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.