Masse Nye Bilder! Også min reise til Oslo

I know I've been slacking on this whole "updating my blog" thing. It's just not very high up on my to-do list! Most of my friends and I read the blog of a girl from Norway who's living in California this year and she updates almost every other day. That's never going to happen here, but I'm going to start trying to post something at least once a week. "Try" being the key word here.

This post is going to be some more pictures from around Christmas-time and will tell about my trip to Oslo (the capital, and the only big city) so I could take the SAT.

First some more pictures from Christmas/Winter break:

Rawr!



Baby Axel!




A bear...eating my foot




Awww




Hotel Britannia in Trondheim




I went searching for some X-mas lights. This was the best I could find

 AAAAND now on to the new stuff. I went to Oslo last weekend because I needed to take the SAT (a college admissions test in the USA, for all you norwegians reading this) and I think I did pretty well...we'll see. I stayed with my first host mom's sister's daughter, Hanna, who goes to the University of Olso. *note: not the university I was testing at*

It was kind of nerve wracking trying to get to the testing center in the morning. My admission ticket told me to be there at 8:00am sharp so I planned to be there around 7:30 to give me some time to get lost and then un-lost and then lost again, etc.. Unfortunately, I asked for directions from the wrong person and was told that I took the wrong train and needed to go back. Once I went back the way I came, I had to ask again where to go from there and was told to go back the way I had gone in the first place. Luckily, on that train I met a woman who works at the school I was going to and she told me which stop to get off at. I know all this sounds like it probably took a lot of time but it really didn't. It's a high speed tram and it just stops for a couple seconds at a time. And I wasn't really going very far so doing all of this puts me at about 7:55. Five minutes to spare and I can see the university. Plenty of time, right?

Wrong.

Since I was really REALLY lucky that day, the testing center was in a building that had just been renamed and I only had the new name. For future reference, Lucy Smiths Hus is the same place as the old administration building. None of the maps were updated yet and no one was walking around the campus before 8 on a Saturday morning. Of course, in Norway it's still pitch black at 8am so that didn't help. I walked around looking for any lights that were on and finally found some. I walked in about 10 minutes late and asked if this was the testing center. Yes it was, and they hadn't even started checking people in yet so it was fine that I was late. It ended up not starting until about 9:30 anyway.

I was surprised at how many people were there; I would guess about 40. I even met a guy who was an exchange student in Spokane last year and was taking the test to go back for college. After finishing the test, I had the rest of the day and Sunday morning to look around Oslo.

I had planned to put my pictures in this post but I just realized that I haven't put them on my computer yet. When I get around to doing that, I'll either update this one or make a new one.

And one last thing: MIN BURSDAG ER LØRDAG!  My birthday is Saturday :) :)

Jul i Norge!

Det er den tiden igjen, tid for jul! Fordi jeg har vært her i 5 måneder, jeg synes at det er tid for meg å skrive litt norsk til alle hjem. Men siden du forstår ikke denne (hvis du bor ikke på norge) jeg skal stoppe her. Og jeg skrivet på bokmål, ikke trøndersk, så at du kan oversetter med Google Translate :)

Christmas time! This is sort of a long one. I haven't updated anything in a while because I figured it would kind of be a waste of time to do before Christmas. But then I forgot my camera-computer connector when we went to Sweden so I couldn't post anything until I got home. Sweden? Yes! My family has a cabin in Åre, Sweden and they spend Christmas there every year. It's just over the border so it's only about a 2-2 1/2 hour drive from Trondheim. But it's really cold there! The temperature reached about -35 fahrenheit on some days...wayyyyy too cold for me.




I got to try cross country skiing for the first time and I loved it! It's a lot more work with your arms than I was expecting but it was also a lot more fun than I thought it would be.

As soon as we got to the house, we went out on snowmobiles to cut down a Christmas tree. In Norway they celebrate on the night of the 24th, not on the morning of the 25th like us.


Me, standing outside when it's -30!



Host siblings! from L-R: Simen, Ida, me

Ida and I decorating the tree

Haha good job to whoever made this one...

Welcome to Duved! (in Sweden)

I'll put up some more pictures sometime but right now I need to go to sleep. God natt, god jul, og god nyttår!

Volleyball Middag + Mer Snø

On Monday my volleyball team had a team dinner to celebrate Christmas (go Reima!) and we went to a pizza place. Yes, they do have good ol' Hawaiian and pepperoni but they also had Kebab pizza. It was the messiest pizza I've ever seen! Good, though. Here are some pictures of it:

 While we were there, it started snowing for the first time in quite a while. A Norway while, not a Longview while.

Of course I immediately jumped up and made Marie come outside with me to get some pictures. It was cold and wet but I only have 5 or 6 more months of snow left before I go home!

I still think it's so hard to get up and go to school even after watching it snow and knowing it will keep coming down all night. I told some people in my class that the first time I had ever been in school while there was snow on the ground was this year. I think it was pretty hard to believe, for them. If Trondheim had snow days, the make up days would extend into the next year's snow days! I had to take a picture from my classroom window even though you can't see any snowflakes falling so you'll just have to take my word for it.

That's all for now!

Jeg Har Spist et Reinsdyr!

 I still definitely have plans to eat reindeer in another form, but today I got to try reindeer sausage! It didn't taste as cool as I thought it would but it wasn't bad either. It tasted a lot like any other sausage, I guess. I do sort of feel bad about eating one so close to Christmas...but Santa doesn't need ALL his reindeer, right?

Thanksgiving

Turkey, pumpkin pie, cranberry relish, stuffing, mashed potatoes, fruit salad, more pumpkin pie, apple cider, the "kids table," even MORE pumpkin pie. Sound familiar? I thought so.

This was my first family holiday that I missed on this exchange. It was a little weird, but I wasn't feeling all depressed like some of then other exchangers said they were (sorry mom!) I really wanted pumpkin pie so i decided to make it myself. Easier said than done, here! My host parents and I went to the biggest grocery store and asked around for some pumpkins. They didn't have any canned, but they did have some in the produce section. When we got there, they didn't look like they could be baked into a pie. But, we decided to give it a go. Six and 1/2 hours, 5 pans, and 17 google searches later, the pie was finished! Did we eat it immediately? No. The sad part of this story is that since it took so long, it was 12:30am by the end and no one wanted pie. The GOOD news is that I took a bunch of pictures! Take a look :)

First we have the ingredients I started with

'Nuff said.

Yes, my pie was made using viking milk and a hammer

Cooking the pumpkin!

Yummmmm ;)

Finally cooked and peeled

Almost ready to eat...Can you tell? :)

"Look tough, like you just made a pie"

    

Everyday Life

It is November 21st and the sun goes down at about 3:00pm and doesn't rise until 9am! Right now, we're losing about 6 minutes of daylight per day. It's crazy having it be dark all the time!

I was reading back through my first post and I've changed my mind about the weird meal times. It's pretty much the same here, if not a little earlier.