barista boys

sexy in any nationality, or perhaps I'm just attracted to people who can provide me with hot caffeine. While I did get lucky today, the only things I scored were a free latté from a Norwegian friend, and 25.50 kroner in redeemed Pant that someone forgot to take the receipt for. Sweet. That's like 4 bucks.

professionals

You might call them the Rolling Stones of Norway, except they are not known outside of the country (or at least Scandinavia). Norwegian popular music can be divided into two broad categories – those with English lyrics and those who sing in Norwegian. Those who sing in English – A-ha comes to mind – do so to achieve success outside of the Scandinavian countries. Most of them don't. Also, singing in English seems to make bands slightly less popular with Norwegians. Admitting the very strong limitations to my observational opportunities, it seems that the crowds are larger and more responsive to bands that sing in Norwegian. The effects have several variables to be weighed against, quite obviously. This is a small town, and I don't know how audiences in the larger cities respond to the Norwegian/English lyrics. At the same time, most of Norway is small towns and Bø does have a mix of students from all over Norway. My dorm mates alone represent southern, northern, and Bergen dialects.

Whether it is the language, the country rock, or some other mysterious quality that makes these granddaddies rock, Hellbillies are professionals. They don't just bring their instruments and some stage effects – a few extra lights or a toy monkey for example. No, these boys bring all their own lights, cables, stage risers for the piano man and drummer, monitors, build-your-own speakers and subwoofers, light and sound boards! Which meant that we had to unload and assemble all this stuff. Then we got to take it all down, load it back up, and get our own speakers hung back up. By the end of the night my cousin's belly hurt because it just wanted to be lying down already. The end of the night came at 5, and I have not been able to get to sleep before 2 the whole week since.

bargain

Give or take, this year the dollar has equaled about 6.5 kroner. There have been better years to travel here, based on the exchange rate. A few years back it was 1:9, something that we exchange students view as mythical as the legends of St Olaf. Of course, King Olaf became a saint because his hair and nails continued to grow after his death, of which the only remarkable thing would be why they kept the body hanging around long enough that they noticed. But we all obsessively watch the exchange rate because we're all relatively poor.* Norway is an expensive country, and we need all the advantages we can get if we are going to go play sometimes. So this makes the few bargains very exciting. Finding good food for cheap is crazy goodness because I might be able to forgo a beer, but I still need to eat dinner. Or in this case, lunch.

Lunch frequently means bread for Norwegians, and thus it means bread for me. 4 kroner bread from Rema 1000. I don't mean buns. I mean a loaf of bread. I never spent that much time in the really cheap groceries back home, but I don't remember there being fresh bread available. This is a 750 g loaf of crusty, whole-wheat bread for about 60 cents. Insane. I'm not going to claim that it is the finest bread ever, and it lacks the excitement of multi-grains and other such goodies. I'm just saying that it is quality bread for less than a dollar shown here in kjempenorsk style.

• Everything in a Norwegian dorm comes from Ikea. Bread knife, cutting board, dishes, and probably the toaster.
• An ostehøvel, the Norwegian invention for perfect, thinly sliced cheese.
• Very hot tea, served not in a mug but in a glass. This isn't always done, but if you can't hold it in your hand for five seconds, your beverage is probably too hot to drink anyway.
• The nøkkelost – "key cheese" with cumin and cloves – is a Dutch variety, but is of course made by Norway's dairy monopoly, Tine.

*This is relative to the Norwegians. Relative to the Eastern European and Spanish students the cost of living isn't quite as extreme. But we are college students and mostly we're kinda poor back home too.

sometimes I want to be somewhere else

I spent six and a half hours rigging up for a disco at Kroa on Friday. This was a large event with a DJ from Oslo coming in for two shows, Friday with a 16+ age limit, and Saturday with 18+.* The rigging was fun because I got to work with friends for the first time, but the disco doesn't appeal to me, so I wistfully looked up some venues far from Bø that would have some shows that I might like to go to. The closest of these is Mono down in Oslo. Mono seems to have an indie clientele, evidenced by the Camera Obscura show last month, and a show I would have enjoyed much more than my actual Saturday night activities.** They had a freakishly early in the evening free show with The Wombats.*** While I can't say they are a great band they seem like they have potential to at least be fun live. Though really, a show that starts at 6? What the frigg?

Mono is one of the reasons that I really miss living in a city. Specialized venues and large libraries. Oh, I will never be a country girl. But while I was checking out the upcoming events at Mono I also read some of their other news.

MONO HAR FÅTT UTESERVERING TIL KL. TRE!

Jepp, nå blir du ikke jaget inn ved midnatt hvis du vil nyte en sigarett til ett glass eller sju, eeeendelig har Mono også blitt en del av sentrum og vi får lov til å servere alkohol i bakgården til kl. 03.00. Takk til politikerne i byrådet som gjorde det mulig.

Mono has just gotten permission to serve drinks outside after midnight as they have just had their position in the city upgraded to 'located in the city center.' From inference, Oslo doesn't allow bars to serve their back gardens, aka side alleys with tables, after midnight even though they stay open until 3. At least, not outside of the central area. Seeing as Mono is a short walk from Karl Johans Gate and the central train station I don't see how Mono wasn't considered part of the city center before, but not living there I suppose I can't be expected to understand local politics. This seemingly random piece of information has me thinking about some of the other seemingly insignificant points. Coming from Madison with its recently established smoking ban in bars the similar ban in Norway hardly makes me blink, but remembering my bartender in Charlotte lighting up a smoke between pouring drinks I realize how non-universal this is. The airport in Frankfurt has smoking stations indoors. Oh my.

*I have been told that the vakt people love the 16+ nights because they get to search bags and take things away from people.
**After Saturday night at a dance party up in Breisås 1, I have a new strategy for preserving my dignity. It involves not going to dance parties.
***Thank you NRK Urørt podcasts.

Peace of Mind

For some reason, every time a professor asks to speak with me after class I get slightly nervous. I have no explanation for this, because I can't think of a single instance in which a prof asking to talk to me has meant anything bad. So when Prof Torvik asked me to wait after class today my first reaction was "but I was going to walk with my 'cousin'" followed shortly by, "what did I do?" I worry about everything though, even when I know there is no reason to worry. And in fact, talking to her gave me greater peace of mind today. I got tapped for a project. A project that will count toward my study points for next spring. Awesome.

Euroweek is a forum for building international cooperation between students, mostly in Europe, but the project I will be working on was proposed by a professor from Columbia. Six students from three countries investigate a topic and give a 45 minute presentation and create some sort of display and write a short paper. Then they get judged. Getting a special project might send me into a panic, no matter how cool it is. Because I have my big ugly thesis paper to write. And I haven't gotten started organizing the thesis into something that might eventually become a paper. Or done anything more than some preliminary research. And I panic about everything. But I feel pretty good about all this right now, because I also got some more information on my spring courses today.

My Euroweek project will count for 5 of my 30 study points in spring. My thesis will get to take up 5 more of my required points. Yay! I get time to work on my thesis. And I'm an impetus to get another program that the school has been wanting to do started. The international office has been wanting to try to get foreign students (this might just mean the American exchange students, I'm not sure) who have studied Norwegian previously into regular Norwegian classes, but with a lower competition level. The literature class that St Olaf's and I have been following as an independent study has been a proving ground for the project, so in the spring I'll be taking the other half of this class as a more integrated student, earning 10 study points instead of just 5.* And my independent study points remain available for my thesis work. Things are still not settled at all, but if this all works out it makes some things easier and everything more interesting. The Euroweek project will be a great thing for preparing for grad school, and hopefully help me get in to a good grad school as well.

*The class I am in now is lit before 1900, the spring class is after 1900. Both classes are covering credits that I need for honors in scan studies major.

Perspective

Two of the Danish students have dropped out of school here because they have fallen in love. Very sweet and romantic, except that the girl traveled here with her boyfriend of six years. The boyfriend is obviously not the one she fell in love with. So all three of these Danes are in the same program, and to avoid the incredible awkwardness, the love birds have decided to travel around Europe for a while before deciding what they will do next. All of this is a build up to: last night was their going away party. Most of the people there were Danish, and thus I couldn't even pretend to understand them when they spoke to each other. Three other "foreign" foreigners that went too, so I spent much of the evening talking to Czech and Slovakia, and Lebanon. Lebanon knows more about American politics than I do, because he reads a lot. He reads the news of the net, he reads biographies, the dude just reads. And he likes Bill Clinton. He read Bill's autobiography. He despises Jr. for the two wars we've got going on, not because he thinks terrorism is somehow okay or that Saddam was a good guy, but because he knows that the war on terror is making more enemies and that the weapons of mass destruction were never the real reason for invading Iraq.* Slovakia, on the other hand, doesn't like Clinton. For him, Reagan and Bush make it possible for him to study English and travel.** All Clinton did was drop bombs on his friends in Serbia. Also, he doesn't like that Bill lied about the affair. On the constitution, which he holds to be sacred. I don't remember precisely if the word he used was sacred, but the effect was the same. And I have to admit that he has a point. If you hated living under communism, you are going to love the men who saved you from it. We also discussed several films that I have not, but should have seen already. Bowling for Columbine being one of them. I got to tell them that of CNN things that have freaked me out, the Columbine shootings places higher than the Twin Towers for me. I spent an afternoon watching kids being evacuated from their school as two of their classmates decided who to shoot. I might be less disturbed by the plane hijackings because I didn't actually see it as it happened.*** In regard to the bullying brought up in Bowling, Slovakia asked me if it really is that common in America and I had to respond that it probably is. I'm not up on my statistics or anything, and I don't know how Moore portrayed the bullying. I asked how things are in Slovakia, and he responded that kids are becoming more rude. Eastern Europe can see every trend before it surfaces in their countries because everything (emphasis was on everything bad) comes through Western Europe from America.

*I am generally more angry about the poor support and armament that some of our soldiers are coming back complaining about, and the general use of economic warfare which is just as destructive, but doesn't make us look quite as dirty.
**On the subject of communism, people here seem confused by the Communist Party t-shirt. I like it for the pun. Argentina and one of the Italians were discussing it on Monday, and he thinks that the joke is Marx laughing at the dupes who put his social theory into practice.
***The Italian did see the attacks live and responded to it with a post-War of the Worlds disbelief at first. Surely this wasn't happening.

sketchy

One of our instructors asked us (the Americans) to help some of the other foreign students with their papers for class. We feel a little sketchy about this, because the students didn't actually ask for help. When they turned in their papers, well, we assume that they were happy enough with them. It's a pass-fail class anyway, so having really great papers isn't that high a priority. At least, it isn't for us, the Americans. Norwegians can be tactless in their directness sometimes.* But one of the American professors here presented the subject to these exchange students in a gentler way, and I just finished going through one of the guy's papers with him. St Olaf helped one of the others with his paper, and reported that she spent five hours just getting the English grammar into something that made any sense what so ever. They didn't even get into elements of composition. My fellow and I had a slightly easier time. Paper writing help from me is not nothing. For one thing, there is cake. Tasty home made carrot cake with creme fraiche frosting and a cup of tea. But the other part of it is that I didn't have very much confusing grammar to work though, so we worked on structure and flow. A paragraph really needs to be more than one sentence. Even if you are a scientist, a paragraph needs to be more than one sentence. I feel even more sketchy, because I did some of his rewriting for him so that we wouldn't spend five hours working things out. The help I gave him wouldn't fly if I were an assistant in the Writing Center on campus back home. But it was still his thoughts, and I tried to restrict my vocabulary and sentence construction to words and phrases he might actually use. This was hard for me, because I am very fond of big words and complicated sentence structure. But I am also fond of having my evening back to work on my own plethora of papers. We used two and a half hours with a smoke break for him.

*This isn't a blanket statement. There are also polite Norwegians.

abuse of power

I have bad parents. Most people, upon meeting my parents, would not realize how terrible they really are. Meeting my mum and pop, one might think that they were nice, funny, possibly even cute. The mistake has been made before. But as I was listening to Yat-Kha while trying to fall asleep tonight (you see how well that is going), I started thinking about how neat Tuva is. Here is this really unique singing style from an area that was an independent country for no more that a couple decades. The only way one would even know they were a country is the postage stamps. But there is a great pride in the regional identity. And I think this sort of thing is interesting and think other people should want to know this sort of information too. This is all my parents fault. It can't just be blamed on my own nature. They did it to my sister too. I also know a disturbing amount about NYC rats, despite not having been to new york. I think books on Louis Pasteur make good bedtime literature. Two of my favorite books are about fish. The social histories of cod and shad. I think it is really neat to know why John "Appleseed" Chapman really planted all those trees. So it isn't exactly child abuse, but they have obviously abused their position as parents to instill a profound curiosity about the world and a desire to share this curiosity with people who don't give a damn.

archives

I was lucky to acquire a diverse music collection while I was living in Madison. The city is pretty music rich given its size, and I didn't really have the time and attention to focus on everything I collected. Since I've come to Norway my resources have been severely restricted, so I've been going back and listening to some of the things that I may have listened to once and forgotten or gathered for sociological/historical purposes. In the former group is The Sea and Cake. I forget how much I like their sometimes jazzy, sometimes electronic pop sound. In the latter group, The Rolling Stones. One of my library guys who always came in for the a/v stuff recommended that I get my education up with Aftermath when I told him I was writing a sociology paper on post-punk music scenes. I like "Paint it Black", but everything else on the album just makes me snicker.