Everything is very expensive here

The country of Norway is quite rich, but as the guy at the bar last night told me, that means that most of its people can feel very poor when they try to spend money. And for poor Americans who are getting the short end of the stick in terms of exchange rates, it's just downright ridiculous. To be specific, the exchange rate is 5:1, and this means that a 150 kroner breast of chicken (which is an accurate price) costs 30 dollars. This makes eating well hard, it makes really touristy tourism hard, and it makes travel within Norway hard if you don't have a Scan Rail pass. Thankfully I do, but in the case of yesterday we went to Oslo and I decided not to use the Scan Rail pass since it works for a limited number of days once you decide to use it for the first time. The round trip was 340 kroner, so the math is relatively simple. The good news is that it was entirely worth it, as most things are once I manage to readjust my idea of what expensive actually means. First impressions of Oslo were not entirely positive in our group, but as we went further into the city it ended up being a great time. Oslo looks like a big city, but it's incredibly laid-back and has a low population density. It also places an emphasis on parks apparently, because we saw several and they were all large and full of character. The one where we actually spent the majority of our time was filled with some type of neo-classical Greek-influenced weird-something sculptures. They were all nudes, but they depicted people doing out of the ordinary things. A picture is worth more than a thousand words in this case, so I recommend looking at Kelley's pictures if you want to know how "unique" it was. The city as a whole is a good city for just walking around in, which is good since that's what we did. The Oslo fjord sits right near the city, and we got the chance to see a nice view of the fjord from a huge fortress designed to keep the Swedes out. I'd qualify that as a uniquely Norwegian thing to do. I also tried my first kebab, which was delicious, especially after a steady diet of food influenced by the aforementioned harsh exchange rate. We also saw the Royal Palace, which was incredibly low-key. This mirrors Norwegians' general attitude towards royalty, which is somewhat detached and uninterested I guess from what I've experienced so far. Maybe that's just the young people, though. I'm not sure. Two more things of particular note this week: we planned our mid-semester break trip today, and I participated in an iPod battle last night. The iPod battle involved playing tracks and the people choosing the DJ who they thought chose better tracks. I definitely think my first round exit was almost entirely due to regional bias. I might have chosen songs that were a little too far out of the mainstream, but I thought that would be the point. Guess I was wrong. Meanwhile, we've decided that our mid-semester break will encompass Munich Germany, Salzberg Austria, Bern Switzerland, Brussels Belgium, and Amsterdam Netherlands. It should be nothing less than awesome. Between that, a probable trip to Ireland, a probable trip to Sweden, and numerous daytrips to different spots in Norway, I feel like I'm making the most of my chance to travel here. And the best part about going to other countries? None of them will be as expensive as Norway.

Jeg ikke snakke Norsk

I spelled that wrong, I'm pretty sure. It means "I do not speak Norwegian", which was my first thought on getting to Oslo. It seems like everybody in Norway can speak English, but everything is in Norwegian anyway. Go figure. It made life a little bit frantic when we got into the airport in Oslo, and then just kind of confusing when we rode the train. But the train ride was really beautiful, right along Lake Mjosa (it's supposed to have a slash through the O but I can't find that one). Then we arrived at the train station in Hamar, and we were ushered around rather awkwardly by students to our dorms. It turns out that Curt and I are sharing a room that's actually quite nice (pictures attached) while Kelley is in a dorm twenty minutes away living with another American from North Dakota State named Breanne. We were basically dumped into our rooms with no instructions except for that we would start school (kind of) on Monday. It was Friday when we got here, so we were left with a little time. We used this to do absolutely nothing. On Sunday we met our international coordinators, Stian and Knut, and we took a tour through Hamar and the university and such. Knut Haugen is an ex-military man and he walks very fast. He is also probably insane. He led us on a great tour along Lake Mjosa, as we saw a castle and lots of water and greenery. This was also the day when I got to meet the other international students, who are all really cool people. The international program at Hedmark University includes students from Nepal, Hungary, Palestine, Kosovo, Tanzania, Namibia, Russia, Czech Republic, Indonesia, USA, and possibly another country or two that I forgot right now. It's an interesting group, and over the last week or so I've gotten to know pretty much all of them. As much as I love PLU, I've never really had the chance to talk to people from so many diverse backgrounds, and even though I've really spent most of my time with Americans the conversations that I've had with people from other countries have been awesome. Monday through Friday was an orientation week, as we would call it back at PLU, but it had an emphasis on drinking that I don't think PLU could legally condone. Personally, I think this is not a terrible thing, as it helps people come out of their shells a little bit more. The activities surrounding the drinking, however, were top-notch as well. There was a party at Hydranten (the pub 10 seconds from our room) on Monday night, karaoke night Tuesday at Hydranten, a barbecue out at the agricultural campus about 15 minutes away on Wednesday, a concert featuring a crazy band called Surferosa on Thursday, and then another party at Hydranten on Friday. I think the reason that so much of this went on in the pub was that Norwegians are naturally slightly awkward or shy, except when they are drinking alcohol. Karaoke night, especially, illustrated this fact. At 9 o'clock when we showed up, there was no one there. From 10:30 on it was nonstop drunk butchering of American pop songs and Norwegian traditional anthems. That night certainly was interesting, and the entire week has been a really fun time. I've definitely met more people this week than I thought I would have, and I've had the chance to check out the city and start to appreciate it a bit. I've been writing for long enough now that I think I can stop detailing the week and attach pictures. I have pictures of our room and of a bit of the town. There's a lot of streets and some beach photos to check out. I'm just going to link to my facebook albums so anybody can look at these pictures: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2036317&id=44903424&saved#/album.php?aid=2036317&id=44903424 AND http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2036317&id=44903424&saved#/album.php?aid=2036315&id=44903424

London

Is not a very creative name for an entry. That's okay, though. First, I'm going to reel off the laundry list of places we went in London and then maybe I'll talk about what I found interesting about the city in general. So: Tuesday - Tour (Big Ben, Parliament, that part of the city), War Rooms, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Jack the Ripper tour through the East End Wednesday - Historic London tour (different part of town), Tate Modern Art Museum, wandering Thursday - Tower of London, Natural History Museum, Abbey Road, getting lost somewhere near Abbey Road Two things jump out of this list: we frequented museums and tours. This is almost entirely owing to the fact that both of these things were free. That said, museums and tours ended up being a good use of time. The tour group we found was, we're pretty sure, made up of maybe 4 people and in our 3 tours we saw 2 of them. The two guides we had were both Australian and pretty insane, but they gave entertaining and occasionally informative tours. Near the end of our first day tour, an older British woman came up to me and said "He's quite mad, isn't he?". Referencing our tour guide, of course. She rambled on about how she'd never seen anyone so odd, and then let me know: "He's not a real tour guide, you know". I felt bad telling her that yes he actually was, so I let it slide, but it somewhat illustrates the nature of this particular tour guide. The other guide was more normal. The museums were museums, so I'll cut any further description out. Except for saying that they were uniformly excellent, especially for being free, and that the Museum of Natural History was absolutely huge and completely crowded. As was the Tower of London, but this is expected since it is peak tourist season. Getting lost on the way back from Abbey Road was an interesting experience, but at least we got to see what was one of the less wealthy parts of London. And Abbey Road looked like it does on the album cover, so I was not disappointed with that. I'm sorry for not writing more in-depth about specific experiences, but I thought I'd rather write a little bit more about general impressions and random musings since there was just so much that happened while I was there. I don't want to write a newspaper article so much as a journal. That said, London is a busy place but I like the feeling of it in general. The underground is some sort of miracle, the accents never get old to me, and hundreds of years of history are there right next to ultra-modern business. I've never been to New York, but from what I've heard/seen on TV/read/whatever New York would be a lot like London if it had 1,000 year old churches a quarter mile from Times Square. It's weird, because people in general seem completely unaffected by the history around them. I don't mean that I expect Londoners to go around staring at landmarks, but I guess I do mean that their newer buildings and so on seem geared toward the future e.g. the London Eye. In other parts of Europe, including what I've seen of Norway now, architecture and business seems somewhat bound to the past; that doesn't seem to be the case in London. Also, the businessmen are much more like Americans than I would have thought. Mostly, that means they're on cellphones and are loud and pushy in the streets. The culture in general, at least in 3 days of limited sightseeing, resembles America's a lot more than I thought. Unfortunately, it's just a little bit too long ago to come up with much more to say about my time in London, but it was a fun way to kick off a semester of studying abroad. Later posts will probably be more specific, but they'll still feature random thoughts more than facts about what I've been doing. For anybody who read this post but not yesterday's, there are pictures of London linked to that post. A lot of them. So check them out since a picture is worth a thousand words. And there are captions, so it's more like a thousand words and change. Next week: Culture Shock (?), language barriers, arriving earlier than you need to, and living next to the best pub in Hamar.

Test Page/Flying to Texas

I will be writing in catch-up mode for the next couple days, by which I mean I'll start from the beginning of my trip and keep on writing until I reach the present day. This may take a few days since in the last week and a half or so I've been to London, arrived in Norway, and been subjected to a variety of unique experiences that I figure I should write about in this space since that's kind of the point. First, though, I have to make sure I know what I'm doing as far as posting on this blog. Actually, I'm going to call it a travelogue because I think the word blog is a little annoying and not quite accurate for the type of writing I'm doing. So this entry is for figuring out what I'm doing. And for writing about my experience flying to Houston. This actually relates to my experience in London and Norway, though, because I think there's a common lesson I learned from spending 3 days in London and 3 days (and counting) in Norway. Stereotypes are almost always completely wrong, but people in certain regions do act the way that I've seen in the movies or read about in books. What this meant for my flight to Texas was that there were more than a few guys in cowboy hats and that everyone was loud, had an accent, and for some reason refused to sit in their airplane seats for longer than 5 minutes at a time. Also, I should be more tolerant of the Texan accent, but it just doesn't make me smile the same way that a British accent does. I don't know why, but the combination of all these things and maybe the general annoyance of plane travel made for a tough plane ride. The fasten seatbelt light was on for the entire flight, and people were in line for the bathrooms the entire flight. This wouldn't have been a problem for me, but I was in the last row. This made it hard to sleep, because there were cowboy hats and Texan accents and wicked amounts of turbulence all at the same time and I thought I was going to go crazy. It was actually hilarious, but I didn't want to laugh at everyone so I just watched Kung Fu Panda instead. Which was also hilarious, so it was ok. The flight to London, on the other hand, was awesome and full of me sleeping. Finally, I'm going to post a link right now for some pictures from London from my friend Kelley, who along with Curt made up our travel group through London and to Norway. For those of my family members who don't know, Kelley and Curt both go to PLU and I've known them since freshman year. I didn't have my camera in London, and yes I know not many of the pictures have me in them, but 1) that's not a terrible thing, and 2) it was my choice, so don't blame Kelley for that. That last bit was mostly meant for my mom. I promise to have more pictures with me in them from Norway. I'll be attaching my pictures to my posts here, but Kelley's site (I'm assuming) will be up and running the whole time we're here so if anybody wants to see more pictures that's your best option. Here's the site:

http://picasaweb.google.com/kelleyw06

Next post: London.