, and I asked him if there were student tickets available. He looked at me funny and cautiously asked, “…are you under 30 years old?” I explained that my 26^th birthday had literally been two days prior, to which I got another funny, cautious stare—he then said it was fine and asked for my student identification card. Crisis averted there.

I had a quick flight to Amsterdam from Oslo, but when I hit the Schipol Airport, things got a little hairy. There was nothing wrong with my flight at all—honestly, it went by fairly quickly, being I was too tired to care. When I got to passport control in the airport, a surly little man pulled me aside to his very official passport police office and started asking questions about my residency in Norway. I provided him with documentation about my Norwegian residency permit and the acceptance of said permit, but he seemed a little big for his britches to me. His little power trip was enough to send me into a foaming rage in the middle of the airport, so I tried to find something to eat, sit down, collect myself, and get through my day.

The flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis was hardly bearable. The flight was packed, seat to seat, and this was a huge airplane, to boot—most likely the biggest airplane in which I’ve ever traveled. Nine hours is too long to be stuck on a plane flying over the Atlantic Ocean and barren, frozen parts of Canada. Luckily, the plane had small video screens in the headrests like the flights I had going over to Norway, so that was a small comfort. I watched a few movies, and then everything was better. The airline also provided food, so I got to have a nice, warm meal en route, and that made things a little better.

I hit ground in Minneapolis and felt like I was home already—though I was still a few hours short. The line to go through passport control in Minneapolis was awful, and I’ve decided that, if there is a personal hell for everyone, mine will be waiting in a passport control line that never ends. I got through passport control with no issues, though, and the passport agent wished me a nice stay in America—thanks, chief, because I’ll be staying a good, long while.

Once I made it through passport control, I moved on to the U.S. customs counter. On the plane to America, every passenger was given a small card with which to say what items the passenger was bringing into the country. As I packed my bags in Norway, I opened an Excel spreadsheet on my computer and created an itemized list of everything in my bags, separated by which bag each item was in, a description of the item, an approximate value for the item, and the item’s country of origin. I filled out this card on the plane and presented it to the customs agent, who took the briefest of looks at it and said, “Alright, next please.” So after wondering and worrying about the intense interrogation I was facing going through customs after being in a foreign country for four months, I got little more than a head nod, and I was through.

I waded through people in the terminal, made it through another round of airport security (I think it was five security checkpoints in all), I found my girlfriend on the other side of the security checkpoint. My first meal in America, you ask? A hulking bacon cheeseburger with a Jack Daniels barbecue sauce and french fries. Worth it? Of course it was. No regrets here! The rest of the trip was really easy, considering I was already in the United States and had a travel partner to share my frustrations with after a 25-hour day of traveling across the world.

Sole Searching

As I was cleaning my apartment today in preparation for my departure from Norway on Tuesday morning, I got to the entrance of my apartment that has dried and dirty footprints from my shoes. I’ve got two pairs of shoes—an American pair and a Norwegian pair—and I couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic.

I knew in my soles that these would be the shoes I’d take to Norway. I’ve had a pair of shoes like this before, but I wore them for almost an entire year before they started falling apart. Because of all the walking I’ve done since I got here, I’ve worn the soles down to nothing in some places, and the white parts of the sole have actually fallen out of the shoes.

These shoes have been with me in every step of my adventure. They’ve seen the western and eastern sides of North Dakota, and they’ve flown with me out to Pennsylvania. After that, they bounced with me from Pittsburgh to Boston to Reykjavik, Iceland to Oslo, Norway. These were the shoes that nervously paced back and forth in the Gardermoen airport waiting for my bag, then sprinted outside to the bus stop to travel south to Moss. I even wore them as I hiked through Mosseskogen, the forest north of Moss—that’s where I tore a hole in the side of my right shoe, I’m pretty sure.

Come to think of it, these shoes have gone through every leg of my European journey. In August, they walked the streets of Oslo when I first arrived in Norway and took me through the biggest city I’d ever seen. In October, they took me across Belgium to the city of Bruges, striding over cobblestone streets to view windmills and towers. Later in October, they slipped their way through the largest city I’ve ever enter—London—and I walked in the paths of kings! In November, I realized how much I took my shoes for granted as I walked through Auschwitz and saw an entire room full of shoes stripped from Jewish prisoners. 

I came back from Poland feeling straight-laced, and I figured I should buy a new pair of shoes, seeing as the hole in my shoe kept ripping wider. I walked to the mall and bought a pair of Norwegian shoes, and they’ve been very nice so far.

If I had to tie this post up in a nice bow, I’d say that you shouldn’t take your shoes for granted—think of all the places you’ve been, and now think of all the other people (and shoes) that have walked there before you. I’ve walked in the footsteps of millions of people, nobility and peasants, old and young. The idea is almost too much to wrap my mind around.

"The Residence of Death": A Trip through Auschwitz

Auschwitz was the main concentration camp—turned death camp—for Jewish prisoners during WWII, rounded up and forced to work in factories near the camp by the Nazis. We all know the stories, right? This place is horrific. I tried to take as many pictures as I could—and I don’t really consider myself squeamish—but here was a place where I could barely manage to lift my camera.

Walking through the “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” gate was gut-wrenching enough, as it’s such an iconic image of the suffering that happened here, but Marta said I needed to go on the tour to fully understand. I received a small headset that was hooked up to a receiver that hung on a lanyard around my neck, and I followed a tour guide who had a microphone attached to his collar—this way, no one in the tour group could possibly miss any gruesome detail. I told Marta later that I couldn’t understand how anyone could come to work there as a tour guide, day after day, and relive the horrors of this place.

We walked all throughout the small camp that had roughly 30 buildings, and just looking at the place made it seem like the most desolate, depressing place in all of Poland—even having heard none of the stories of what happened here. Seeing the dirt streets, the brick buildings, and the electric fence around the outside perimeter made it feel like the most hopeless place on earth—as the tour guide said, the prisoners weren’t even allowed to sing, as that would inspire hope in the other inmates.

The tour took us through rooms explaining how the gas chamber worked, but that wasn’t all that new to me—that’s the stuff you learn in history class. The issue that seems to be forgotten or looked over here is that these were people, just like you, just like me—they had lives and families and possessions, and those things were all stripped from these people as they were crammed into living quarters unwashed and unfed. The tour guide directly us through several rooms full of the murdered Jews’ possessions. One room was full of the Jews’ luggage, and many of them had written their birth dates on the outside so as to retrieve their belongings after their stay at Auschwitz; some of them had personal messages, love letters and goodbye letters, scribbled across them. Another room was full of shoes from those people. Another room still was filled with eyeglasses—and each pair of spectacles once sat on a person. It was only upon seeing a room filled with the possessions of these murdered people that the magnitude of this place really began to sink in.

The last place we toured in Auschwitz was the actual gas chamber and crematorium. In American history class and on the internet, I had seen pictures of this place, and I had seen the picture of the scratches on the walls inside the chamber; this is another powerful, iconic image from Auschwitz, scratches on the walls of the gas chamber made by human hands. I wanted to take a picture, but again, I couldn’t raise my camera. I touched the scratch marks on the wall, and that’s all I could handle in that room, and I quickly stepped out into the open air again.

From Auschwitz, the tour group was taken by bus to Birkenau, the train station for the original Auschwitz camp and the site of a new, bigger camp than Auschwitz that had the same function—to utilize Jews as a free labor force and eventually kill them all. After murdering this many people, who is it that can think, You know, Auschwitz is working pretty well, so maybe we should build a BIGGER ONE, with a clear conscience and cold blood?

Like I said before, this trip was not enjoyable—but it was very interesting, and it’s necessary. I was talking with the ACN people, and they explained that the Auschwitz/Birkenau tour was a mandatory part of the Norwegian high school experience. I can understand why it would be required, but it almost seems like a high school student wouldn’t make the same connection to this place the way someone older might, like the students wouldn’t understand the gravity, the weight, the importance of this place on a global scale. I know I wouldn’t have, and I’m glad I saw it when I did.

The People of Poland

It’s already been almost two weeks since I went to Poland, so I’d better write about it before I start losing track of the stories that I took from there.

I arrived in Poland on Thursday, November 7 quite late at night—late for me, anyway, because I’ve been going to bed at 11:00 or 12:00 at night like an old man for the last month or two. Once I reached Norway and started posting pictures and statuses on Facebook about being here, my Polish friend, Marta, invited me to come to Poland, and we planned my trip for the beginning of November. Marta and I worked together at a bible camp outside my hometown called Upper Missouri Ministries in 2007; she was the international counselor for the summer, but after the summer was finished, I figured I’d never get to see her again, what with the distance and all. Lo and behold, though, here I am on her doorstep. She was waiting there at the Krakow airport for me with her brother, Jakub, and we took her parents’ car back to her hometown of Katowice.

For years and years, I’ve thought that Katowice was this sweet little Polish town of a few thousand people, like a close-knit community where the old lady next door makes delicious baked goods and brings them over to your house. Again—Kirby was wrong. Katowice actually has a couple hundred thousand people, and the city of Katowice is quite the bustling place, as cars rush past at all hours. Poland is divided into several smaller pieces, much like the United States, but Katowice is one of the main industrial hubs in its “state.” This particular part of Poland is well known for its coal mining operations and industry, and Marta explained that her area of the country makes a good amount of money for the country as a whole.

I caught up as much as I could with Marta on Thursday night, and we said Friday would be the hard day of the vacation: the tour of Auschwitz. We had breakfast at her apartment and drove to Auschwitz, taking back-roads to see the countryside of Poland where we did, in fact, run across of those few little villages that I thought Katowice was. Friday was not an enjoyable day—interesting, but not enjoyable. I’ll do a separate post about this, I think.

After I had toured Auschwitz, we went back to Katowice and stopped at her father’s company. Her dad works in metal fabrication, it looks like, and he’s the main owner of a company that fabricates machine parts by cutting metal using high-powered water-jets. The operation is really interesting, and I’d have loved to have asked questions, but her dad didn’t speak English—I felt a little guilty about asking Marta to translate every single sentence for me, as I’m sure that got very exhausting.

It turns out, though, that Marta’s parents invited us to dinner with them for a real Polish meal. Getting to her parents’ apartment, we started playing with Bobek, Marta’s adorable, whiny cat. Everyone was rushing around the apartment—bringing plates, bringing silverware, bringing glasses—and I volunteered to help, but they kept saying, “Nie nie nie nie nie” (“No no no no no”).

The dinner was really nice, and it wasn’t outside of my comfort zone, by any means. They had skinned potatoes and boiled them, and a side of sauerkraut with bacon mixed into it; the main course, however, was the most foreign to me: a flattened pork chop rolled into a burrito shape with all sorts of fixings rolled into it. It was really very good, especially after walking through Auschwitz for the day.

To the Wagner family: Dziękuję za piękny czas w Polsce.

Nomming through Norway

So, it’s been about three months and some change since I moved to Norway, and I’ll admit that I’ve been getting a little homesick. I was talking with someone recently about it who also spent some time in Europe, and she said that the biggest things you want when you’re homesick are family, friends, and food. Instead of boring with you with sighs and dramatic monologues about missing my family and friends, I’ll instead talk about food. We’ll save the sighs for another time.

My eating habits have changed significantly since I got here, what with Norway being a whole new culture to me. Back in North Dakota, I would get food from a restaurant, either dine-in or take-out, almost once a day. I was trying to learn how to cook for myself more throughout the Spring 2013 semester to get ready for this big excursion to the frozen north, but I’d still fall back on eating at restaurants more often than I’d care to admit.

In Norway, I still get my restaurant-fix once a week, normally on Thursday nights. On a nearly-weekly basis, a few members of the ACN staff and I go to the microbrewery here in Moss; the food is good and filling, and it’s also particularly American (e.g. fish and chips, bacon cheeseburgers, nachos). This is really the only meal that I eat during the week that I don’t personally cook. This is a massive change from what I did back in Grand Forks: have something small at home for breakfast, go to school, get something in a drive-through window on the way back home, and then snarf it all down while watching Netflix (followed by subsequent food coma).

The difference in price between American and Norwegian restaurants is astronomical, almost to the point where if I continued my normal American eating habits, I would go broke. As I was leaving Williston, my grandmother asked me what I was going to eat in Norway, “because a hamburger from McDonald’s costs $17!” I figured there was no way that that could be right. I was wrong. My normal meal at the microbrewery is fish and chips with a Coca Cola or a beer, which totals out at about 250 kroner; at the current conversion rate, that translates to just over $40 USD.

Therefore, I make most of my food at home here in Norway, since eating at a restaurant every day is almost financially impossible. There isn’t much fancy that comes out of my kitchen, but I eat three meals a day. A good amount of the time, I have a bowl of cereal in the morning, a sandwich with some sort of vegetable at noon, and then something a little more labor-intensive and “down home” for supper, like baked chicken with home-fries.

Going to the grocery store isn’t really different for me, since I go in, get what I need, and I leave. I pretty much zero-in on the things that I need or want during the week, then make my way for the door. After I left the school this afternoon, I walked up to the grocery store to get groceries for the week, and tonight’s haul cost me 268 kroner—and below is what I got for nearly $44 USD.

Here we have one frozen pizza that I had for supper tonight, a loaf of (THE BEST EVER) bread, a package of cheese, a package of chicken legs, a bag of potatoes, and a six-pack of Cokes.

Now, before you jump the gun and say, “Man, this guy’s a cheap asshole, whining about being in another country and how much the food costs,” let me tell you—I have no qualms about going to the ATM anymore, withdrawing 500 kroner, and going on a shopping spree at the grocery store. (Hell, I even thought of paying $80 for a zebra steak just to say I’ve eaten it. Yes, you read correctly—zebra steak.) For the first few weeks, I was pretty sticker-shocked, seeing as my biggest vice, Coca-Cola, came in a smaller bottle (0.5 liter) for more money (20 kroner = $3.50). Nowadays, though, it’s just second nature, and it doesn’t bother me in the least.

Overall, I think it’s a really interesting cultural change, and I feel like I’m a lot healthier because I’ve been making food at home and not snarfing down a bacon cheeseburger and fries every single afternoon. The food alone has been life changing for me, and I hope this change sticks with me when I move home. (And if you’re reading this and you know this change hasn’t stuck, you have my permission to physically abuse my future-self.)

London is for History-Lovers

London is most definitely a tourist city, which is easily seen by some of the food prices in restaurants. Of course, you’re probably not going to London for the food, necessarily—you’re going because it’s London, and there’s a lot of history to see here. The interesting thing is that the history you’ll find in Britain might not even be British.

One of the first places I went while I was in London was the British Museum. This place is as interesting as it is massive—there are thousands (maybe even hundreds of thousands) of artifacts dating from modern times back to the oldest piece in the entire museum: a stone tool dating back 1.8 million years. As I was walking around, I kept having a post-colonial thought crop up in the back of my mind: This museum is full of stuff that rich, white men took from other cultures.

I was so mesmerized by the British Museum that I wasn’t paying close attention to where I was walking—I simply walked from expansive room to expansive room, snapping pictures as I went. There probably is a set order in which you can cover the museum, but I had a whole week in London, so if I had spare time, I went back to the museum and looked through more exhibits. It also became kind of a shelter for me, since it rained frequently during my trip (well duh, it’s London).

The rooms are set up chronologically in some parts of the museum and culturally in other parts. I ended up walking backward through time during one expedition to the museum. I went from renaissance Europe back into medieval Europe (YAY!), wandered through a room full of clocks, then found my way into some ancient Roman stuff. That led me to ancient Greek stuff, and the next room took me back even further.

You can literally spend two full days of a trip to London walking around in the British Museum. If you’re a history buff, you’ll want to be here like flies on a gut-wagon. The museum normally has special exhibits that change every few months—while I was there, it was an exhibit of sexuality and eroticism in Japanese folk-art, or something like that. Entrance to the whole museum is free, but the special exhibits actually had an entrance fee—I didn’t go into any of the special exhibits, though, because I was just exhausted after looking through the place for seven or eight hours my first day.

Another really awesome place for anyone interested with history is Westminster Abbey. From the outside, the place is absolutely gorgeous, and the architecture is really something to behold. Be prepared for a line, though—I waited outside for about twenty minutes before I even got to the front door. There is an entrance fee here, but you can always flash a student ID card to get a slightly cheaper rate—instead of paying ₤20, I paid ₤16 or something.

Once I was inside, it looked like tourist central. Walking into the church, there are attendants walking all around in red and green robes, and some of the robe-wearing people were leading tours throughout the building. I didn’t have a tour guide, but there was a table full of what looked like cell phones—these are actually little audio devices that kind of “lead” you through the building, stopping at points of interest or famous people who are buried in Westminster Abbey. These devices are the only electronic devices allowed inside the church, as there is absolutely no photography allowed—the robed attendants were quick to pounce on anyone who was even holding a camera.

The strict “no cameras” rule is because Westminster Abbey isn’t just a place to rake in tourists—it’s still an active house of worship. There are a few priests wandering around in the crowd of people, and there was even an announcement over a PA system inside the building to invite anyone to sit down for a moment of silent prayer. I actually had a conversation with a very nice priest who explained the setup of the front of the church, where all the clergymen sat, who sat where, etc.

I was specifically looking for two graves—one for Richard II, and another for Geoffrey Chaucer. Richard II was king of England during the late-fourteenth century, which means that he was ruling over England at about the same time that Pearl was being written in the northwest midlands of the country. Pearl is considered part of the “Ricardian” era, as Ricardian poetry is a very small, very specific genre of British literature, so I figured I should see his grave. Also, I was looking for Chaucer’s grave, since he’s the father of modern poetry and all. I took a class on Chaucerian poetry a couple of years ago during my graduate work, so again, I figured I should see his grave—I even waited until all the attendants were looking away and a large group of tourists was staring blankly at the floor marking Alfred Lord Tennyson’s grave, and I even touched the stone of Chaucer’s grave. It was magical.

The last big stop for a history buff is the Tower of London. Obviously, this is a huge deal, since the oldest part of the tower was constructed by William the Conqueror. William wanted to show his power over the English people, since they were quite unhappy with the Norman Conquest, as England was, you know, conquested.

Over the centuries, more and more fortifications and buildings were constructed, thus creating the Tower of London that we know today. One of the biggest fortifications was the creation of the moat—in theory, the moat was dug, and the water from the River Thames right outside the Tower of London would flood into the moat and surround all the fortifications, making it totally impregnable. It didn’t work. At high tide, water from the River Thames would flood into the moat—along with loads and loads of disgusting human waste. (“Imagine what that would smell like on a warm summer day,” the tour guide said. “It was Britain’s greatest line of defense! Nobody would want to invade a poo-stained castle!”)

The Tower of London is most famous for the bloodshed that’s occurred there over the centuries under how many different monarchs, I don’t know. We’ll just say “a lot of them.” The most famous of these most famous incidents of bloodshed was probably the murder of the boy princes, ages 9 and 11. The princes were killed in one of the towers, which was then renamed the “Bloody Tower”; after they were killed, their bodies were locked in a trunk and hidden, thereby allowing their uncle, Richard III, to ascend to the throne of England.

The Tower of London is a spectacular place for history people, since there are stories to be told about every corner of the place. I would highly suggest going on one of the free tours—the guide we had was very knowledgeable, and he was a riot to listen to (“If you lived in any part of the British Empire, let’s have a big huzzah!” he told the group, and most of the tour group huzzahed in reply. “And as for you Americans…You don’t get to huzzah with us, because you made your choice!”) The entry into the Tower of London was ₤18, but it’s very well worth it—plus, the guided tour with a snarky guy dressed up as a beefeater is entirely free, so again, well worth the trip.