Norway wins 6-1

Today was the big innebandy game between Norway and Denmark. Well, really, it was Norway versus the foreigners because we were there to cheer on the American on the Danish team. I'm not sure, but I think perhaps all of the Danish students were either playing or there to cheer them on wearing the Danish team color. I'm somewhat surprised that I actually got into the game a bit. Innebandy is floor ball, or ice hockey without ice. It lacks the advantages of ice hockey (speed) and has the disadvantages of basketball (squeaky sneakers). The game was, however, reminiscent of watching my Hurricanes. Our boys where out there in red, and they lost. All the same, Heie Denmark!

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.

Islands and Travel

The island at the center of the world.
Winter break travels saw the opposite of snow. My first visit to New York was dry and not especially cold. Indeed, it must have been close to 60º when I was catching my plane to Stink Town (as a friend so generously dubbed it). When I got to NYC, I was tired and soon to be sick, without a very strong idea of where I was or where I was meeting my cousin. I also didn't have a mobile phone (an experience limited to my having forgotten it, until I canceled my plan for time abroad), or any sort of clock (having forgotten my iPod on my desk back in my dorm). I did, however, manage to meet to find the correct corner in Manhattan and meet my cousin at the right time. This, I felt, was a very important accomplishment. The following day, the cousin generously showed me all the sights I wanted to see in Manhattan, from the big Christmas tree to the public library. I was not sufficiently impressed. I was impressed with my cousin, whom I hadn't seen in close to a decade. But I am possibly one of the few who is neither enraptured by, nor disturbed by the massive and culturally significant New York. I liked it. The subways were convenient and efficient. The buses seemed to be fine. The architecture was interesting and very tall. I am fully aware of the city's status as an economic centerpiece to the world. But my over all feeling was 'I'd like living here, but I don't see what the big deal is.'
Oh, and the American Natural History Museum displays their fossils nicely. Plenty of light, instead if half-hidden in mood lighting, as the Field Museum seems to like doing.

An island at the edge of the gulf.
Most of my vacation was spent in Charlotte. I don't necessarily think of the city as 'Stink Town', but my affection for it definitely waxes and wanes. I do love the friends that I have there, but they are increasingly fewer persons, as I just don't live there anymore. Charlotte couldn't even dream of a white Christmas, as the temperature neared even the 70ºs while I was there. So what do I do? Travel further south. The Florida panhandle is very nice for camping in January. Few insects (none that I would call pests), mild temperature, and while we were there, lots of rain. The first night we did sleep outside, but the second night we were rained into a sweet little B&B in Apalachicola and enjoyed hot showers and overly warm beds. I was a bit in the realm of unreasonably cranky for most of the trip, which generally manifested as sarcastic humor. I was, in fact, cranky for most of my entire break. Starting out the break with a cold that didn't get attended to immediately, and spending much of my time tired, or in transit, or tired while in transit, anticipating more time traveling and worrying about missing my various modes of transportation. This was not the best for a happy, relaxing vacation. And yet I wouldn't have wanted to give up any part of my travels.
Enumerating, I took a train, a plane, a short airport walk, a trans-Atlantic plane, a bus, several subways and much walking, another bus, another plane, several local car trips, one very long car trip, a few more local car rides, another plane, another bus, more subways and lots of walking, another train, another trans-Atlantic flight, another train, much walking, a return train, another plane, and one last train from the time that I walked down the hill from my dorm in December until I walked back up the (now snow covered) hill in January.
And I still haven't said much about St. George's Island in Florida. It was wet. It has lovely sand dunes, and pretty shells, and it was raining lightly. Until it was raining hard. But it was still nice, and I'm impressed with my sister's park scouting skills. But as she is the ekte friluftsliv person in the family, she's the best woman for the job. I went camping, hiking, sailing, fishing, and so on with my parents when I was younger. The sister and I both did. But it seems to have stuck better with her, and even seems to have worn off the parents with the passage of time. I could even see my sister going hunting, as one of her quotes on vegetarianism is "Sometimes Bambi's gotta take one for the team." Though I have not yet seen or known her to wield a gun, bow, or pointy stick.

Architecture of an archipelago.
Somewhere towards the end of all my traveling, I took a long layover in Copenhagen to see the islands that a friend had loved so well. Arriving at 07.00 and at probably the lowest point in the tourist season, there wasn't much open, but there was still plenty to see. I felt more dwarfed by the lower architecture of Denmark's head city than I had in New York. This is certainly because of language rather than the physical structure of the city. But I was also more enamored of the buildings in Copenhagen. The central train station in Helsinki is nicer I think, but the churches are lovely, especially the church with the big golden ball at the top of its spire. I learned the name of this church, but have forgotten it again. However, anyone looking for it just needs to look up frequently enough and they too will stumble upon it. It is my goal to return to Copenhagen toward the end of my studies and climb the spire to look out upon the lovely city of (I'm sorry, I love you Danes, you are all really great) homely language. All the water is very nice too. I could happily live in Copenhagen, something that I can't say for Oslo.

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.

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.