We Inner Dog

Hey guys! I decided that keeping an online blog would be the best way for me to keep in touch with friends/family back home, and would act as a convenient way to store my pictures. My friend Lauren Kaija used the same blog software for her trip abroad this past semester to Europe and I really liked the format that she used, so I decided to use the same one. I probably won’t have as many posts, but I’ll definitely dump a ton of photos in here so be sure to check out the gallery! This is my first post after my first night here, but I’ll probably be writing about the interesting places I go to and the various cultural/social aspects of Norway that I find interesting and hopefully you’ll find interesting as well. Also I have better things to do then proofread this heavily so sorry Mrs fields and Mrs. Perkins.

Trond and I’s trip abroad to Oslo, Norway was off to a roaring start; our main flight to the city was delayed 4, then 6, and then finally 10 hours after its initial departing time of 10pm. So we hunkered down in the corner of the JFK international terminal and attempted to sleep, read, or wait for the entire night under the painfully bright lights of our gate. If I was traveling home or to school, I normally wouldn’t really mind a delay; it would give my time to sit around and read all the new books I got for Christmas. However the University of Oslo Housing center would only let us pick up our keys to our rooms the following day (Friday) between 9am-6pm, and now that our flight was delayed 10 hours we were pretty much screwed. We missed our meet and greet session for international students, as well as the window for grabbing our keys, bus/train passes.

If I wasn’t with Trond, I’d probably be sleeping in the airport tonight once again and be stressing out big time. Luckily Trond has a bunch of cousins and family in Oslo, so we managed to get in contact with them and they were able to grab our keys from the UiO student center (can’t overstate how lucky we were that this happened, we wouldn’t have been able to get into our rooms for another 2 days). After taking the Flytoget express train from the airport into Oslo, Trond’s uncle Frode picked us up from the Oslo central Station and drove us to the Sogn Student Village, where we live. Frode and his wife were incredibly kind to us, pointing out major cultural parts of the city on the way to Sogn bi while letting us how Trond’s cousins were doing. Frode’s wife reminded me so much of my friend Rasmus’s mother Majken, who are from Denmark. She had a crazily similar accent/way of speaking, and wouldn’t stop offering us a place to stay at her home, which kept refusing politely. When we got to our rooms, they were so alarmed at how barren they were as they had almost no furnishings, sheets, or blankets (We were supposed to get that stuff that day, but the because of the delay we couldn’t). Trond and I couldn’t have been happier. There’s something about living in absolute squalor and/or living with minimal necessities that is so appealing to me. I’m a very organized person, but I like seeing what I can take in terms of living conditions. Maybe that’s why I loved living in the KDR house so much this semester.

As we were exploring the almost-empty dorm complex, Trond found a letter saying some students left some items from last semester on the top floor in the attic, and the stuff was up for grabs. As we crept up into the frigid, moldy attic, we found rooms upon rooms of leftover sheets, blankets, and dorm furnishings. We cracked up at the absurdness that we managed to arrive in Norway and have almost nothing with us, and then managed to find a treasure room of free gear. My favorite item was this picture of this Norwegian girl, who’s now my sole piece of artwork in my room. Trond grabbed a kimono.

We don’t have wifi in our room yet cause we need to buy a router, so I’ll be putting up this post up late. This next week we’ll be busy doing orientation stuff with our group and getting to know the city. I’m probably most excited for our orientation group pub-crawl next Friday! Hope y’all enjoyed my ranting.