Når er det Mørketid (Now it's the dark time)

In Norway between October and January it becomes the dark time, or dark period. The sun is "up" (at least it's sort of light) at 10 AM and down again by 3:30 PM at the darkest time. I should clarify that this is true in the southern parts, whereas the northern parts are darker even longer. Us International students were told to get plenty of vitamin D and omega 3 fatty acid from cod liver oil, fortunately in pill form now. Unfortunately, much of the oil they use comes from fish in Peru, and the factories making the pills are polluting the local people. I don't know what percent of the oil is harvested in Norway, but the general assumption here is that most of it comes from Norway. Peru and Chile produce over 55 percent of all the fish meal and fish oil on the market now, and the fish meal is used primarily in fish farming...and I also eat the delicious farmed salmon that is clearly colored pink with beta carotene...yum.

I have no computer right now because my charger stopped working. It looked like it had been burned or melted, and I blame the cheap converter I bought at Wal Mart and myself for not buying a proper plug for Norway. It's at an Apple service center now in Oslo, but in the meantime I have the fancy computers on campus to use. Surprisingly, the world has not stopped turning because I no longer have my own computer.

I can't put my pictures on the blog this time but I found some good ones online. Here is the oak tree that all the students who live in the student housing area must pass to get to campus, so I think it has become an icon of sorts for us:

From: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/19882621

There is not yet snow on the ground, so this picture is not accurate to right now but I'm sure we will have snow, or snø, soon. I saw it on the cover of one of the tabloids, so it must be true.

I have a lot of studying left to do before my 4 final tests, which are supposed to take something like 3 hours each and count for between 60 and 100 percent of our grades. I guess that's how they do it here. Not going to succumb to the pressure! I'm feeling good right now because we just finished a huge term paper a day before the deadline, so clearly it is time to blog.

I don't know if this is true broadly in Norway, but I am impressed and a bit humbled by the speed with which cars stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk. Maybe it's partly due to our particular crosswalks next to the school that a lot of students use, and of course we are all the future.

I am not so impressed with the amount of litter I see daily around campus. It makes me feel like all of these Norwegian kids are spoiled brats, who have had it easy in the high standard of living under socialism. I know that's not true, but I did meet one kid (18 or so?) who introduced himself in Norwegian to my Norwegian roommate as, "the Prince". Let me just spend a couple of sentences on this guy, because it is amazing. He wears a red (possibly velvet) robe and slippers around their place, with his hair slicked back, like a 50s movie star. He and his friends have hired a professional DJ with a club-sized speaker that I can feel the vibrations from in my room, several floors away, almost every weekend since I got here. They may have finally buckled down now, because I haven't heard it the last couple of weekends.

I don't think that a 28 year old masters student should be sharing a building with 18-20 year olds who just want to get their party on, but that is my world this year. Next year I will likely have to move anyway, and I'm looking forward to it even though I know it will likely be more expensive than now, and now is expensive! How did I go from a giant house shared with 2 people for 300 a month to a tiny cubicle with common area shared with 6 for over 500 a month?
Oh well.

My Norwegian is getting better now, I think. I at least understand most of what I need in the store, train station and around town, but unlike with Japanese my written comprehension is much better that my listening conprehension. I'm hoping to improve the situation this January, when I will possibly visit relative/help out on a farm/hang out with Unni and Lill Nora. Plans are still in a nebulous state.

I wish I had a cute cat picture to end with, but instead I'll end with a cute Norwegian moose:

From: http://anniekatec.blogspot.com/2010/11/heavy-metals-may-influence-moose-health.html

Okay, in finding this picture I saw this ridiculous article:

"Norway's Moose Population in Trouble for Belching
The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year -- equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey." From: http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,501145,00.html

I ate some moose stew last weekend so I guess I helped avert climate change. Go me!

Campus Tour and After, Lunsj

After almost over three months of being here, I will finally give you a tour of my campus and some surrounding areas. So come along and follow me, let's go for a walk around the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, or as it's known to the locals Universitetet for miljø-og biovitenskap.

It's fall now, almost winter, so most of the trees are bare but just last week we still had some color.


The rows of small yellow trees are part of the campus apple orchard, from where I got the apples for the giant apple pie I made a few weeks ago. This hillside also has a pretty good view, but it gets better up the hill from the church. I don't go up there much except on my jogs.



We have a nice book store, or Bok Smia as it says on the sign. It's not cheap but it's close, and sort of looks like a farm building that they maybe used as such when the university was first founded. It is still very much an agricultural university, but with newer departments in the environmental, developmental and ecological disciplines.



Here's our Agricultural Museum, that I haven't been in since the first day but I always see the Ås locals hanging out here. It's like the Sunday meeting spot after church or something. Inside there are exhibits of Norway's agricultural past, including milking parlours, some of the first machinery, and even a replica of the spoiled first son's room, who was treated specially because he would take over the farm one day. In my jetlagged state that first week I fell asleep during the movie they played for us at the end of the tour.

Across from the Landbruks (Agricultural) Museum, there's the school duck pond.


You may notice the little house on the island. The UMB fraternity, the Hankatter (Tom Cats in English) have a tradition of keeping it painted red and white. I'm not sure if they do anything but party and watch this house to make sure no one paints it different for long. Others try, but very soon it is back to red and white.

Next we have the student center, SiT (student informasjons torg).




This is where I got my health care coverag figured out and teared up, and before that actually cried in Vilma's, one of the school's administrators, office. What is up with this building and me and crying. Oh, they have a cafeteria on the top floor with the most delicious pastries, I almost cried it was so good.

Across from that is my department's building, Noragric (I forget what it is in Norwegian! And I can't find it on the website..) which is the Department of International Environmental and Development Studies.



The master is split into Env. and Devel. studies. Haha mine's first in the title!



As I said, it's and agricultural university primarily. One of my roommates and another friend are in the horse training and breeding program. These people might just be locals though.

I have many classes in this building, the Tower Building. Not sure what the tower part is about. It is five floors of hard core economics, including my Political Economy class. And for some reason my Socio-Ecological Resilience class.

Nearby there are some really nice boreal forest fragments, maintained by the campus and local organizations. I took a walk in a new one last weekend, and was pleasantly surprised by this hand-drawn diagram of the geological history of this area:


So there was an iceberg here! In the picture it's the "isbre". After this picture is nice forest walk with many trees labelled. No English but I can figure out more things now that I know more words. There's a lot of campfire spots I see in the forests here.





People just feel free to use whatever forest area is around. Socialism.

And that's the end of my UMB special magic campus tour extravaganza! Hope you enjoyed it. I'll just finish with another food item I've been enjoying recently, the smørbrød, or open-faced sandwiches:


I put mayo, smoked salmon, cucumbers, and hard boiled egg over some whole grain brød, I mean bread. The one in back has kaviar from a tube, seen in a previous entry.


It's part of this complete lunsj, with tea and broccoli and mackerel paste salad, also from a tube. The mackerel, not the broccoli. It's good, I swear!

Cruise to Copenhagen

There is no way I can keep up with the NaBloPoMo festivities, but I will at least try to blog more often then I have. Things have been piling up! But not the snow yet, so that's good.

Last weekend was one of the International Student Union's biggest events: The Booze Cruise to Copenhagen!!


The basic plan is take a giant cruise ship to Copenhagen over night, get really drunk (I didn't get that drunk--just enough to have a good time!), and then spend the day in Copenhagen hungover, then get on the boat again and do it all one more time and then you're back in Norway, sleepy and maybe hungover again. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it was actually quite fun since I didn't over do it like some people, and they had a good DJ on the boat.



My roomies in our cramped room. One Canadian, one Norwegian, one Italian and one American. see if you can guess which is which. A clue: the American is not pictured. The Norwegian is not the blonde this time--she's on the right but I think she dyes her hair to be not blonde.



This was one of the views as we shipped off. See you in about 36 hours, Oslo!

In Copenhagen itself, there's a lot more old architecture than in Oslo, but other than that not much different. The language differences were weird, since I've been learning Norwegian, so a lot of words were familiar but just looked like they were spelled wrong. For example, in Norwegian "fruit" is "frukt", but in Danish it's "frugt". And "water" is "vann" in Norwegian and "vand" in Danish. It is similarly strange like this in Sweden.

Some pictures from around the city:



I love when birds perch on dramatic statues. I'd almost suggest we make a theme out of it on the blogs, what do you think? I have a somewhat unfair advantage, perhaps, being in Europe.




The human element. Love those red boots.



Here's Copenhagen's Occupy movement. They had a sign that says: "Trees don't grow on money". Clever, and mostly true. In a literal sense anyway. In another sense, I got paid to plant trees, so does that count as trees growing on money?



Some vines of awesome colors growing up a building. Not sure how it got that way, but I like it.




The entrance to Krisitana (sp?) district, where police don't bother to go, and no one paves the roads...it's an alternative community, where they burn certain plants recreationally. Pictures aren't allowed inside, seemingly the only rule other than maybe some hippy stuff like "love everyone".



Ah, the sun. Maybe the best thing about Copenhagen is they had sun on this day, where Norway has been cloudy for several days.

After one more night of dancing, I was able to get up and face Oslo. As we slowly passed the islands and houses I was able to take my time and appreciate where I am. The Way to the North.



I survived. To get coffee. Norwegian coffee is strong, just like I like it. More on food and daily life in the next entry!