One year down, one to go!

I'm happy to report that another semester is in the books and I survived my first year of graduate school. Now I'm ready for summer and the non-schoolness that awaits. And summer in Trondheim means... snow?

First day of summer vacation, wheeeee!

This weather actually goes perfectly with my latest (and greatest?) Norway purchase:

Yes, that's The Muppet Christmas Carol WITH Norwegian dubbing. One of my favorite movies, now in Norwegian, and it only cost $3.50. The purchase of a lifetime and they're just giving it away! Maybe the snow is a sign I should watch it right now?


I hope the cold weather is on its way out, but there's no telling around these parts. Here are some pictures I took after my last exam yesterday to commemorate being done:

Cloudy and cold but still beautiful

The state of affairs was completely different just last weekend. It was delightfully warm without a cloud in the sky. EVERYONE was down by the river, soaking up the rays and grilling on portable, disposable grills, my new favorite pastime.

Gonna need to have a campfire one of these days to

show them how to really roast marshmallows. 

There was a mass exodus out of doors. After just one

Norwegian winter (and spring, if you can even call it that),

I completely understand why.

This post is kind of random but I'm just going to continue. I recently got to go on a scenic drive and see some of the farms and fjord outside of the city. I haven't been out of the city much so I didn't realize how close I am to breathtaking Norwegian nature. It was a treat to see the fjord on a beautiful night and take in the sunset just before 11pm.

 Reminds me of home :)

I'm hoping to experience more of Trondheim, the country around it, and other parts of Norway this summer. I've been reminded of how beautiful this little part of the world is and that I need to see it while I'm here. Hopefully the weather cooperates some in the next few months so I can get out and explore without needing a winter jacket. Well wouldn't you know it, even as I write this sentence, the sun is shining again.

Hurra for Syttende mai!

The phrase "highlight of my life" is thrown around all too often and easily these days. I don't mean to use it lightly now, but when I think about my heritage, how important Norway is to me, all the time I've spent dreaming about wearing a bunad, and celebrating Syttende mai (17th of May) in Norway, I think this might qualify. It's a little early to say, but I really think I'll look back on this day and call it a highlight. Certainly a dream fulfilled, to say the least.

So what is Syttende mai? A little history: For a long time Norway was a part of the Swedish and Danish kingdoms. On May 17, 1814, Norway signed its own constitution, though it was still technically under Swedish rule. It wasn't until 1905 that the union with Sweden officially ended, but they celebrate their independence based on their constitution. Yes, the country of Norway as it exists today is actually younger than the US! Syttende mai celebrations became a bigger deal after the liberation from German occupation during WWII, and Norwegians were once again free. So on Syttende mai, Norway celebrates peace and freedom, with a big focus on children as well as the royal family.

Besides the fact that they are completely different holidays, there a few main differences I noticed between the 4th of July and the 17th of May. First of all, everyone dresses for the occasion; whether it be in bunad, dresses, or suits, it is a formal affair. Arriving in your Norwegian flag t-shirt from Old Navy is unacceptable (not that I tried, but I wouldn't recommend it). Next, everyone is obsessed with eating hotdogs and ice cream. It's the day when you can really go wild eating good stuff. The day is not complete unless you eat at least one hotdog and ice cream. Third, music is a big deal and there are lots of traditional songs (though nothing like Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American," thank goodness). But lots of music and singing, and the National Anthem is still stuck in my head. Of course there's other stuff that's different too, but that gives you a place to start.

With all that in mind, here's a play-by-play of how I celebrated the big day:

7:00am

Woke up to the sound of marching band drums beating outside my window. Was confused for a few seconds, then remembered it was Syttende mai, got really excited, and couldn't go back to sleep.

8:45am

Grabbed my supplies for the day (bunad and flag) and took the first bus of the day down to the city. Got more excited as each person who got on the bus was either in bunad or a suit. 

9:00am

Arrived at my friend Marit's place to prep food for our Master's student brunch and get dressed. Got even more excited as she and her roommates donned their bunads.

9:45am

BUNAD TIME :D

Help from a professional

10:30am

Arrived fashionably (if I do say so myself) late to our Master's Brunch:

Nina and Marit, fineste bunad buddies :)

Good food to get the day started

Some of the master's students at the medical dept.

Haha, let's just take this opportunity to

admire the fine embroidery on Nina's bunad.

12:30pm
Head to the city center to find a place to watch the parade. I was told Syttende mai was a magical time when the sun shines bright and everyone smiles and eats all the ice cream they can handle. But in reality, sometimes it looks more like this:

Please enjoy Marit's umbrella

1:00pm
The parade begins. It's your standard parade, with lots of community groups, weirdos, and important looking people. My favorite part was probably the Mustache Club, didn't get a picture of them though. Look who I spotted walking with the Red Cross:

My cousin Torgrim (black hat)

What's a parade without Stormtroopers?

1:45pm

Spotted some other friends across the street and a ways down, hopped in the parade for a bit and hopped out again to join them.

Red, white, and blue Norwegians!

Thoroughly enjoying myself

Seemed like the novelty of everything to me

helped others get a little more excited too.

I believe Rannveig and I yelled the loudest of everyone that day.
Hipp hipp hurra!

2:15pm
Join the parade! It was winding down and we saw the perfect opportunity to join one of the student groups and try to get the crowd pumped up.

 I know it appears otherwise,
but no one and nothing could rain on my parade!

The parade is over, but I don't want to stop...

A friend (many friends, actually) commented that the day should have sunny because it would have been so much better. But I said no, I think that would have been too much for me to handle!


3:00pm
At this point, I was in a parade-induced daze and in desperate need of refueling. A stop by Salam Church for hotdogs and cake did just the trick.

Marianne, Camilla, and Julie

You-know-you're-starting-to-become-Norwegian moment of the day: Correcting Camilla after she sang a line of the National Anthem incorrectly.

Future roommates :)

My parade-walking buddy, Andrea, who could

not stop laughing at me/my enthusiasm.

4:30pm
People head home to rest, get ready for dinner, or maybe, if you're a student, return to studying for finals. Many take off their bunad and call it a day. But I was determined to celebrate all day in proper fashion, come what may. And while I was not about to take the bunad off for anything, I did loosen it for a few well-appreciated minutes. 


5:30pm
Run out of adrenaline and crash:

Quick rest and recharge because the day is not over!

6:30pm
Dinner with more great Norskies. We sung songs before both dinner and dessert. It was cool to see young people respecting the day and keeping traditions alive. And there was ice cream for dessert, so don't worry, I checked that off the list.

Bon appetit

All the girls - super kos!

No smiling, a nod to the olden days.

Nice one for all the moms out there.

"Awkward hands"

Norwegians are goofy

Who is the Norwegian???

10:30pm
Arrive home after a long but wonderful day. Greet my Norwegian roommate, get a surprised look at the sight of me in a bunad, and wish him a happy Syttende mai. He had stayed home all day studying, didn't want to venture out into the rain. I told him he missed out and made him take one more pic:

A successful Syttende mai!

11:00pm
Reluctant but ready to take off the bunad. After several (embarrassing) minutes I finally figured out how to take off the silver jewelry holding my shirt together without damaging it. Went to bed good and tired and smiling, already looking forward to next year.


Great day, great friends, great celebration, great country! Thanks everyone who was a part of my Syttende mai and thanks for letting me celebrate with you.


And now, back to studying for finals!

Things just got real

I have never come home and immediately written about my day and posted it on this blog. Most things can wait. But something awesome happened today that cannot wait: I got a traditional Norwegian costume to wear on Syttende Mai (Norway's Constitution Day on May 17th)!


Behold, in all it's glory:

The Råndastakk med rutaliv bunad.
Please don't say it looks Scottish. It's not.

I am borrowing the outfit from my friend Marit (tusen takk til deg og familien din). Her grandmother made it for her mother to wear for her Confirmation ceremony when she was a teenager.


A bunad (pronounced 'boo-nod') is a traditional Norwegian costume, worn on special occasions like weddings and Syttende Mai. Every region of Norway has it's own style of bunad, and people usually get one from the place they have the most heritage. The bunad I'm wearing is called "Råndastakk med rutaliv" and it comes from an area called Gudbrandsdal, where one of my great-grandfathers was born. I've been dreaming about getting to wear something like this for a long time, and now the dream is a reality!


Bunads are usually incredibly expensive, because they are handmade and include valuable silver. You don't just go out and buy one because you feel like it. You save up for it for years and it can take years to make. We're talking about thousands of dollars. As the (my) saying goes: Nothing's cheap in Norway except cell phone service. Seriously, I pay way less here than I (my parents) did in the States, it's weird.


Back to the point: Many bunads are more elaborate than what I'll be wearing, but this is as good as it gets aside from having my own. And to get to wear one from a place I actually have some connection to...wow! For me, this might as well be Cinderella's gown. It means a lot that they would let me borrow something so special. I am downright giddy, and I don't think that's a word that most people would use to describe me. That should tell you how significant this is for me!


Syttende Mai is the biggest celebration of the year and the biggest day for bunads. I am so happy I get to be in Norway for this holiday (a dream in itself) but I am THRILLED I get to wear a traditional outfit and blend in with real Norwegians. Now I won't look like (as much of) a fool when I have my picture taken with my friends, and you'll be able to tell how special their bunads are when I post pictures.


Feeling left out? You don't have to be! If you're in Seattle on May 17th you should head to Ballard for the biggest Syttende Mai celebration outside of Norway. Go have some fun and celebrate Norway. It won't be the real thing, but we can pretend!

Home is where The Needle is

I just heard it was the Space Needle's 50th birthday a few days ago, wow! While I'm super glad and thankful to have to the opportunity to live in another place, I still love and miss my city. Not the city itself, but the familiarity and the people in it that have made it home. And Dick's burgers, I miss those too. Ah, sacrifices.

Asian Me and the Space Needle, circa 2006

I've been here eight, almost nine months, and lately a visit home before next year sounds nice. I have no idea if that will happen, but if the opportunity arose, why not? I wouldn't say I'm homesick, just that I'm a little nostalgic for America right now. I'm coming to grips with the fact that, though it would be cool to be purely Norwegian, I am an American, and can't just erase that from my being. The U.S. can seem strange and foreign when you're away for a while, which is probably a good thing to experience, but it's also OK to miss it. It's home, and home is always a special place.


A few Americans I've met are dying to get back stateside, but I feel pretty un-homesick compared to most of them. I think that has to do with a several things, like learning to be content wherever I am and not worrying about what I would be doing were I somewhere else. Living here means developing familiarity with a new place and relationships with new people. These things take time to do, but before my eyes, I have a second home. Even though I am focused on life here, I really look forward to seeing my family and good friends once again, whenever that happens. I keep imagining how special, yet hopefully normal, it will be. It will be exciting to see what's the same and what's changed, with them and me.


Even though I probably won't be back soon, something just as good is happening: Home is coming to me! Next weekend I will get my first visit in Norway from someone back home. My cousin, Kirsten, and her husband will be in Oslo on partly work-related matters, and I get to hang out with them for a few days. I'm excited about that, to be able to see them in person and catch up, and for them to experience a little bit of Norway. Should be a good time, a great time if they could smuggle a hot Dick's Deluxe across the borders.

Adventures in language

One of the best things about living here is learning Norwegian. My goal is to learn and speak as much as I can and rely on English as little as possible. Norwegian really is my first second language (high school French was kind of a disaster) so every day I'm learning something new. I have way more motivation to learn Norwegian than I ever did French and am having much more success with it. I owe a lot of my progress to the background I got from basic Norwegian classes at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle (highly recommended, if only because you get to hang out with other people who love Norway). Those classes gave me a solid foundation to build on and that has made all the difference. I have a Canadian friend who moved here at the same time I did but without any previous language knowledge and we are at very different levels in our Norwegian ability. I can't imagine moving halfway around the world and starting from scratch with the language. I'm thankful that I at least knew what the "ø" should sound like even if I couldn't (and still can't) say it perfectly.


I also can't imagine not trying to learn Norwegian. Some people live here for years speaking English and not trying to learn Norwegian at all. I think that's sad and a little disrespectful. Especially because Norwegian is not that hard to learn. Unlike English it has rules and sticks to them and the spoken language is almost completely phonetic. I've found that learning Norwegian has made my experience better than it would have been and helped me connect with people in a different way, especially those that don't speak much English.


So how much Norwegian am I speaking? I don't really know. My comprehension is good and I can understand almost everything that's spoken, depending on the content and the dialect(s). Basically, I speak Norwegian whenever I have the chance. But that depends on the setting and who I'm talking to. At school it's mostly English because we have lectures and reading in English. With friends and family it's as much Norwegian as I can manage. It can be harder with people my own age because they speak faster and usually want a quick response, but most are very patient with me and have joined me in my quest to learn Norwegian. 


Norwegian is a language of dialects and that deserves its own blog post so I won't go too much into the dialects here. The point is that there are approximately a million variations of spoken Norwegian, and this can make things confusing and difficult but also very fun. When I first got here it all just sounded like Norwegian, but then I began picking up on the differences between dialects and started to understand what people meant when they make fun of people from other places. Now I'm at the point where I can guess pretty well where people come from in Norway based on their accent, vocab, etc., always a fun game.


It's so fun to learn the nuances of another language and in that, learn more about the culture. I am determined to get as fluent as possible, though to be honest I'm a little worried about my English. Every once in a while I notice that I just used the wrong preposition in a sentence because I've been listening to non-native English for a while. And whether good or bad, you tend to start saying what you hear around you. Something I didn't expect was that I've also started to say "oi," a typical Norwegian response when you make a mistake or hear surprising news. That's something my family back home would poke fun at after we visited Norway but now I'm doing it too... Oi!


It's great to have the chance to learn a new language and I can't wait until I can say more of what I want to in conversations. My American accent shines through and I butcher a lot of things and struggle with grammar but I can't believe how much I've improved since I've gotten here. The cool thing is that most Norwegians can't either. They are usually surprised, and some are shocked, when they ask and I say I've lived here only since August. My dream is to be able to speak Norwegian as well as they speak English. So I definitely have a ways to go, men jeg tror det går bra.

Spring has sprung!

At least in Oslo... the sun is out and blåveis are in full bloom:

I don't know about Trondheim, though overcast and raining is a safe bet. I'm in Oslo for a few days before I leave for Croatia to go on a mission trip with a group of students from Trondheim. We're flying out of Oslo on Thursday so I decided to head down early to relax a little and visit relatives. And boy, did I pick a good time to skip school because it's basically summer down here!

Today was warm and beautiful so my cousin Kirsten and I had a lovely walk down to and around the water. Thankfully I packed sunscreen but I should have brought shorts too.

All I needed to do to find the sun and beach

was get down to Oslo. Who knew?

Now I'm not Oslo's biggest fan, but there are a few things I like about it. One is how it reminds me of a miniature Seattle with all the water and boats. Another thing I like is the Viking Ship Museum. I've been before but decided to go again yesterday with some friends who were also visiting. For a student price of 35NOK ($6) you get to gawk at well-preserved, real-life viking ships, so yeah, definitely worth seeing again.

Viking ship = instant manliness

The museum has lots of other viking artifacts too and what I find most impressive are the intricate designs carved into everything. Maybe they had nothing better to do on those long voyages to the New World.

Typical wagon decorations? I dunno...

So that's about all that's going on right now. When back in Trondheim I'm trying to keep up with school, applying for summer jobs, and certainly enjoying the days as they get longer and lighter. It's mostly just normal life but I'm still thrilled to be spending it in Norway.

25, alive, and in Norway

It was my birthday a couple weeks ago and I could have only ever dreamed I'd be celebrating it in Norway. When I step back and think about it, I'm constantly amazed that I'm actually here. But there was an extra dose of surrealness in the birthday experience. And while I've never been a big birthday person because I don't like a lot of attention, this was a great birthday for a lot of reasons.


Since I've been here I haven't been homesick too often, but at one point I found myself missing the familiar for my birthday. It was a little weird to be here when I'm used to celebrating at home with close family and friends. I don't like a fuss to be made about me, so I had specifically asked my parents not to send anything for my birthday (because it's so goshdarn expensive and I didn't need anything from home at the moment). But leave it to them to not listen to a word I say and send an awesome birthday package anyways. Besides a gratuitous amount of chocolate, it contained really special things from a lot of my family and friends. The most special things being the original artwork by Cadence and Jackson (now proudly hung on my wall). Thanks to everyone who contributed and to my mom for putting all this stuff together. It means a lot to be remembered back home and I could honestly feel the love and thoughtfulness that went into it.


Some of my birthday loot:

OK, enough sap for now. How does every mildly homesick American in Norway want to celebrate her birthday? With a pile of meat, of course! And thanks to my sweet, perceptive, and incredibly generous friends, that's exactly what I got:

 Equally excited about the food

as I am to be in a restaurant.

We feasted on two platters of various meats including spareribs, steak, chicken, and lamb (this is Norway, after all)... and it was delicious!

 They do free birthday milkshakes in Norway, too!

Later in the week I threw together a last minute party to hang out with as many people as could come. What a great time of just hanging out and enjoying each other's company. Though I wish I could have done the same with my friends at home, it made me realize what great friends I making here, and I am thankful for them!

Surprise rice krispie treat cake

Got all the candles in one breath,

even the sinisterly placed ones sticking out on the side.

Thrilled party-goers

All in all, I realized that I am blessed to have both good friends in Norway and amazing people back home who love me. Thanks to everyone who celebrated with me and made my first Norwegian birthday one to remember.