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)!