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. 

Wait...so you people don't use trucks?

One of the biggest shocks I’ve had since coming to Europe was the automobiles. Coming from an oil-boom town in North Dakota, I’ve seen some big vehicles, and most of them are oilfield trucks with suspension lifts, making the trucks stand something like seven feet tall at the tops of the cabs. The size difference between European and American cars is a little jarring at first, but even the types of cars that Europeans drive are far, far different than American vehicles.

From the time I could drive, I’ve driven all kinds of cars in America, from little four-cylinder cars to 15-passenger vans. After getting my learner’s permit, I drove a 1990s minivan with my mom and blasted a 1970s chart-toppers cassette-tape; upon getting my normal driver’s license, I graduated from the minivan to a 1977 Ford F-150 with a 400 V8 engine and dual exhaust with glass-packs (because I wanted a loud, cool truck). I named him Frankenstein, since we replaced a lot of his parts with parts from other trucks we had at our house; alas, Frankenstein’s undying hatred of mailboxes destroyed him (with help from an icy road), and I moved on to Old Blue, a 1978 Ford F-150. I drove Old Blue through my stay at community college, then bought a truck for myself, a small 2001 Ford Ranger that I named the “Power Ranger.”

As far as vehicles in Britain go, the cars are far smaller than American ones. I was watching the Discovery Channel a few weeks back during my lunch break, and there’s always a car show on. There are two guys: one guy buys a junker car, then gives it to the second guy, who’s a mechanic. The mechanic fixes up the car and gives it back to the first guy, who then sells the car again. They had a pretty generic car from the UK on the program in this particular episode, and they each kept saying how massive, how huge, how monstrous this car was—and my Power Ranger pickup, which is a small pickup truck by American standards, was only a few inches longer and wider than this car.

When my sister came to Europe about the time she graduated from high school, I was still only a freshman or sophomore in high school—hence, just another dumb kid. I seriously thought that she was joking when it came to how small the cars were here. She also drove a 1970s Ford truck for a while, and she said that most European cars would fit into the back of her truck—and she really wasn’t lying. Most of these cars really are teeny.

For the months that I’ve been in Norway and across Europe, I’ve seen just two big vehicles. One of them looks like an import for the United States—a suspension-lifted Ford F-250—and when it goes down the street in front of my house, the other cars on the road have to pull over to make room for it to go past. The other one I’ve seen is a big, black Hummer H2. I didn’t really figure on seeing any Hummers in Norway, considering Norway seems like a very ecologically-aware country that imposes taxes on people’s cars based on those cars’ emissions.

Pickup trucks in Norway (and Europe, for that matter) seem pretty scarce. Whereas most construction workers in the United States drive pickup trucks to their job sites, or most oilfield workers drive 4x4 pickups to their rig locations, construction workers in Norway drive vans—and seemingly, these vans are no bigger than the minivan with which I started driving. Instead of having an open-box pickup truck like Americans, the carpenters that have been working on my street for months turn these little minivans into mobile workstations, converting the back half of the minivan into a place to store lumber, supplies, power tools, hand tools—you name it. I've asked people around ACN where all the pickup trucks are, and they usually say that there aren't that many in Norway. It almost seems like the word "truck" is only given to semi-trucks with huge cargo trailers or dump trucks, or other large construction vehicles.

When it comes to vehicle brands, there’s a little bit of a difference there, too. Back in the United States, if you drive a Mercedes Benz, most people will think that you’re well-off, since the Mercedes Benz brand gives off a posh vibe to Americans. I walked out of my apartment one of my first days here and saw the garbage truck rumbling up the street—with a huge Mercedez Benz logo on the front of it.

Coming from a family that, at one point, drove three 1970s Ford trucks and one 2001 Ford truck, it’s been a really interesting experience in Norway and Europe so far, seeing how different cultures utilize vehicles for both work and play. Coming from an area of North Dakota where pickup trucks outnumber cars by a significant amount also makes for a significant change. And now, I just want to drive my little truck again. 

The London Expedition

This post is certainly long overdue, but things got pretty hectic at ACN for the past week. On October 14 while I was in London, I had my students turn in their papers to the office assistant at the school; as soon as I hit the ground in Norway again and made it back to my apartment, I started grading these 70-odd papers.

As for my trip to London, I think it went pretty well, all withstanding. Getting to and from London wasn’t really as big of a hassle as I’d imagined it to be, but getting around in the city was a little difficult, since I’m so stubborn.

On the afternoon of October 12, I got a ride to the Rygge airport by someone from ACN. I got to the airport a couple of hours before my plane was set to depart, and there wasn’t any issue in the airport (although the ticket counter attendant said, “Have a nice flight,” to which I replied, “You, too!”).

I chose to fly with an airline called Ryanair again, the same airline I used to get to Belgium. The problem with Ryanair is that you don’t fly into the main airports of big European cities like Brussels or London—you fly into smaller airports that are usually an hour’s travel away. For my trip to Bruges in Belgium, I had to fly into a place called Charleroi, which was about an hour by bus from big train hub in Brussels; similarly, my trip to London took me to Stansted airport, which is a two-hour bus ride into London. Even though I had to take a bus into London from Stansted, my total airfare for this trip was $42. Yes. $42.

I could have taken a train from the airport to the center of London where I was staying, and that would have cut my travel time in half, really. There are trains that go from Stansted straight into the Liverpool Street tube station, and from there, I could have taken the tubes all the way to my hotel. I didn’t take the tubes because I had printed walking directions from one particular bus station to my hotel, and I figured that would be simpler than trying to go through the tubes and learn the tube-routes, having just stepped into the city.

Walking around London on a Saturday night is quite interesting, as there are people everywhere. Of course, being it was a Saturday, everyone was standing in the streets, standing outside of pubs and taverns smoking, or waiting in line to get into the big London clubs. I started reading my map, and I started walking, avoiding the crowds where I could. Instead of going straight to my hotel, I ended up wandering into Trafalgar Square, and I knew I was in the wrong place. What Google Maps claimed was a 45-minute walk from Victoria Coach Station to my hotel quickly turned into a 2-hour trial by fire, taking wrong turns, backtracking, walking (terror-stricken) through a pitch-black Green Park. I tried flagging down a taxi after simply giving up on getting to my hotel, but none of them would stop for me—so I kept walking.

I finally got to my hotel on Charlotte Street after walking nearly 2.5 miles from the Victoria Coach Station. I had already made my hotel reservation online, and I printed the confirmation and brought it with me—only, when I got to the address listed for the hotel, there wasn’t a hotel at that address. There were no signs that I could see, and I stood there, defeated. I saw a few English gents in cooks’ clothing standing outside a pub that served “gourmet hot dogs,” and I told them my plight. (“Y’walked all’uh way from Vitoria? Yer fookin’ crazy, man!”) One of them bounced down from the pub’s entryway and buzzed the door at 68 Charlotte Street, and a very nice Indian man came down the stairs and took my hotel confirmation.

The man’s name was Kumar, and he walked me away from 68 Charlotte Street to an entirely different building, which was my hotel. From the look of it, the building had once been an apartment building, but it was renovated to become an apartment-hotel hybrid (the place was even called an “aparthotel”).

The hotel was really…interesting. There were four floors to the building, and I was on the first floor; on each floor, there were four “hotel rooms,” two shared bathrooms, and a small kitchen. On the fifth floor, there was a fully-stocked kitchen and a dining room—each morning, you could go into this kitchen and cook whatever food was in the fridge, but then you did your own dishes once you were done. It really was an interesting setup, and it did save me a little money in the long run, not having to buy breakfast for seven days.

I hardly ever saw other people, but I certainly heard them—the walls were paper thin. I was lying in bed on the first night, and I heard someone cough in the next room, but it sounded like he was sitting at the foot of my bed. If I were staying in London for a couple of nights, this place would have been ideal—just a place to rest my head after a long day of sightseeing. Staying there for seven nights, though, seemed like a stretch. Plus, if I were traveling with someone, there’s no way I would stay in any aparthotel again. The place was in a central location, and everything I wanted to see in London was within walking distance of my hotel (almost everything), so in the end, I really sacrificed comfort for location. Most people would probably say I should have taken the tubes more, but really, I didn’t mind the walking, and my feet never hurt throughout the entire seven days of walking I did.

That first night in London, I had no idea where I was going—again, a 45-minute walk turned into 2.5 hours of mindless, panicked wandering. Three days later, I was telling people directions. It really took me by surprise how quickly and easily I learned my way around the city. Because I don’t like having strict plans while I travel, I would wake up in the morning, research what I wanted to see in the day, memorize the way to get there with Google Maps on my laptop, and then go. If you ever get to London, ask people on the street for directions—for as big of a city and as busy of a city as London, everyone on the street was incredibly nice and helpful. Even people working in businesses will give directions if you’re really stuck. London is obviously a huge tourist spot, so half the time, you’ll end up asking a tourist for directions, anyway.

Because the streets were so familiar to me by the end of the trip, I walked straight from the aparthotel to the Victoria Coach Station at 6:00 in the morning on October 19. I took my bus back to Stansted, waited around at the airport for a few hours (better two hours early than one minute late), and flew back here to Norway. It really was a great trip, and I think I’m starting to get the hang of traveling (and maybe even a touch of the “travel-bug”).

Trainspotting

If you’ve been looking through the ~150 pictures I put up on Facebook, you’ve probably guessed that I had a fantastic time on my trip to Bruges in Belgium. I’m back in Norway now, settling down from all the stress and excitement of traveling. Before coming to Norway, my main reason for not traveling was just that—the literal travel aspect of things. I’d love to go see this and that and the other thing, but I’m not a great traveler. Whenever I start making plans and realizing that those travels plans all have to interlink and overlap and become one cohesive unit, I get stressed and tend to fret about dates and times and alarm clocks not working and watching the train slip out of the station—without me on it.

For all the airports I’ve been to, I’ve almost always had someone to pick me up or drop me off at the airport. This makes things really easy, since I only have to worry about my flight that way. Being in Moss, though, I had to find my way to the Oslo-Rygge airport (I ended up taking a cab); then, once I had flown from Oslo-Rygge to the Brussels-Charleroi airport, I had to find my way from Charleroi to Brussels, which is an hour south of Brussels and the main train-hub in Belgium. I did my research and found a shuttle bus that took me straight to the Brussels-Midi train station, so that wasn’t really so bad.

As I looked around the Brussels-Midi train station, I couldn’t find any train officials to actually get a ticket to Bruges. I found an information desk, but plastered across the front was a large, handwritten sign (written hastily by an annoyed employee, I assume) which read, “NO INFORMATION ABOUT TRAINS.” It seems odd to put an information desk in a train station that has no information about trains, but hey, it’s Europe—what do I know.

In the Brussels-Midi, they don’t have any officials selling tickets that I saw, but they had touchscreen kiosks that printed tickets for you. The machines would only take a credit card with a microchip in it (whereas most American cards still have the magnetic strip you have to swipe), or the machines would take cash, but only in the form of Euro coinage. I went to a few different stores in the train station and broke down some Euro bills, and I finally had enough coins to buy a ticket to Bruges. I entered my departing station and my arriving station, and the machine spit out a ticket that didn’t have a train time on it.

The odd thing I found out about the trains in Europe is that you can hop on any train bound for your destination after you buy a ticket, no matter what time of day it is. So long as the date is correct on the train ticket, you can take any train to the arriving station. In North Dakota, the train only comes through twice, one eastbound, the other westbound; in this scenario, there really isn’t any worry about train times, since you always know that the train will be there sometime, late or not. If you miss it, you miss it, and you come back tomorrow and try again.

Because I couldn’t find what time the train left, I had to start looking at the screens hanging in the station. Just like at the airport, the screens scroll through which trains are arriving, which ones are departing, what times the trains get in and what times they leave, and what platform each specific train is at. As I looked at the screen, I had this horrifying feeling. I couldn’t see Bruges on any of the signs. I started looking at the walls of the station to find the train times when a French couple came up to me and blathered off a question about a train stop, to which I had no reply. I searched the memory banks of my brain for anything French that I could remember. Oui—no, don’t give them hope. Omelette du fromage—no, how does that help? I’ve got it! “Parlez vous anglais?” They replied with a curt “No” and walked away, but just after that, I found my train to Bruges.

My dealings with Amtrak have apparently ruined me, as I only think of trains in terms of my point of departure and my point of arrival. Believe it or not, the trains still run when I’m not on them. All the trains listed on the posters in the station had the very first and very last stations on them, meaning that my stops were probably going to be somewhere in the middle of the train’s route. I found a train from Brussels-Midi to Oostende, and Bruges was the stop right before Oostende and the end of the line. As I climbed the stairs to get onto the platform, the train screeched to a halt and the doors whooshed open, so I jumped inside, sat down, and pulled my hat low just in case it was the wrong train. In a little over an hour, I was in Bruges, and the train station was a two-minute walk from the hotel.

The biggest issue of the trip was the languages. I’ve been in in Norway for almost two full months now, and I’ve started retraining myself to automatically try and think in Norwegian when I get lost and see road signs. This didn’t work in Belgium, obviously—the country is surrounded by different languages: German, French, and Dutch. Furthermore, I was in a tourist town, so the people who were there were from all over Europe. I did run into a few English speakers, but they were few and far between. The people at the hotel and the museums were generally fluent in English, since they’re used to speaking to travelers. Going to restaurants was always difficult, though, unless they had pictures of the food on the menu. When servers came by to take my order and asked what I’d like, I mostly said, “Yes, please,” trying to tap into my adventurous side. 

Getting from Bruges to Brussels to the Charleroi airport on the way back wasn’t nearly as difficult as I imagined it would be. I looked online to buy shuttle bus tickets from Brussels-Midi to Charleroi airport, and from the website I was looking at, it seemed like that was the only option to get tickets. I planned to leave Bruges on the 6:30 A.M. train back to Brussels, but I decided that it would be better to have a little more “uh oh” time in case I couldn’t get a ticket to Charleroi and had to work out other options; I ended up leaving Bruges at 5:36 A.M. As soon as I hit the Brussels-Midi station at about 6:30, I hoofed it to the other end of the station and caught the 6:40 bus to Charleroi airport, and I was sitting in the terminal by 7:45, a whopping four-hour wait before my plane departed.

By the time I made it back to Norway yesterday, I was exhausted, but I never did take a nap. I just went through the rest of my day and went to bed at the normal time. I slept in this morning, but I knew I didn’t have to be anywhere today. Overall, it was an awesome trip, but the traveling still gets me pretty wound up. 

New Apartment Sweet New Apartment

If you've been reading since the beginning, the ACN people didn't have my real apartment ready, so they had me living in a temporary apartment for about a month. Last weekend, in the midst of grading papers, they said I could move into my new place. Here's a picture to show how far I moved up the street.

This place is infinitely quieter than the last place, since you can see the construction scaffolding all around the outside. At 7:00 every morning, a man with a 50-pound sledge hammer woke me up by pounding above my head as I slept in my bedroom.

This is my half of the building, which is another renovated apartment building that used to house workers at the nearby paper mill that just closed down (they've actually started disassembling the old smoke stacks at the plant, which makes it harder for drunk students to find their way back to the dorms, I'm told). You can see in the picture that I even have a front yard and a shade tree! Finally. I can yell at adolescent miscreants to get off my lawn. This building is actually a duplex, more or less. I have the north side of the building, and two ACN students live in the southern half.

As we get inside, it's a straight shot into the living room through the kitchen. The place is still a mess, as I'm trying to figure out where I can put all the smaller kitchen appliances. On the ride side, you can see some counter space and a few drawers, so I've been trying to cram as much stuff over there as possible.

As for the rest of the kitchen, there isn't much space over here to put pots, pans, food, and other kitchen stuff. The two cupboards above the sink are full of dishes. The cupboard above the stove, however, a good majority of the space is filled with the vent from the stove's exhaust fan, so this cupboard serves as my pantry; it's a lot easier to pile smaller pantry items into this cupboard than try to put a bunch of plates and cooking utensils here. The magnetic hold on the fridge door is incredible. You can't open the fridge without making the whole fridge move. Norwegian engineering at its finest!

If you go back a few steps into the entryway and take a left, you'll end up in the bathroom. It's actually a really big bathroom, so I'm wondering if that's a Norwegian thing, as my last apartment had a huge bathroom, as well. I wonder if it has to be big to accommodate a toilet, a sink, a water heater, a washing machine, and a shower (a shower that doesn't leak, I might add). I took my first real shower since August, and I just stood there under the shower head for about ten minutes, loving the fact that I wasn't flooding my bathroom by enjoying the hot water. The water pressure is ridiculously strong, too. The shower has a removable shower head/hand sprayer thing, so if you put the shower head into its little cradle and angle it just right, the water pressure will move the entire shower head.

 Another cool this about this bathroom is the fact that I've got what appears to be a brand new washing machine. This one is a little different from the washing machine in the other apartment, since that other one was a combination washer and dryer. This is only the washing machine portion, but I finally found a clothes drying rack when I moved apartments.

Below is the living room. It was kind of a challenge getting all (okay, most) of the furniture from the old apartment to the new one. This place is a little smaller than the previous place, but it feels a lot more cozy, I guess. That, and sweaty workmen don't wake me up every morning with a percussive alarm clock. If you saw on Facebook the other day, I said that I got a TV in my new place, and I was trying to watch Norwegian-dubbed Hannah Montana. I've got a big bookshelf where I can keep my thesis research organized, and I even have a desk to work on my thesis at home, so those two things make life a little easier 

Here we have the "Steps of Doom" just inside and to the left of the entry into the living room. Each stair up to the bedroom is cut into a wedge-shape, as you can see, so there's no real way to rush up and down the steps if I'm late in the morning for class. It also makes things difficult since you can only start walking up the stairs with your left foot first; if you forget and use your right foot first, the climb is that much more perilous.

Just to show you how steep these stairs are, here's a shot looking downward toward the living room. The transition between the last step and the bedroom floor always feels awkward, since there isn't a landing at the top of the steps. The living room has open rafters, which I really like; it makes the space feel so much more open, but at the same time, I can turn on a single lamp in the living room and provide adequate light to the living room and the upstairs bedroom. 

Finally: the master suite. It's a little room, but I'm sure it was made only for sleeping, as any other activity could be done with ease downstairs in the living room. From the previous apartment, the only things I figured would fit up here would be the four-drawer dresser to the right and the two-drawer end-table/nightstand. I put a single lamp up here and angled it up at the ceiling, as the light reflecting off the white paint makes the light a little less harsh and bright. I do have a few pictures that I'd like to hang, but I'm not sure where to put them just yet. Again, the place is a little disheveled, but I only started unpacking yesterday. Welcome to Casa de Kirb! Oh, wait, wrong language.

Learning the Lingo

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, and I know I should be more on the ball, telling you people about my adventures. About two weeks ago, my students (about 70 of them) turned in their first papers for my Composition 110 class. I graded them all in about a week and a half to the surprise of my colleagues, since it normally takes longer for Composition teachers to get through a round of papers. It was a lot of late nights in the office, and by the time I was done, I really didn’t feel like sitting down and posting a blog.

Last night, the ACN staff had a Thursday get-together, like an end-of-the-week dinner to kind of decompress and de-stress from the week. As we were talking, we started talking about languages and how each of us sitting around the table knew different languages. That’s something you really don’t see in the United States, a table full of language-speakers (and no, not the languages offered in high schools like German, Spanish, or French).

My boss is American, but she studied in Norway during college, so she picked up Norwegian and is now fluent in it. Another person at the table was raised in Holland, but he attended American schools there, so he speaks English like anyone off the street; however, he also knows a little Dutch, I think he said, and he also speaks Norwegian pretty well. I took four years of German in high school, then another two semesters in college; I also took three semesters of Norwegian at UND and tested out of the four Norwegian class I was required to take. Of all the people at the table, one colleague didn’t speak Norwegian at all, but he really surprised me when he pulled out his reading glasses in an Indian restaurant and started reading the inscriptions that were painted along the walls.

I guess I never realized how multicultural Europe was until I got here. I mean, I did have some inkling as to the diversity of the place, being there are so many countries, so many cultures, and so many languages all jammed together in one place—it’s something you learn in school, but you really need to experience firsthand.

I’ve been speaking Norwegian to some of my students at the beginning of class and in the hallways here and there. It seems very challenging but very rewarding to speak with students more than anyone walking down the street. First off, I already know the students, and through their papers, I get to know more about them, so it’s very comfortable talking with them. It’s pretty daunting, however, because when I speak Norwegian to them before class and say something as I’ve always said it, they laugh. I asked if my pronunciation was wrong, or if I was inflecting the wrong parts of certain words, but they replied, “No…we just don’t expect it from you. It’s always surprising when it comes from you, because we know you’re American.”

Whenever I speak with students in Norwegian, they’re always very excited to teach me new vocabulary (but I’m surprised that they haven’t gone straight for the bad words). Every conversation in Norwegian ends up with me asking about linguistics questions (“So the –st ending on vennlig makes it an adverbial?”)—and then our conversations boil down to different dialects of Norwegian language.

Norwegian has a slew of different dialects, and the problem with them is that two people with different dialects can both be speaking Norwegian and not understand each other. We have a few people from Bergen, a larger city on the western side of the country, and people from around this area near Oslo can hardly understand them because of their dialect. Because there’s such a long coastline here, you could almost imagine that every little fjord along Norway’s coast could possibly have its own specific dialect—and people have claimed that by studying Norwegian dialects, we could actually pinpoint where in Norway a person originated. I’m sure there are linguists that study that with English, as well, though I don’t know the real term for it, but in all, I think it’s really interesting. 

School Sweet School

Because the weather hasn’t been as delightful as it usual, I decided I should do another blog post. Quite a few people have been asking me about what the school looks like, to which I’ve always thought, Well, you know how a school looks? It looks something like that. Instead of leaving it at that, I decided to take a few pictures and give the grand tour via blog. Onward!

Here’s a picture of the outside of the building. For those of you who have been watching my Facebook uploads, the front of the building is this bright, happy yellow color with white trim. The building is actually U-shaped, and the yellow side is the side which faces the street; this portion of the building is actually offices, the ACN staff has told me, and these offices aren’t affiliated with the college at all. The brick side of the building is our half. Don’t mind the scaffolding—some construction people are replacing old or cracked bricks all along the building. This makes it hard to keep the students’ attention sometimes, since there are people walking along the windows of the                                                                                       classroom.

Here is a picture of the student area of the college. Most times, when I’m walking out of the building to go home and make lunch, there are students hanging out here on the two couches in this area. There are two computers for the students to use, and those two computers are connected to the printer to the left of the computer screens. Because the students don’t have any printing options in the dorms (unless they brought printers of their own), there always seems to be a mad rush before my Composition classes to print everything.

Between the two “Staff Only” doors, we have a small library. This is mostly composed of old textbooks from previous semesters. ACN used to buy all the textbooks for the classes and sell them to the students, but it is now the students’ responsibility to get their own textbooks for whatever classes they take. There are plenty of travel books here, as well, for both students and lecturers to utilize and plan trips throughout the semester. The pennants above the bookshelf are from ACN’s sister-schools: Adelphi University (in New York, I believe), University of North Dakota, and West Chester University in Pennsylvania.

This vending machine is also in the student area. It seems rather small to my ‘Murican brain, but with a school this small (approximately 80 students), it doesn’t seem necessary to have a whopping machine. The writing on the outside of the machine promises “fresh fruit” and “sweet greens,” but the inside of the machine is crammed with candy and soda (which is awesome for me). If you find this vending machine, do not press #5. Those are my Cokes.

Here’s a picture of the “big” library (but again, no need for a four-story Chester Fritz library for 80 students). Once more, this is mostly composed of textbooks from previous classes, but ACN has separated the books by topic in the case that a student might want to write a paper on sociology issues, or what have you. The door to ACN’s administrator is just outside the left frame of this picture. The historic part of the building is on the other side of the glass door; also on the other side of the glass door, there’s a statue of a samurai (I think, I haven’t been up close to it yet), which is absolutely terrifying to walk past at midnight, since it always looks like someone is staring at you as you walk past. Walking up the stairs takes you to the classrooms and the other offices.

A couple of these doors are just for storage, but again, we have two classrooms and three offices. All the offices are on the left of the hall: first, the International Student Advisor’s office; second, my office that I share with Burt (or Burt’s office that he shares with me); finally, the Activity Coordinator’s office. At the end of the hall is Classroom #1, and Classroom #2 is to the right.

The classrooms are fairly standard, like you would find at any other college. This classroom has a simple podium at the front of the class. The cool part of the room is the technology used—I’m pretty sure that these are “smart-boards,” where a teacher can pick up a stylus and interact with the image from the projector. I haven’t really used it much, but I have shown a Powerpoint presentation. This room has two projectors, and with some fancy technology magic (or so I think), the same Powerpoint can be shown on the two projectors simultaneously. (Don’t judge—this is magic to me.) This is the room where I have all my Composition classes, since the                                                                                                 Composition classes all have more students than my                                                                                     literature course.

This classroom is only about half the size of the other room, and it still has the same projector system. It’s quite the setup, honestly. The ACN staff told me that literature courses are very hard to sell to students, as many of the students want to go into international politics or international business of some sort. This is the room where I have my Arthurian legends course.

This college’s goal is to allow Norwegian students to adapt to the American college system. While studying here, students will start to learn what the American university system is like by taking classes from (mostly) American teachers. As they study here for a year with the intention of transferring to a school in the U.S., they meet with the International Student Advisor to plan out what schools they would like to apply to, though the ACN staff said that a great many students go straight for UND or the other sister-schools. More and more students have been looking toward California schools, however, no doubt because the weather is far better there than in North Dakota. Overall, it’s a really interesting program. And that’s the school (for now)! 

Forests and Fine Dining

Today I haven’t really done much. On Friday, my first first day off for the weekend, I packed up my laptop with the intention of going down to the school and working on my thesis for most of the day. Instead, the other instructor from UND who came to ACN for the semester, Burt, called. He mentioned during the week that he wanted to see if an old walking path was still there on the island, so we set out to find it at about 10:00 A.M. On the way to the canal, we stopped quickly at the mall for water to take with us, and then we began our hike.

We walked from the mall down to the canal, across the bridge, and along the shoreline until we ran out of walking path. Knowing that it was there somewhere, we checked a roadside map, backtracked up near some apartment complexes, and eventually found the path.

Now, from what he’d said earlier, I thought this was going to be a walking path that was sandy and beach-like, since he did say that it followed the shoreline. Where we went instead was far more exciting to me. As a flat-lander from North Dakota, I’ve never really been in a dense forest before, the kind of forest where the sun is blocked out from the tree canopy overhead. This was that forest. It was incredible to walk through, to look at all the undergrowth, to even look at the roots sticking out of the path, itself. I need to find more hiking spots when I get back home (preferably in the forest somewhere).

During our trek, we went to two small towns, Alby and Rød (though I don’t know that many people even lived in either one—for Williston people, think of Epping/Springbrook, just outside of Williston with very few people living there). Alby had a teeny little museum, but we didn’t go through it—walking was the main goal of the day. We did go through the Naturhus in Alby, just to see what it was. There was also a café in there, as well—you could get a full meal, then sit in the normal seating area or take a blanket from inside the café and sit on the lawn to have your snack! I thought that was a neat idea.

By the time we got to Rød, it was already almost 1:00 P.M. Also by the time we got to Rød, we were starting to feel very tired and a little hungry. There wasn’t a whole lot to see there, except that we stumbled across what looked like an artist community where there was a ceramic shop and a guitar-maker shop (which I may have to find again to take pictures for Kellen). Again, we were both pretty fatigued after walking for three solid hours, so we headed back for Moss.

Once we got to the top of the big hill on the island, we made our way back down to the canal where we stopped and had a quick bite in a café Burt said was good and reasonably priced. I had a cup of coffee and a croissant sandwich, and I was good to go again. I think we made it back to ACN around 2:00 or 2:30, and then it was time for a shower and a nap.

Friday night, I met two Norwegians who are from Moss at a new Italian place just south of ACN. We had a great conversation about education, as one of them studied education and pedagogy in the U.K. I ordered a half-calzone half-pizza (so they basically made a pizza and flipped one side over onto itself). First off, one can never go wrong with pizza. Second, this pizza was very, very good—the Norwegians said that this was authentic Italian food. I responded with a prayer to God in thanks for Italy (and pizza).

For the rest of the weekend, I haven’t done much, although I did take a hike up into the hills above ACN on Saturday evening. There’s a path that leads back into some of the hills, and I was immediately enthralled with the promise of another forest hike. Nay, this wasn’t as good as the Alby/Rød adventure, simply because much of the forest above the school has been cut down to pave the way for a half-dozen apartment buildings. Ah, progress. Still, it was a neat trip, and I even went up there again today to take some pictures.

In all, I’d say that’s a successful weekend: explore the countryside, dine with the locals, and explore the countryside even more. 

My First Weekend in Moss

It was a busy weekend in Moss—lots to do, and lots to see.

I don’t have a stable internet connection in my apartment, since this unit is only temporary until the ACN people move me into a different unit because of scheduling conflicts. Because of the temporary locale, they gave me a little wi-fi hotspot to use in this apartment, but it has a data-plan attached to it, and I’d hate to go over the data-plan and get overage charges, so I keep sneaking down into the school and into my office to use that stable wi-fi connection.

On Saturday morning, I went to my office at the school and played video games on my laptop for a while. There was a festival going in the downtown area of Moss, and there was also a 10K race—I know what you’re thinking, NO, I didn’t run the 10K race. I wouldn’t be sitting here typing if I had run that race (I would be dead), but one of the ACN staff ran it, so a few other members of the ACN staff went outside to the street with Norwegian flags and a sign to cheer her on as she finished the race.

After we stood outside for all of a minute as our colleague ran past us, we decided to walk downtown to the festival. When we got there, I was struck at how much it reminded me of home. There’s one street that someone told me was the “walking street,” and there are shops on either side. It was almost like a sidewalk sale, as the different shops had pulled racks out into the walking area. There were also plenty of food stands, as well—someone mentioned that I should get a “pølse med vaffle,” a hotdog wrapped in a waffle instead of a hotdog. It was an odd mix between the sweetness of the waffle and the saltiness of the hotdog. (Burt, to my right, said that we were getting funny looks from the Norwegians as to why a waffle-wrapped hotdog was picture-worthy.)

We went into the fenced-off concert area at the festival, and a big banner said that it was “Frederiks-Dagene,” the Frederiks-Days. I’m not entirely sure what the story is behind Frederiks-Days, but there was a festival involved! My group watched a couple of bands play, and we started shutting down after that. We walked the few minutes back to ACN and adjourned for the day.

Sunday, we went to an activity center outside the city of Moss. We took the highway out a few miles, and it was really beautiful countryside to look at—huge boulders were sticking out of the cliffs by the highway, and the trees were thick (and as a flat-lander from North Dakota who’s never really seen a forest, the verticality of the forest was something to behold).

The activity center also reminded me of home, particularly Upper Missouri Ministries where I worked for a summer. At Upper Missouri Ministries, there’s a small area cordoned off called the “Co-op Course,” and it’s meant for team-building. There are all these different little obstacles to cross, but you can only do so with a group of people working together.

In the same way, the people at ACN wanted to welcome the students to the school and show them that, as students, they were something like a team. It was meant more so as a fun “welcome weekend” type event. The students played paintball in big teams on a full-fledged paintball course complete with rugged terrain and places to take cover—one student went loping across the field at the enemy, tripped on a root, and broke his glasses in the process! (I learned a new word, but I’m not sure of its spelling: “stakkar,” meaning “poor, pitiable.”) The students also rode a mechanical bull and went down a 300’ zip-line over the barbecue grills that were cooking lunch. Once they were all tuckered out from running and riding and zipping, they got onto a bus and headed back for the dorms.

In all, it was a long weekend, but it was a lot of fun. (Of course, I’m not thinking of my frustrations with the washing machine in my apartment—“stakkar.”)