chief

It's been a very stressful week, on so many levels. I've got my first exam to finish by Monday, I just completed the Project Overview for my EuroWeek team – due today.* I still have a norsk litteratur oppgave to finish next week, and I still haven't gotten any further with my thesis paper than I was at the end of Spring Break. So I'm taking a break from writing with a little bit of writing. Makes sense, right?

Among other dubious distinctions this week, I've become the official Team Leader for my EuroWeek team instead of just the de facto leader. I'm not entirely sure I wanted this position, but as I've been doing the work, it's nice to have the title to go with it. I am the team secretary and head writer as well, being the only native English speaker.** The writing position I'm quite satisfied with, seeing as it's about the only strength I have to contribute, not being a business student to conquer the theory and project design or being proficient enough in Norwegian to interview Norwegian businesses for the case study or the survey that the team has designed. So I'm the last person to get all the information and get it in order for the deadlines, so I suppose that puts me in a good position to lead. I know when I need to demand information by in order to get things written in good time. And maybe it will make me look extra shiny and brilliant on my grad school applications. Maybe it will help me get funding. So I guess I do want the Team Leader position.

What I'm not sure I like, one of my team members called me "Leader" – with the quotes and capitalization – in a recent e-mail. I'm trying to take it as recognition and a compliment, but being being cynical and worn out I'm struggling not to interpret it as sarcasm. Especially in light of my peppering chat messages with large amounts of encouragement and smilies when I start getting very frustrated by being misunderstood or not getting data and other information when I need it. I love the internet. I can privately growl and scowl as much as I need to and then give people happy faces when I have to explain something for the third time.

In other news, my kvedarkurs had a concert for some of the kindergarten kids on Monday morning. It went slightly better than can be expected, seeing as I didn't know which songs we were singing until Sunday night. Oh, the dangers of taking an early break. I had missed the last class meeting before Påskenferie because I was traveling in the UK then. At least I didn't forget the songs I had to sing on my own. Though I honestly don't remember if I sung well or not. And then, of course, I heard about the shootings at Virginia Tech and it combined with all the rest of my stress to completely freak me out. Not that it doesn't upset me anyway. But I'm not sure I would have sent out an e-mail asking my college friends to send me some words if I hadn't already been on the edge of breaking down. Much thanks to all the friends that responded, especially those who had done so by the next day. It seriously did something to calm me down. Unfortunately, getting the news on Monday prevented Lill and I from practicing the Scottish folk song that I wanted to sing for the last åpenscene. She was going to accompany me on guitar. We did manage to get a second practice session in on Tuesday night, but ended up not preforming anyway because we were both just exhausted on Wednesday. I did, however, still sing in her choir and did a not to bad job of it. Especially seeing as I was late to the practice right before and didn't get to warm up with everyone.

And I finally got some Magnet and Sivert Høyem. Yay! New music! What's more, Blogger had learned Norwegian. So cool. Of course, I pretty much know most of the new words by knowing their position in the layout rather than really thinking about what they mean and understanding them, but that way I can leave them på norsk and get used to them. Now that I am leaving in 5 weeks...***

*Both of my exams are take-home exams, which means that they are 6-8 page essays. At least, the first one is and I assume the second one will be as well.
**The British are free to argue with this and say that I am actually a native American speaker, but it amounts to the same thing. Though not to be confused with a Native American. It all gets rather complicated, doesn't it?
***Blogger switched me to Norwegian automatically. Otherwise I would have missed out on this delightful new feature.

voi vittu

mobil ringer.
-du arbeider i dag.
-nei, det gjøre jeg ikke. navnet mitt var ikke ned for i dag.
-jo, det står egentlig her.
får melding. skrev du ned til å arbeide i dag. var det en feil?
sender melding. jeg kommer nå.

stikker inn matbutikken. kjøper banan og melk. skal trenge det...
ankommer.
gjør noe.
vent.
vent.
deler matpakken med venninna.
vent.
vent.
vent.
banden kommer seint.
flytter noen ting.
vent.
vent.
gjør noe.
vent.
vent.
vent.
forandrer noe som var gjort tidligere.
klager.
vent.
vent.
-hva vil du drikke i kveld?
-øl.
-samme.
går hjem.

spiser noe. blir mindre sur.
prøver å gjøre noe arbeid på oppgaver.

skal tilbake seinere.
står foran scene.
elsker ørepropper.
nedrigging.
vent.
får øl. har crewmøte.

sover seint i morgen.

I should be using my time much better than this at the moment but

I'm enjoying the wi-fi in my Edinburgh hostel a bit much. I should be out exploring the city, right? Or getting the paper that's due before my return to Bø written. All the research is done, so it shouldn't take too long and then I can enjoy the rest of my time without anxiety. But instead I've been taking a break to catch up on some e-mails, rest my ankle, that I over stressed a bit, and look at some randomness. They made a video of part of the Urørt concert* at Kroa a few weeks, and I have a brief cameo with a couple of my friends while we are all doing nothing at about minute 1:30. For some reason, they only came by to film things when we had nothing to do.


*NRK, the national broadcasting company has a program of unsigned artists on one of their radio channels, and they have a competition among the bands that submit to this every year. The winning bands then get to go on tour, and this show was one of their stops. At least, I think that is how it works and I'm too lazy to double check at the moment.

bedre under tvang

I should not have had a cup of coffee this afternoon. I've been having this outrageously early bedtime working for me recently that involves me getting up early and doing things. Today, for example, I cleaned. Not just the vacuuming that I did last time, but actually finding space on my desk and a few things that I had lost there. This doesn't always mean that I am subsequently especially effective at going on things I really need to do. I would argue though, I really did need a new alarm clock playlist.* Okay, maybe I've been waking up on my own before the alarm goes off. I still hear and Adam Arcuragi is really starting to grate my nerves. Nice enough, but I don't think I've changed my playlist for a couple months now. You can only hear the same songs every morning for so long. And it takes time to make a really good playlist.

So now I can't sleep. But, it was offered. A nice dinner with friends, sharing some music, a cup of coffee. What could the harm be? Only that the caffeine would combine with my natural anxiety over, well, nearly everything. I'm not really freaking out over anything. I just can't sleep. So instead I'm thinking about how much I have to get done, how much I miss friends back home, and how much I'm going to miss everything here in a couple months. It doesn't help that I've been realizing that the last show I work at Kroa might be the Transistor show on Saturday. There are other shows I'd rather see as my last job than metal.

On top of this, another friend forced me to use my Norwegian today because it won't be that much longer before I'm going back to the states, rarely to speak Norwegian again. This is undoubtedly good for me. She's right for one thing, and most of my friends are English majors, hence they tend to like speaking English with me. I'm educational. What's more, despite some gaffs now and then, and using English grammar with Norwegian words sometimes, I don't do that bad in my second language. And I'm better under a little pressure. To be perfectly clear about this, it isn't that I am better at getting the pronunciation and grammar correct when the stakes are higher, it's that I tend to rebel against speaking Norwegian a lot of the time. Everyone here can speak English, most of them pretty well or nearly excellent.** However, in the few instances when friends refuse to speak to me in English, I get there. Another happy point, I seem to be getting better at reading comprehension as well. I'll admit though, this might just be because we are getting into increasingly contemporary writing in my Norwegian literature class. There is a big difference between trying to read from Kristin Lavransdatter and Uke 43.

So after lots of tossing and turning, a practice run at packing to cross back over the ocean, a short essay on language laziness, and some music surfing... once more into the breach! Sleep, you shall be mine.


*Oh my beloved iPod and computer speakers, they are the best alarm I've ever had.
**I think this is one of the reasons that I get so annoyed every time a lecturer apologizes for his or her English. Seriously, it's fine, and we could be getting on with the educational part already.
***I can't think of an aesthetically pleasing place to put this, but practice packing seems to indicate a very smooth return. Granted, I'm not taking all of my clothes home with me, and some of the things I brought from the states are toiletry consumables (not to be confused with ingestables), but I'm suspicious of this. I might have to do a new practice packing project where I don't just pack most things and guess on some others, because everything is fitting into my duffle and a backpack with room to spare right now.

Han lo av, ikke lå på meg

One of the guys that I work with has decided that he will only speak to me in Norwegian. He had the idea that this annoys me. When I asked him a question very early Sunday morning in English he answered in kind, realized that he was now speaking to me in English, but then continued to do so until we were finished taking everything down from the night's disco.* When I finally told him "på norsk" he was apparently somewhat surprised, and commented on it later during the nachspiel.

So that was the back story. Today, while I was talking to a friend about language I tried to say "han lo av meg da jeg fortalte han å snakke norsk" (he laughed at me when I told him to speak Norwegian). However, prepositions and proper pronunciation can be difficult sometimes and what I actually said was "han lå på meg..." (he lay on me...).


I had a rather difficult evening for speaking properly in Norwegian, so when I screwed up again during our singing class I said to her "han lå på meg" and we started laughing, she told the class about it, and our teacher gave me this Danish song:**

Bitte mette, bitte mette,
Får jeg ligge overpå, åh
Bitte mette, bitte mette,
Får jeg ligge overpå?

Ja det får du, ja det får du,
Du får ligge overpå, åh
Ja det får du, ja det får du,
Du får ligge overpå.


*I asked in English because I couldn't remember how to say, "Should I take the filters apart?" in Norwegian. It was probably about 0400 or 0430 and I think I should be excused from forgetting that "the filters" in Norwegian should be "filtrene."
**The words were already translated from Danish to Norwegian, and in English are roughly, "May I lay on top of you? Yes, you may do that."

worth it for the nachspiel

Kroa tends to involve either me working and thus getting home very late and being crank and tired, or else going to a show there and leaving with someone's beer spilled on me. Come to think of it, working a show tends to mean that I go home with several people's beer spilled on me. And then there was the CC Cowboys show last semester where an air duct was having the humidity of a very large crowd condensing on to it and then dripping on me. I had to move my scenevakt stool. Not that all events at Kroa are wet. Or that there are not rewards. I don't generally go to the nachspiel for the night's workers, usually because I'm really tired by then and don't want to try to figure out what these happily tanked Norwegians are trying to tell me about my vibrant hair.* But I walked a friend home after going out tonight, and we had a little nachspiel of our own. What is really good after a night out, especially when one's boyfriend has gone out of town for six weeks, is a friend to walk one home, a toasted cheese sandwich with a glass of milk, and something nice to listen to. Of course, Eric Clapton and a glass of milk mostly made me want to fall asleep on her couch, but we had a lovely little chat, as most chats with a good friend are, and then crawled off to the cozy cocoons of our respective beds. It's nice that there is only a little ice to crunch over between her house and mine.

*None of the other Kroa crew has ever commented my hair, but various drunken Norwegians have felt the need to pet my artfully tousled spikes and even a bartender has asked me if the color was natural. What is one to say? Yes, this atomic fireball red really just grows right out of my head.

"du tjente det"

Last night was an 80s party at Kroa. I new there was something I didn't like about the 80s, and now I know precisely what it is. It's not the coke habits or the bad music.* No, I hate the clean-up from the 80s. They had a cover band called the Poodles and pyrotechnics. And confetti. It friggin' sucks to try to get smooth bits of mylar off of a slightly damp stage. Also, the band didn't come take care of their instruments immediately. No, they went off to drink first. I don't think they even got their drums taken down last night. We had to move the drum kit to take down the risers underneath it.

Even more exciting, while there should have been four teknisk crew plus the two teknisk leaders, I was the only crew member who actually worked. It really wasn't that bad. It took a while to get things taken down and all, but okay really. It just sucked that I didn't have anyone to drive me home afterward. I've gotten a little spoiled by working with guys with cars most of the times that I've worked. Knowing that Kroa was going to get fairly hot from the large crowd, I had on Converse instead of my boots. I'm just glad I brought along some woolen socks for the walking part. I got home at 0530, and then got up again at 0930. I had suggested brunch to the Americans, and wanted to get a tasty cinnamon kringle made at something resembling morning. Scrambled eggs, cinnamon breakfast bread, and a discussion of our potential group trip to London in February was very pleasant. We also got to share the gossip of the night before. Of course, I'm already booked to go to London for a week by myself three weeks later, but it would be nice to travel with a group for once.

On another happy note, I got a tip from someone last night. He was coming in and out of the security fencing in front of the stage several times and the last time he came in with a beer he gave me the change in a handshake as a tip. When I started laughing he told me "You earned it."


*There are only two especially 80s songs that I really like. While the DJ did play "Take On Me" while we were cleaning up, I resent that they didn't play "Tainted Love".

we are pleasure to be here

In the end I felt sorry about giggling, but his English really was very endearingly cute. I went to a modern (?) jazz show tonight with friends. Based on a broad sampling it would appear that folk music is much more popular in Bø than jazz.* And one of their tunes was titled "Bunny". It just makes one want to take the trio home as pets, little bunny-boys with floppy hair that one would feed carrots and lettuce. Of course, three grown (though young) Finnish men would probably not thrive on carrots. Finns, like Norwegians, are pretty good drinkers. So I really shouldn't tease them for their perfectly fine, though not quite perfect, English. I can't even remember all of the personal pronouns in Finnish. Fine result for a year's worth of study.

I was also a bit melancholy at the end of the show because they played a jazz arrangement of a very beautiful traditional Finnish tune that Ruth MacKenzie performs with English lyrics about one's lover being far away. And because the trumpet player from SUN was genuinely flustered by introducing this tune, and I don't like to make people uncomfortable about language issues. I've gotten rather sensitive to problems of communication, and find that it affects my social interactions. For example, I'm not very comfortable talking to the Kroa technical crew leaders when I'm not working a show. And I don't socialize with the very nice Danes that I have met, though that might be more because I am not a real friluftsliv person. It's like when I was a "bicycle groupie" before I learned how to really ride my own bike.

*Three concerts, leaving out the rock concerts at Kroa that have nothing to do with either genre.
**It took me a very long time to ride a bike. I learned when I was 21, and wasn't really comfortable riding until I was 25. By this time I think most non-riders would have given up, either ignoring the beauty of the bike, or becoming bitter and harassing cyclists.

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.

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.

slem, slem, slem! snill, snill, snill!

I finally turned in my Hedda Gabler paper yesterday, so I'm taking a well deserved break from my required writing to do some non-required writing. Usually, when it takes me two weeks to write a paper, I mean that it took me two weeks of complaining about the paper while I thought through the ideas that I wanted to use and appeared to be doing nothing. Then I wrote the paper in one evening. No. I spent over two weeks staring at the computer screen, tired and frustrated, trying to type anything that made sense about the play. Because I had to write it in Norwegian. And my norwegian textbooks don't have that much information relating to Hedda.

I also had a traumatic experience recently, when my computer decided to freeze up while I was writing my first journal entry in several days. Not that it wasn't also traumatic when it has frozen up on my paper writing or my e-mails, but Word and Gmail have auto-save features, where as Blogger just disappears with all my clever turns of phrase. But a lot of things have happened since I last made any updates, so here are the last two weeks in review and reverse:

One of my dorm mates has a twin who, while not identical, looks enough like her that when I'm not paying attention I can confuse the two. So for the Halloween party at Kroa this Saturday it was only appropriate that they dressed as an angel and a devil. Every time they saw me they would chant "bad, bad, bad" and "good, good, good" at me. I also met another guy from Wisconsin, who I got to dance with us to Ghostbusters. Bravery points all around, because he danced despite being tanked, and we danced with him while he was tanked. I also saw another of my dorm mate's boyfriend again for the first time since the beginning of the semester. He lived in the dorm building (in fact, my room at one point) the last couple years before he graduated. Apparently all the buildings cluttering my kitchen view have gone in over the past couple years. Bø might be a rural college town, but it is growing.

While Bø is building, you can get a nice house in Tinn for a song. Since Norsk Hydro has gone inside the mountains and mostly automated, the towns around the hydroelectric plants have lost their major employer. Tinn still looks nice though, with a pretty little downtown. We drove through it on the way home from a field trip two Wednesdays ago to a stavkirke in Eidsborg and the Norsk Industriarbeiders Museum in Rjukan. Luther-girl and I were having an extra-cranky day. Being cold and rained on in Eidsborg didn't help. The tower was off the church and on the ground, and everything was wrapped in plastic, because it's no longer tourist season so it's time for repairs.* It was cool to get a mini-lecture on the structural changes to the stavkirke while sitting in the pews, but I didn't start feeling better until we got to Rjukan and were fed a nice paprika chicken lunch. The Industrial Worker's Museum is located in the old Norsk Hydro power plant in Vermork. I have had an affection for this power plant since I wrote a paper on Norwegian resistance fighters for my second college history class.

This was one of the field trips from a very evil week for we American students. Two major papers due, and three field trips. Granted, the trip to Eidsborg and Rjukan was optional, but our class that day was cancelled so that we could go. Then when we got back, I ran up to my dorm to grab a quick snack and my rain clothes, because then I was going to look for beavers as part of my friluftsliv class. We saw some beavers. Fall is not the best time to go beaver hunting. The long days of summer are better for this, because one can sneak up on the beavers while they are on land and get a good look at them. All of our beavers were in the water, and quick to disappear if we tried to get close to them. We also saw five swans. Two adults and two juvies. We got a lot closer to the swans than the beavers, and disturbed their attempts at sleep. The beaver safari was pretty cool. We got pølse. Norwegian and their sausages. Oh my. What wasn't so cool was the trip to Lifjell on Friday. At least, not for some of us. The friluftsliv class is large enough that with the Spanish alpine ecology students along, they divided us into two groups. My group got the Danish department employee. The first thing he said to us was that we were going to stick together. We stopped frequently to consult the map. He had us discuss the articles for class that day as best we could, see as we had not read any of them. He talked to us about hiker safety rules in Norway. They are pretty standard, but with the addition of avalanche awareness, not so important in flat Wisconsin. Then he gave us compasses and had us start learning how to navigate our way back with the maps on the smaller, sometimes indistinct trails. We got back right about on time. The other group, with the friluftsliv department head, they got lost. They didn't have compasses. At least, not other than the instructor. Heavy off-trail walking finally brought the two Americans in the group, far ahead of the other students, to a different parking lot than the one we started from. They got back an hour and a half after the rest of us. Fortunately, our taxi-bus wouldn't wait that long, so we all got to leave only slightly late, while our Dane stood around waiting for everyone else to arrive. Granting that we have only a select group of Danes here in Bø, they make a very good impression of the country.**
*as the church in Eidsborg is wrapped in plastic, it is obviously not the one in the picture. I took the picture on Bygdøya in the Folkemuseum.
**All of the Danes I have met are here in relation to the friluftsliv program. The are all very competent, friendly, and generally attractive. Denmark is obviously populated by some strange and wonderful race of fairytale people rather than humans.

permission to laugh

Humor requires a mutual understanding. An understanding that, even when people can speak the same language, it can be hard to establish. Sometimes it is cultural reference points. Sometimes it is an understanding between the parties that it is okay to laugh at language mistakes. It is absolutely essential to my mental health that I laugh, truly and deeply. The kind of laughter that bubbles up from your soul, like a popped bottle of champagne. I've been getting stressed out over various things recently, mostly the intense amount of work that I have to get done. I was having a crisis. Completely crisis girl. But yesterday I was studying in the kantina, starting to read up on identity theory again, and get all those sociology words working in my head again. I was not enjoying this. But then one of my Norwegian classmates saw me and came over to talk. She was post oral examing. This would mean giddy. She was giddy, getting over the anxiety that an exam in practical english can induce in a person. This was excellent. There was a great amount of giggling. I needed giggling. It also led to my having someone to go to a concert with. The concert was for part of my thesis research. Really. I shouldn't be dreading working on schoolwork so much when part of it means going to concerts. How much more awesome does studying get?

So I went to see Harv play at Grillen last night. As part of my thesis/sociological observations. The concert drew a relatively large crowd, but I'm not sure how many, because I'm really bad at estimating things like that. It is possible that I can get an accurate head count from the concert organizers. I spoke to them briefly at a table in the school on Wednesday, and they thought it was cool enough that I'm here in Bø that they introduced me to the band. Sweet. I got to shake the hand of Magnus Stinnerbom. He's played with Hedningarna. Though Harv has been getting more interesting in recent years too. And it makes a difference to see a show in a Scandinavian country. There are jokes based on cultural reference points that they can tell. I'm guessing that there were about 50 people in attendance; probably more than half of them were between 20 and 30-ish. And so far as I could tell, everyone was really into it. Two of the Danes I've met here even danced. They were good dancers too. The band sang a song well known to all Norwegians, though I didn't get it, my classmate should be able to explain it to me a little better. It was a really fun tune at any rate. I'd like to learn it. They were also telling jokes about Norwegian dialects, actually speaking in the dialects. The crowd really enjoyed this, and most surprising of all to me, they demanded two encores, and got them. Both aspects of this surprised me. And awed me. Of course, they were selling their cds, but because I'm on the NorthSide buyer's service, I already had the disks. The exact same disks. I don't understand completely why the band would be selling NorthSide cds in Norway, but they were. So I didn't buy a cd, and thus I didn't get a signed cd out of the evening. Instead I loaned my classmate 150 kroner so that she could get a cd to have signed. But she didn't get introduced to the band.

After the show there was much laughter and joking with my classmate. We discussed making her my Norwegian cousin, because her family is from a place about two hours away from the area that my great grandmother emigrated from, and I don't know my Norwegian family. Also, the job coordinator from Kroa was there, skipping the fattigmannsdisco to see Harv, but she had to go back to work afterward. And I met a couple of my classmate's friends, who dragged us over to the Bull Inn (O'Bulligans as we Americans have renamed it), for a final drink for them, and some water for us. On the way back home, back to climb up our kjempe big hill (or small portion of a mountain), we saw the Danes still sitting outside Grillen talking. They hailed me as we went past. It was nice. Vennelig, koselig, deilig.

Norwegian Ska

First, two notes on my trip to Oslo that I forgot to mention. When I got back to Bø my Spaniard (not that I have any particular claim on her, but she's the only one that I have a class with) was walking up the hill with the Italians and one of the Latvians. She greeted me with "My Captain" which I thought very endearing. We had been on the same sailing team. The other thing, was that I got an SMS* from one of the teknisk crew at Kroa asking if I could work for him the following day, which from the time of this post is now yesterday. He had a project coming due. Despite my own duedates in the near future, I agreed to take his position, and I'm very glad I did.
Hopalong Knut is boldly Norwegian, in that they sing på norsk. Lots of bands want to appeal outside of Norway, and thus sing in English. For example, the previous show that I worked with Grand Island and Blind Archery Club. If you go off exploring Hopalong, you'll find that it is only the words that are kjempenorsk. It was a fun show to work, both because their ska sound was more interesting than the last show's light rock sound, and because the teknisk volunteers got to be more involved with setting up the stage. We were there longer, and got to see the sound check before we went home to dinner. The crowd was also more lively, so there was a bit of pushing in the front rows center, and some very drunk kids, but for the most part it went off easily, and the kids went home earlier this time I think, because teknisk crew didn't have to help with the mopping. Just took down the equipment. There was much less waiting around too, and this was with four instead of three volunteers, only one band, and I had more of a clue what I was suppose to be doing and got to it. It definately gets better as you figure things out. And I saw my friends and neighbors in the crowd having a good, not too rowdy time. All but one of them said hello to me, but I was keeping an eagle eye on the crowd and didn't really say much back. With the beloved earplugs in, I couldn't make out much of what they said anyway. Eventually, I will learn to relax and have a good time as scenevakt, but for right now I'm pleased that I didn't nearly fall asleep at my post, and that I have learned how to quickly and correctly coil cables.
*a text message. I don't know why they call them different in Europe.

I got:

• A bruise on my knee from when Wisco's dorm mate tripped me while moving a monitor.
• A shirt that reads "scenevakt" (stage security) on the front and back.
• A cut on my elbow from when I hit it against a door putting said shirt on.
• To move guitars.
  
• Cranky. I've had insomnia for the past week. I can't get to sleep before 2 or 3, and then I wake up at 7.30 or 8. I became really tired as scenevakt, perhaps because Blind Archery Club and Grand Island don't really do much for me. Okay, they are good musicians, but their tunes don't move me. Watching the audience really enjoy themselves was good. Until it was the 'I don't want to go home' handful that were keeping us from washing the floor and getting to
• A beer.
  
• A ride home.
  

I really need a bike

Living up in Breisås is great, including the obnoxious hill (or portion of a mountain to be accurate about it) that I have to climb to get home. No, I couldn't ride up this hill. No possibility of that. But it's a good way down to the school, and it's even longer to Kroa. After the hill, most of the way is gloriously flat, being down in the valley, but it still takes about half an hour to go there. So whenever I work a show there, like today, I get a couple of nice long walks in. For concerts, start work at 2 setting up things. For Blind Archery Club and Grand Island, I helped set up a couple platforms for drums and keyboard, placed and connected monitors, and then we cut a few more gels for the lights. Gels into the lights, and while we were waiting around to find out what's going on we got a short lesson on mics in Norwegian. That I followed pretty well, but I had the instructions for working stage security in English. Set up, so far as volunteer tech crew goes, went pretty quickly. I spent about 3 hours there, but most of that was sitting around. Then I go back at 10, to watch the kids up front and make sure they are not too drunk or going to pass out.