New Semester in Norwegian Class & Election

A new semester of my Norwegian language class started in the last week of August. I was put in a level 2 class for 2 weeks. The teacher came to me and suggested me to move to another class, level 3, after she saw that I knew the materials before she taught them. That was cool. It takes, normally, one semester to finish one level, but mostly, it depends on each individual student. One day in the first weeks I got to this country, I borrowed a book from a library with title 'Norwegian in 3 months'. I finished the book in a month and remember most of it until now.
The first day I was in the new class, I felt so lost. It's a much higher level class, and they've started 2 weeks before. I learned that the students in my class have been living in the country for years. Some are more than 5 years! I got a lot of 'wow' when people learned that I've been here for such a short time. I sometimes feel proud of myself, but at the same time, it does not matter as my language is still a bottleneck for me to get a job.:(
The class, for a couple of weeks, has been learning about election and the politics in this country as the election to choose which party or party coalition to be the government for the next 4 years was coming soon, on September 12. For only 3 days, I had to catch up and be ready to present in front of the class about the Right party (one of the biggest parties). I asked myself whether I should go back to my previous class as I was feeling the high pressure. Suddenly, I had to read a lot about politics, and opened a dictionary very often while I was reading. But my presentation went well, we had a good Q&A session, and I learned a lot about Norwegian politics.
As part of the education on Norwegian politics, we had a day when level 3 and 4 students answering questions from other students in their native tongue. On the same day, 7 representatives from local political parties were invited to present their parties programs to the students and answering questions. On the election day, September 12, we also had election in our school, mimicking the real election. The result of our school election was not far from the result of the real election. The labor party got most of the votes.
After the election was over, sometimes I feel like I do not learn enough from my Norwegian class. Hehe... I try to learn the language at home by myself, in addition. I really want to get a job as soon as I can. It's been 4 months I am unemployed. I also realized that learning a new language is not easy, especially Norwegian is a difficult language (more grammar than English). I have much faster progress comparing to most of the other immigrant here, but still 4-months is not enough for me to be fluent in both speaking and writing. I am expecting myself to be unemployed for the next several months. It's not easy, but I have to have positive spirit and enjoy my life.

My First Camping Trip

Morten loves camping, being alone in the wood. He said it was so peaceful. Me, on the other hand, I had never camped before. The idea of not having proper toilet did not really lure me into camping before. He tried to convince me that camping was really fun, a good activity to relax. An ex-colleague of mine from Maine has told me about it, too. I guessed I had to try it, then. Unfortunately, we did not get a chance to do it when we were in the US. Well, we did sleep in a tent for a couple of nights in our garden when we were painting our house as we did not want to sleep with the paint smell.:)
So, one weekend here in Norway, we planned for a one-night camping trip. Just to give me an introduction of how it was to sleep out in a wood. We had some warming up first, sleeping in one of our friends garden for a night, then we headed up to Lillehammer area. Lillehammer was the city in where Winter Olympic was held in 1994. If you want to know more about the city, the internet link is http://www.lillehammerturist.no/english/. We have a friend who lives there who we were going to visit.
After we checked on a map and had an idea where we were going to camp, we drove to find the place. Unlike in the US, there are more places we can camp here freely. We can pretty much camp in anywhere we want, even though the place is privately owned, as long as it is not in somebody's yard or in a middle of a farm. It is rarely you'll find No Trespassing sign in this country. We aimed for a place that had no houses around and had water, lake or small creek. It would not be difficult to find such a place as Norway has a lot of lakes.
So, there we were, driving and trying to find the place. But ops, unfortunately, the road was closed. It was not surprising if the land was privately owned. Some people close the road to their lands if they don't want other people to trespass, for example. Unfortunately, it is not always shown on maps if a road is closed. We just had to drive there and check it out. And oh it started raining. It already passed 7 in the evening, but there was still light. We checked out around 5 places, until we found a perfect spot. There was a lake and no other people around. And oh...there were so many blueberries! And the rain had stopped, too! We had some companies, though, a small flock of sheep were curious watching us putting up our tent and unloading the car. They left us after a little while.
As we have not yet all unpacked from our moving from the US, we did not bring our camping cooking equipment. We just brought some bread and things to put on bread, and some drink. Morten preferred hot meal for dinner so he drove to nearby town to find some gatekjoekken. (Literally translated as street kitchen. Anyway, it's a small local restaurant, that typically sell fried chickens, hamburgers, and kebab.) I was left alone to contemplate that it was really nice to be out alone in the wood. He came back with a fried chicken and a hamburger that we ate while sitting on a rock next to the lake. We read a little bit inside our tent before we fell to a very nice sleep.
In the morning we had breakfast and clean our faces. I was thinking to swim in the lake but it was too cold for me. Then we drove to find our friend and we went to a forest up on a mountain to pick cloudberries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudberry). We did not succeed in picking cloudberries as much as we did with blueberries. It is not easy to find cloudberries. They grow in bogs, marshes and wet meadows and requires sunny exposures in acidic ground, and do not clump together in one place. It is a delicate berry in this country. If somebody found some cloudberries on a mountain, normally it would be reported that they saw a bear there (so other people would not go there). Anyway, the three of us together could only find less than 20 berries and most of them were stored directly safely in my stomach. Nevertheless, it was a really nice weekend with some new experiences for me.

Picking Blueberries

A couple of weekends ago, again, we planned to go picking blueberries. This time, we did not want to take any chance for not knowing where to find some, so we went a bit further from where we live. Morten learned from his father that there were some places that have lots of blueberries in Kongsberg. His father lives there, it's about 45 minutes drive from our place.
We left home before noon. This time, Morten let me driving, driving a manual gear car! Uh..it's a bit scary. I drove automatic cars when I was in the US. I've been practicing driving a manual gear car several times here...in a parking lot of a shopping center after their closing time. But it's still scary. I am not used to the idea of shifting between gears. I still killed the engine the last time I drove, that was the last weekend. Anyway, driving to Kongsberg was not very difficult for me because driving on highways is easy, no need to stop, less chance of killing the engine. We drove into a small road and park there.
We found a place where there was lots of blueberries. Morten taught me how to use the picker. As I felt it was easier just pick directly with my fingers and we could not find our other picker, so I did it with a cup on my other hand and let Morten used to picker. Just looking at the sight of that mass of blueberries was already so exciting to me. I have never seen such sight before. They were much smaller and the color was stronger than those in the US. We gotta be careful or else it would be very difficult to get the stain off. I have been warned before, so I put on my least favorite clothes on. My socks were full of stain that I don't know how to wash it off.
After a little while, we moved deeper into the forest (it was not really a forest, though), and we found much much more blueberries. It was so exciting. I kept saying, "I am having fun...I'm having fun..."
Then, I tried to use the picker, oh, I got the hang of it...it was much easier and faster. Of course, that's why they designed the picker. Silly me...
I was too excited and too busy picking blueberries, and did not realize that we were not alone. There were only 4 or more people there, though. Some of them were picking mushrooms. Hmmm I would like to try to pick mushrooms, but Morten does not know which are edible and which are poisonous. So, we would need to go with somebody who understands this thing next time, maybe, I hope...
We've been picking for around 3 hours and our bucket was almost full. It's a 10 liters bucket! We got so much blueberries. We called it a day as we were already tired and hungry. But I was having so much fun!
Now, the boring thing came, cleaning them. It took me 3 days to clean them! Well, not all day, cause it would be too boring. We did not have a tool for cleaning them, so I needed to do it manually, one by one, 10 liters blueberries! Can you imagine it? I spent around 3-4 hours each day doing it. I made 1 liter of some kind of jam out of it. And the rest, Morten's sister's lent us some space in her freezer to keep them. Some kind of jam and borrowing some space in somebody's freezer, forgot to tell you that we haven't really settled in yet. We do not have a kitchen yet as we needed to remodel the kitchen after we bought this apartment. And we haven't bought most of the appliances we need yet. Gotta get the kitchen done first.
Anyway, we got another kind of berries, too. Another 10 liters. It's red currant berries. We picked them at Morten's sister's backyard. She does not like to pick berries, so rather than they got wasted, she offered us. It's much easier picking red currant berries, no tool needed, just use our fingers. And of course, much easier to clean also. We did not even need to clean them before freezing them. We could just use a fork to clean when they are frozen, we were told.
Hmm...which more berries can I pick next?

My First Summer in Norway

It's been a while I didn't write in this blog, and a couple of friends have asked about it. Thank you all for reading my stories and please do not hesitate to comment. It was not because I did not have interesting experience anymore, but it was due to my ability to access the internet. We have moved to our own place and we do not have a telephone connection yet, you see. There is a nice library in the town center of Asker (the place where we live now) that has many computers with internet connection. I have been coming here to check my emails and surfing the internet a bit for the past several days. The town center is only 15 minutes walk from our apartment. Quite a good exercise for me.;)
Summer is almost over now, it's getting a bit colder in the air. This summer I was told was kind of unusual, more rain than usual. In fact, I came here wearing a rain jacket, a pair of Wellington boot (these are my second pair, my first was when I was 5 years old!), and an umbrella. It's been raining since yesterday (I started writing this since last Monday, but did not get to finish it). The weather easily changes, unpredictable. The weather forecast here, as I observed so far, was almost fifty percent wrong. It was forecasted to be nice and sunny last weekend, as a matter of fact, it's been raining almost non-stop until Monday.
Day light is longer in summer. In where we live, the sun starts rising around 3 in the morning, and goes down around 11 in the evening. We had some nice weather, though not much. Several weeks ago, it reached almost 30C, quite warm for Norwegians. They are not prepared for such a weather as most of the houses are not equipped with air conditioner. We went to visit a very nice family in Eidsvol, around 1 hour drive from Oslo. Einar Andreas is one of Morten's best friend since high school. We spent a night at his house. He and Astrid, his wife, have 3 kids: Anna Klara, 7 years old, Ole Anders, 4 years old, and Ãse Ragnhil (I hope I get the name right), 1 year. They have Norwegian names which are difficult for me to remember. I struggled a lot with the youngest's name. They are all very nice and happy kids. Of course, they all spoke to me in Norwegian. I understood more than half of what Anna Klara said, but not Ole Anders as he still struggled with some pronunciationn, and definitely not Åse Ragnhil as most of the words that came out from her mouth was 'pa..pa..pa...'. Some kind of code words, I guess.;)
Anna Klara liked to talk to me. She showed me that she could count in English, from one to ten. I managed to teach her to count to eleven. Twelve is too difficult for her. She told me that after dinner she was going to get some 'love on a stick'. I thought I misunderstood her. Later I learned that that was what Norwegian called lollipop. Every Saturday after dinner, the kids get to watch a kid's movie and eating some sweet.
In the morning, Morten and I borrowed their tandem bicycle and went to bicycle a bit. I have never used tandem before. It was a nice ride. Many kinds of wild flowers were blooming, so beautiful. I learned some of their Norwegian names. We stopped on a side street to see some wild strawberry bushes. I have never seen wild strawberry bushes before. And the strawberries were only as big as a newborn baby's finger! Apparently, there are many berry bushes in this country. Well, I was told that strawberry is not a berry. Hmmm...I saw many raspberry bushes along the street near by our apartment. I liked to pick and eat them. We tried to go pick blueberries last weekend but we did not get any as we are not familiar with this area yet.
Anyway, at Einar Andreas and Astrid's we were served moose meat for dinner. Another new experience for me. They got the meat from Astrid's brother in law who part of his job is to take care of the moose that were killed on the road. Einar Andreas cooked it in their back yard, with camping cooking way. He and his father are very active in boy scout. I was afraid that I would not like the meat. I tried reindeer meat, I did not like it because of the smell, wild animal smell. I was surprised to find myself enjoying the meal. It was very delicious.
The people here have 5 weeks paid vacation in a year! Most of them take a long vacation during the summer, average 3 weeks. Almost no people working during summer. Some stores are closed for 1-2 weeks, or they have shorter opening hours. Well, stores here have much shorter opening hours than in the US. Most of them close at 5 PM. They open a bit longer on Thursdays, until 7 PM. Saturdays only a half day, and no stores open on Sundays. They really enjoy their lives here. I hope I can enjoy my life here, too. After all, that's why I moved here.