Two parties tomorrow, it's too late to talk about Bergen, and I'm almost done with my paper

Those three things sum up the status of life here in Hamar. I can feel everything wrapping up in the form of a fiery crash. My 21st birthday will be celebrated a day early in a country that diminishes the accomplishment of turning 21, if you know what I mean, because my birthday happens to be relatively close to another classmate's and we're having a joint birthday party. I'm most definitely looking forward to it, especially because it coincides with the due date of my case study and my case study is pretty much finished. I have a few revisions to make and a bibliography to finish, but it's going to happen and that's a good feeling. Then the 22nd (my actual birthday) will play host to the christmas/goodbye party for international students. It's always a fun and unique time when the international students come together, so I'm expecting big things from the final jamboree. Between those two parties, my birthday will not go un-celebrated to be sure. As for the second point of the title, it is kind of too late to talk about Bergen, but not really. I didn't want to write a large travelogue entry then because I was working on my case study and typing was beginning to hurt my fingers. Excuses aside, however, Bergen was a great way to (maybe?) end the many and varied travels in and around Norway. It was very rainy, somewhat cold, and ridiculously scenic. As with all cities we've been to, it seems, the city was built around water, and between that and the inclement weather the best word to describe Bergen is wet. The first day there was all about hiking, and the second day was all about wandering. At this point, that's become the status quo, but the hiking was unusually good here (no Switzerland straight uphill debacles) and the wandering was solid due to the fish market, preserved historical buildings, and the better exchange rate than a couple months ago. I'll give you a sense of daily life in Hamar at this point: I slip on ice a lot these days, I eat a lot of pasta, and I get rather cold outside. Also there's this cereal called Coco-Pops: Crunchers! which is a wonderful cereal and really needs to catch on in the States. I mean, sure I like Marshmallow Mateys and Golden Grahams and stuff, but this is some good dessert cereal. I will miss it when I leave this place. Finally it was dark at like 3 today, and it was never really light. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.

Are gas prices really that low?

When I left Washington in the summer, gas was just over 4.00 a gallon. Now I'm reading its like 2.50 or something on the West Coast. Is this true? I suppose it's possible, considering oil prices have like halved in the last couple months. I guess if there's one good thing in the global economy verging on collapse it's that I'll be able to drive when I get back and not go broke. Hooray. I've been working on my case study, incidentally, about the effect of Puritanism on political structures in colonial New England and will have the rough draft of that done tomorrow. It's basically a two week academic dash after a whole lot of nothing, and then there will be another two weeks of nothing until I'm back in the States. And then I will drive my car without regard to the environment, the economy, or my own sanity. Anyway, I'd appreciate it if someone would comment if this news that I have read is untrue, because I feel like I've actually missed something huge in America. Not the changing of a president; I'll get to see that happen for real on January 20. No, gas prices returning to American levels. I think Norwegians hate us; even though they have the largest oil reserves on the planet save Saudi Arabia, they still pay quite crazy gas prices. But at least they have a decent train system. Win some, lose some, I guess. This post seems more like a blog than a travelogue. But do not fear, because I leave for Bergen on Thursday, and after that the content will become blissfully travelogue-y again.

Finally, copious amounts of snow

But not in Hamar. The international students had a bit of a party/trip to a cabin in the mountains, and there was lots of snow there. Apparently not as much as last year when they went in April, but it was still satisfying to me. So we got to do the whole snowman and snowball thing, which is something I'm still hoping becomes an option here in Hamar in the coming weeks. I'm not here much longer, though, as I'm starting to realize. After 2+ months that have managed to feel like both a very long time and a very short time, there's only about a month left until I get on the plane back to Phoenix. So I hope we get some good snow. I also hope I manage to squeeze in enough trips to the county building for my field study, which I will probably describe later. And then there's the case study, which should occupy a good deal of my time. I would have thought that having so much time on my hands would have put a dent in my procrastinating habits, and there's still a lot of time, but as usual everybody seems much further down the road than me. Oh well. As long as there's no snow outside and it's still cold and miserable, I have no reason to go outside. Except for the Bergen trip we're making on Thursday. I would definitely say that learning outside the classroom has taken precedence over more traditional methods i.e. learning in class. To make a circle back to the beginning of this post, one example is the interactions with other international students. I don't want to make it sound like we're always having deep political discussions or anything, but when I do talk with other members of the international student community it tends to be interesting. Of course everybody wants to ask us about the election and everyone has an opinion about that, but the crazy moments for me are hearing people talk about the Balkans like they're a great place to visit and hearing people compare African democracy to American democracy and stuff like that. This is why PLU wants its students to study abroad, I know, so that they can hear things they've never heard before. This extends to the serious and the casual, but I have to say that the times that I've felt most intellectual this semester have actually been at these sort of parties for international students. It's not so much that we go out trying to have boundary-crossing discussions or anything, but I think that by talking to people that are fundamentally different from me, I'm forced to try to understand that. I also find that Americans may be more similar to people from other parts of the world than we think, even despite these fundamental differences that can be hard to understand. I wish us Americans were less separated or cliqueish or whatever than we are, but the time that we spend with all the international students is always fun and maybe even enlightening. Maybe my case study will be too, but I doubt that right now.

I cannot wait to have a laundry machine in the kitchen

For some reason, school seems to think it's cool to charge exorbitant amounts for me to do the essential task of laundry. Then malfunctioning machinery leads me to lose 50 kroner in one go and I'm left trying to pick up the pieces. AND they charge you 25 kroner for every 100 kroner card you buy. AND I have to walk outside in the freezing cold without my warmer clothes (because they're in the laundry) to get to the laundry room. It is quite terrible. I write this mild diatribe for two reasons: 1) These are the little things I deal with on a regular basis, as I planned to describe and 2) I have to do my laundry today. I slept for 16 hours last night, I've eaten nothing but cereal for the last 36 hours or so, and surprisingly I don't feel like my body's going to explode. Apologies for the corniness of the last post, but as I said sleep deprivation is a powerful thing. The other problem, though, is that describing something like I was feeling yesterday necessitates some use of corniness. No excuse, but there it is. The next stop in this stream of consciousness is Sweden. I'm not going to write a whole travelogue of Sweden just yet, but I will just say that one thing we saw was a little girl peeing in the planter of a really nice hotel. It was as out-of-place as a fire engine in a string quartet. Just had to mention that because I didn't want to forget.

Yes, I've been up all night

And no, I'm not going to bed anytime soon. In fact, I have to warn you this entry will get a bit sappy (or like REALLY sappy) but I assure you that's all because of lack of sleep. Regardless of my political preference, which is probably known by most of the readers of this travelogue, I think this election was very exciting. Therefore, I thought it was completely worth it to stay up all night and watch the coverage via a million different live streams and maps that exist on the Internet. I'm glad I voted, I'm glad turnout was relatively high, and my mind is definitely racing on caffeine, some healthy skepticism, and some genuine excitement. But whatever. The interesting part was seeing the most fascinating election of my lifetime from a foreign country, completely removed from what was actually going on. Of course the internet has made the world a bit smaller, but I still felt the physical divide not least because the first polls closed at 1 AM here. To answer many questions, "Yes" the Norwegians are happy Obama won, "Yes" most of Europe expressed a somewhat ecstatic preference for Obama in my travels, and "No" I don't think my vote actually counted for much. But it's the fact that people really got excited and decided to go vote (and I don't give all the credit for that to Obama, McCain managed a fair amount of votes himself) that makes me feel patriotic today. I can say that the Norwegians and international students I talked to today viewed us Americans a little bit differently than they did before Election Day, and mostly positively. Any negative view can probably be attributed to the fact that a few of us were absolutely delirious from drinking the darkest coffee in humanity's history. I don't want to alienate people who happen to have a different ideological background from my own, so believe me when I say this has little or nothing to do with the results: Today we earned our democracy in a way I guess we have to every election, and the rest of the world acknowledges us for that. I wasn't there to see it, but I could feel it even over the internet. I'm proud to be American not because Barack Obama won an election, but because I was in a foreign country and could feel the U.S.A. come alive. I heard the anger, the joy, the music, the rhetoric, the division, the drunkenness, and a million other conflicting and awesome things. But I didn't hear any apathy or hopelessness from anywhere in America. Just the beginning of a discussion that I hope doesn't fade when the hype is over, and which I believe could shape a generation. It's a hard thing to define, especially from overseas, but it feels like something woke up that was sleeping for a bit. I have one wish now, and that's that people take this opportunity to keep making their voices heard through civil disagreement as well as hopeful affirmation. When I get home, I'll exercise both of these voices as well as many more and I hope that America will be united through all its people using their voices together, in harmony and in dissonance. It will take a song to keep us united, so just keep singing and I believe we'll be fine.

The Great Adventure (Part 4)

It has now been a few weeks since the Great Adventure has come to a close, but deconstructing it has proven to take a long time. Since I want to be writing about things around here, as well as things like the recent Stockholm trip and the exchange rate and food and such, part 4 of the Great Adventure may be shorter and less descriptive than the first 3. Sorry, but I believe it's in my best interest as a traveloguer and as a lazy person. I had no idea what to expect from Brussels, as Belgium was the only country on our trip that I hadn't at least touched down in once in my life. First impressions were vaguely industrial, somewhat rich, and not exactly clean. These impressions were mostly borne out over the course of a couple days of sightseeing and eating waffles, fries, and chocolate. I'll start with the good stuff. I really like Belgian waffles. Like, a lot. This holds true even of the terrible knockoffs I've experienced in the States, and even though the waffles I had in Brussels were probably tailor-made for tourists, I was still quite happy to be eating them. I didn't know that fries were famous in Belgium, but apparently they're right up there with waffles as far as national pride goes. The only problem is I tried to eat way too many and almost had a heart attack. At least the sauce I had with them was good. And finally, the chocolate. The chocolate I had was good, but it was from a supermarket and probably manufactured by Nestle so I'm not sure if I can say I really had Belgian chocolate. We saw about 1300 chocolatiers scattered around the city, but a truffle there would have run me like 10 euros or something so the Nestle-manufactured variety was not a terrible choice. My favorite thing about Brussels not involving food was the musical instrument museum we visited. It had thousands of instruments, and their hook was that they had headphones you wore that automatically picked up where you were standing and then played you music by the instrument that you were looking at. This was kind of neat, very well-done, and extensive. We spent a couple hours there and then visited a comic book museum which was also cool, but more constricted by my inability to speak French. There were Smurfs everywhere, though. Turns out a Belgian created the Smurfs. The cultural learning in travels like these truly are infinite. So, the food was great and the museums were nice. What, you may ask, did you enjoy less about this city? I answer by saying that it had a strange idea of how to incorporate modern architecture into an ancient city. Brussels dates back to medieval times, which would be fascinating if the structures from those times weren't surrounded by parking garages and ugly hotels. Philosophically I don't necessarily oppose this type of mindset, but as a sightseer it makes things a little less interesting. It gave an odd vibe to the city, like they were actively trying to destroy their past and move into the 21st century. This was so in contrast to all the other cities that we visited in Europe that it just came off a little flat. That and the trash that was left in the streets at 7 PM and stayed there until 9 AM. You would think that the center of the EU would have a more effective garbage service, but you would think wrong. The juxtaposition of old and new, trash and shopping districts, nicely dressed people and graffiti, all served as a completely different European experience than we had witnessed up until that point. I'm not going to completely write off Brussels as a city to visit in the future like the other members of party seemed to want to, but if I were to cut out one city Brussels would probably be it. Amsterdam, on the other hand, was a great way to end the trip. After we got there. Our train was delayed several hours because of a "collision" on the "train track", which was mildly annoying but better than the alternative of actually being a part of this collision. Nonetheless, we arrived in Amsterdam considerably later than we had planned to, and were robbed of a little bit of time that first evening. Amsterdam is a beautiful city, what with the canals and all, and may have been cheated a bit in the tourism department because of the whole "everything is legal" bit. The "coffeeshops" (they didn't sell coffee there) were widespread and clearly quite geared towards tourists, but I didn't find that this really distracted from the experience in any way. Clearly, a lot of people were there to kind of experience the most legally liberal city in the world, but there was also a lot of other things to do. Walking around the city, as we did by ourselves and as part of a tour, was enjoyable for the architecture and looking at boats and all that, but it was also easy and remarkably pleasant as the weather in Amsterdam was finally very agreeable. It was great to be outside near water, even if it was all just in canals, and just soak in the city. We also visited the Anne Frank house, where her and her family hid, which was converted into a great museum, and took a boat tour. The boat tour was disappointing. We only had a speaker (and by speaker, I mean a speaker like you attach to your computer, not a person) give us about 5 words of information about 4 different places in 6 languages. Those are the highlights and lowlight of Amsterdam; all in all I thought highly of Amsterdam and would recommend it to anybody. Don't worry about the Red Light District, weed, whatever you're worried about. Let's just say there's something for everyone, and I don't feel like any type of tourist would be marginalized in the city. So that takes us back to Hamar, I guess. Things were quite low-key for a while but now we're making weekend trips again. Took a trip to Stockholm this weekend, which was beautiful and afforded us the chance to see the new James Bond movie a couple weeks early. Then next week a cabin trip then the week after that maybe Bergen? Anyway, travel has definitely been a huge part of this study away experience for me, but my travelogue will likely take a turn toward the small and mundane in the next few posts. There's a lot of great parts about living in a foreign country, there's a few bad parts, and a lot of parts that are just different. I'm going to start addressing that sort of stuff soon, so my travelogue doesn't give the impression that I just travel all the time. Some may say the point of a travelogue is to document travel, but I respond by saying that this entire semester counts as travel and thus grocery shopping belongs in a travelogue just as much as The Great Adventure does. So look forward to that, and now I'll make my obligatory mention about the election. I'm glad it's ending soon.