Rebecca goes to Norway!

Back to school--starting the day right with a Norwegian breakfast.

2011-10-03T23:38:00.000+02:00

School has started again at my two workplaces, Gol Vaksenopplæring and Ål Kulturskule.
So far we are about 5 weeks into the school year, and it is high time for a fall vacation!
However, what did I offer to do during vacation? Work. Technically only for two days though, and it is not really teaching as per usual. I am helping out with the Integration Program on Monday and Tuesday as support for the refugee consultant who plans the entire week's activities.

Today we made a Norwegian breakfast. It turned out to be lunch because of logistics--having to buy the food and then prepare it--but it turned out tasty anyhow!
We had:

grov brød-- Bread, the foundation of many Norwegians' diets. "Grov" is a little hard to translate, but basically it is whole-wheat bread. If not wheat per se, then it is bread that has most of its grains and thus its vitamins intact and inside the bread. This is the opposite of white bread. Often this can be a combination of grains such as rye, barley, wheat and oats.
knekkebrød--this is not very common in the States, but it is sometimes called flatbread. Wasa is a common brand in the States, but there are many different types here.
smør--butter. We used a combination of margarin and rapsolje (canola oil).
ost--cheese. Norwegians eat a lot of gulost (gul--yellow, ost--cheese). The most well-known brand is Norvegia. Norwegians also sometimes call this cheese hvitost (hvit--white). I assume their color differentiations come from their comparison to...
brunost!-- possibly the most Norwegian food ever, apart from lutefisk. This brown cheese is near and dear to every Norwegian's heart, and is most likely in every matpakke at least once a week at every school in Norway. That is just my guess, not an actual statistic.
nøkkelost--a kind of white cheese with caraway seeds in it, one of my favorites.
brødskive--Literally a slice of bread. The combination of a slice of bread with something on it (pålegg) is a brødskive.
agurk--a common topping for many a brødskive. Slice it up, put it on pretty much any other pålegg except for brunost (although I think some rebels do that as well).
tomat--take a wild guess---tomato! Also a popular pålegg, often combined with any savory combinations of meat, cheese, or fish. Usually used sparingly.
paprika--red bell pepper. This word technically applies to bell peppers of any kind, but Norwegian specifically use red bell pepper for putting on brødskiver.
syltetøy-- jam! Most often raspberry (bringebær) or strawberry (jordbær).
kaviar--this is not the kind of caviar that Americans tend to think of. This is a cheap kind of fish eggs in an aluminum tube that you can squeeze out and smear on bread. Personally this disgusts me to no end. But Norwegians like it.
egg--another wild guess....you got it, egg! Egg means egg. It's a miracle. Boil eggs, slice 'em up, put 'em on a brødskive.
kjøttpålegg--meat stuffs to put on bread. This can be sliced boiled ham, turkey, chicken, salami, roast beef, pastrami, or whatever else you can think of. Except much more limited here in Norway. But more game types of salami/sausage are available, like reindeer sausage, moose sausage. These are salted and smoked most often to preserve them. They are terribly delicious but as said, very very salty. We had turkey pålegg at the school today since most of our students participating are Muslim and cannot eat ham, the most common kjøttpålegg in Norway.
frukt--fruit. Also part of a healthful breakfast. We had bananer, epler, og druer this morning. Bananas, apples and grapes.
melk, skummet og hel--milk, skimmed and whole (fat). Many Norwegians drink milk for breakfast, as well as during the rest of the day. Especially the dairy farmers!

That is what we ate for breakfast! However, it is an unusually large breakfast for a Norwegian to eat on a daily basis. Most Norwegians eat about 2 brødskiver, and probably vary their pålegg according to mood.

Brødskiver are open-faced, by the way. That means: take one piece of bread, and put something on it. Do not put another slice of bread on top. Eat.

The brødskive is also used for lunch, when Norwegians take their matpakke (2 brødskiver wrapped in wax paper or a matboks, lunchbox) to work or school. From an American perspective, this is incredibly pitiful, but it is Norwegian tradition and Not To Be Mocked. Also, one might note the increasing rate of obesity in the States as compared with Norway. Combining two kinds of pålegg, such as meat + cheese, is often considered unnecessary luxury.

Since Norwegians eat two open-faced slices of bread with pålegg, they usually have a piece of wax paper in between (mellomleggspapir) so the cheese doesn't stick to the other piece of bread, nor make the neighboring piece of bread smell like brunost when the other slice of bread has gulost. Complicated matters here.

After the breakfast, the students listened to a specialist who talked about kosthold (diet), and trening/fysisk aktivitet (exercise and physical activity). It was very interesting and motivating. I hope that many of the more sedantary students can get started with at least a walk in the evening and improve their diets a bit. Now that it is fall, it is lovely weather for an evening walk!

Trip to Norwegian parlament with Gol Adult Learning Center

2011-08-09T23:12:00.000+02:00

In June our school (my workplace) went on a field trip to Stortinget, the Norwegian parlament. We got to see a meeting going on, during which they were discussing the pros and cons of disabled kids attending special schools, or attending regular public school.

We were shown around by Trond Helleland, a representative from the Right party (Høyre). He is from Ål and was our contact and guide at Stortinget. After viewing the meeting, Trond led us into another similar room where everyone could ask him questions and pretend they were members of parlament.

Trond with one of my students from 2011.

After our trip to Stortinget, everyone split up in groups for a bit of free time in "hovedstaden", the capital. A lot of students used this time to eat at restaurants or go shopping for ethnic things (food, clothing) that they can't get back "home" in Hallingdal.

One of my students giving the golden man a few coins.

Later everyone met up again and we took buses to Vigelandsparken, the park which is home to Gustav Vigeland's huge granite and bronze sculptures. In the picture below we are blocking a huge fountain sculpture.

Many of the students from Somalia in Vigelandsparken.

It was a great trip--good weather, and educational. It seemed that everyone got at least something out of it, whether or not they understood everything that was said. Stortinget offers free tours to visitors/tourists in Norwegian or English.

Syttende Mai! Seventeenth of May!

2011-08-09T21:26:00.015+02:00

I didn't get to see the final episode of "Farmen" because my husband and I had something much more fun to do. We went to New York City and Maryland for a week in May to celebrate my father's (insert secret big round number here) birthday. It was a happy coincidence of timing that the Norwegian constitution day is May 17th, which fell on a Tuesday, which meant we got Monday off as well. Including the weekend and a few vacation days, both of us managed to get away for a whole week which was quite wonderful.

It was a very special trip, with three days first in New York and the rest of our time in Maryland. It was my husband's first time in NYC so that was kind of exciting and fun to see how he reacted to Times Square and the subway. For a farmer boy he did pretty well, although I tend to navigate through the subway stations and busy streets for us both.

Ola Magne at Times Square

I insisted on seeing a Broadway show while we were there, which is one of my passions. We saw Billy Eliot, a good show for both of us since it involved dancing (for me) and a boy plus politics (for my husband).

In January 2007 I took a class in college called Theatre in New York. It was just that--living in New York for a month and seeing 19 shows, probably about 11 of which were Broadway, some off-Broadway as well. It was a great experience and I loved getting a chance to live in the city for a limited time, without having to commit to moving there. It was nice to get back there. However, it was nice to leave again as well. It was very busy and exhausting compared to little Torpo. :-D There are however several trees in New York, as you can see in the picture below. I heard that there is even a park...centrally located...but we didn't go there this time around.

Me before getting on the ferry to Liberty Island.

We saw the Statue of Liberty, of course, since neither of us had seen it before. It was fun taking the ferry in, although it was very foggy! We almost couldn't see the Statue until we were at the Island.

We took pictures of us reading our local newspaper (Hallingdølen) in an attempt to get our picture published on the back page, but have been unsucessful so far. The paper tends to favor cute kids and animals. I guess we are neither.

Me posing for the camera...not really reading the newspaper.

We also went to the Hard Rock Cafe for drinks, saw the World Trade Center site where they are rebuilding the Twin Towers, and Wall Street (the street...really not that impressive). I also spent a long time in Macy's only to find one shirt.

Wall Street.

Before we left, we celebrated Syttende Mai! We went to the Sjømannskirke (Seaman's church, which was established in many cities of port for Norwegain sailors to keep connections and their faith) to attend the service there. It was full of Norwegians, both natives and American-Norwegians. Most everyone was dressed in bunad (the traditional costumes of Norway) or nice clothes like dresses and suits. The Lutheran service was entirely in Norwegian by a female Norwegian minister. There was a lot of singing and music, including live trumpeters.

After the service they served pølser, Solo brus, and bløtkake! It couldn't have been more Norwegian! Pølser are the Norwegian kind of hot dogs known as wienerpølse, long and skinny, that stick out of the hot dog bun most inconveniently. Brus is soda, more specifically Solo is a type of orange soda--the best I have ever tasted! It tastes like actual oranges and has relatively low amounts of sugar. Bløtkake is the kind of cake they serve for special occasions, which has two or three layers of "sugar-cake" and are sandwiched with whipped cream, and often various other ingredients like fruit or nuts.

People wearing bunads eating pølser and drinking Solo brus.

After the service we had to go check out of our hotel and catch our train to Maryland, so we weren't able to attend the 17.mai parade that happened afterward. We took a train from NYC 2.5 hours to the station nearby my aunt's house. She picked us up and we stayed with her for one night, then moved to the area where my dad lives. We got to stay in our own "guest house" which was very nice.

Ola Magne, me, my aunt and my father

We had a really nice time, with more or less great weather. We went to Gettysburg to learn about the Civil War--very interesting. Getting caught in a thunderstorm out on the battlefield was one fantastic experience that made me happy to be alive afterward. We had to run to a big monument to seek shelter along with a high school class that didn't seem to mind the rain too much. I was personally more concerned about the lightning.

We also went to a couple other local museums about the Civil War, as per my request, including one about medicine during the Civil War in Frederick (horrific but very groundbreaking for modern medicine in warfare), and another museum at Monocacy Battlefield. This guy was really excited about the Civil War. He told us everything we could ever possibly need to know, or want to know, or not even really need to know, about the costumes (ahem, uniforms) worn since the Civil War until today. However, he talked so fast that I only understood about a third of what he said.

A very excited guy.

The birthday party for my dad was a very special occasion. All of his numerous siblings were present, and some had come from great distances. It was great to see all of them and get to know them better. We got to look at old pictures of the family and it was so fun to see what they all looked like as children. I hope to visit some of my aunts, uncles and cousins in the future.

Looking at old pictures with family.

Getting even more rustic...

2011-05-08T23:52:00.004+02:00

Well, it's the last week of Farmen (see previous blog entry!) so things are getting exciting. My husband and I are gearing up for finale-week, but unfortunately we won't be able to see the finale! Does anyone want to record it for us?

This weekend was pretty calm but full of housework, along with making food from scratch: black bean soup, brownies and lasagne. I figure that whatever proper food you can't buy in the stores here must be made by hand at home! I use the Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks a lot, along with The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and other Molly Katzen cookbooks. Thank the powers that be for that woman! The internet is also great for when you can't remember what 350 degrees Fahrenheit is in Celcius. (Answer: approximately 175-180 C.)

I've also been enjoying our "new" hytte this weekend. We are renting it for the year from some local people who own it and don't need it, so they rent it out. It is only big enough for two people (and maybe a cat or two). It is called "Raudbrekk". I asked my husband what that means, but he doesn't really know. Any ideas? The hytte (cabin) has two rooms: one "living room" with a combined kitchen, a table with benches, two chairs and a wood-burning oven/stove, and a bedroom with a built-in bed. There is an outhouse with a toilet, which actually has a real toilet seat! Luxury! So far we've stayed there only two weekends, and we come back home to shower, etc. It is only about 10 minutes' drive, so it's no crisis if you forget something or have to rush home to feed the cat.

I wasn't too sure about the idea of paying money for the use of a place without electricity and water...but it's not as bad as it sounds. Even though the cabin is very rustic, it is nice to be somewhere without distractions. However, I brought a smidgen of modern times into the place with my Ipod and small speakers for listening to tunes. It's a great place to learn tunes on hardanger fiddle without anyone to listen in!

There is a bunsen-burner type thing for cooking and boiling water, so you can do the dishes and wash your face/hands, and there are paraffin lamps for reading which have an absolutely lovely golden color and warmth to their light.

Today I brought our cat Pus along, and he seemed to like it. He sniffed around and then settled down with some food and water, then rested on one of the rugs. We went outside for a while and he sniffed around and was very interested in the birds making angry, hissing noises (probably protecting their nests). He didn't try to run away, so that was a plus. He wasn't fond of the car ride, but maybe he will get used to it after more visits in the future. Fortunately it's not far from our house just in case he tries to find his way home sometime...

2011-03-14T20:23:00.002+01:00

Now it's time for the Norwegian reality TV show Farmen again! It started last week and so far one person (of 14) has left the farm. There is a girl from Geilo in Hallingdal, so we are rooting for her. This week she is storbonde, the big farmer (the head farmer). The storbonde is in charge of the weekly assignments and makes sure that everyone is working and things are going well on the farm. This year there are a lot of nordlendinger, people from Northern Norway, plus one Same (a Sami person). He seems like a luring, a trickster or a clever person. Two years ago a Sami person won Farmen, so we will be watching this guy to see what happens.

I like watching Farmen because it gives me and my husband ideas for what we can do on our mini-farm (småbruk), as well as a sigh of relief for all the things we don't have to do since it's not a full-fledged farm. In addition it makes me grateful for things like grocery stores, hot showers, shampoo, and dinners with meat and vegetables. It also makes me look forward to summer, sitting outside in the sun, jumping in ice cold lakes (bading), and petting baby bunnies!

My husband has been getting more interested in raising rabbits for meat, so he bought a male rabbit this week to mate with our other female rabbits. We have four females, so if all goes well (from the male rabbit's side of things) then we should have about somewhere in between 4-40 baby bunnies in about 28 days. Sometimes it is hard to know whether "it took" so each female usually get 2-3 times together with the male. My husband is an educated butcher and meat-cutter, so that is why he is interested in selling the rabbit meat.

Fortunately the baby bunnies will arrive right about when the snow is starting to melt, and grass will start growing in May, so there will be a lot of free food for them outside. We are going to make cages that you can move around so that they will eat the grass and their droppings will fertilize the ground.

At the end of this week, I will be dancing in a performance of Alice in Wonderland put on by Ål Kulturskole (Cultural school), which features the dance and theatre students this time. There will be two performances, one on Saturday and one on Sunday. In addition we are excited to have visitors on Sunday from my husband's American relative and her aunt from Austria.

Check out this link: http://aalkulturskule.no/

Hvis du snakker norsk og bor i Hallingdal, må du gjerne komme på forestillingen!!

If you speak Norwegian and live in Hallingdal, you are most welcome to attend the performance!

evidence of spring

2011-03-04T02:41:00.011+01:00

I'm on a roll with two blog posts in one week!

I just had to show off some pictures that prove spring is around the corner (at least for this week). I went skiing on Wednesday and took some pictures of the mountains nearby our house. It takes about 10 minutes to drive there. The weather has been beautiful this week, from +8 to -5 degrees Celsius, usually cooling off at night.

To the left are some tracks by a wild hare. In the picture below you can see the cross-country ski tracks.

I also want you all to welcome the newest member of our family:

Frøya!

She was born in late September and is now five months old!

We apologize for keeping her a secret, but we wanted to make sure she was healthy and would be a permanent part of our family. We are so happy to have been blessed by her and are having so much fun with her.

Pretty soon we can take her to go get spayed. Yes, Frøya is...a little girl cat. :-D

Here are some pictures from when she was little until now.

She has grown quite a bit since we got her, and now eats about three bowls of food everyday!

She gets along well with our other cat, Jackson, who is about three years old. They like to fight and play together, and take naps on their sheepskins on chairs next to one another.

Spring is on its way! (I hope.)

2011-03-03T23:25:00.004+01:00

Wow! It's been almost a entire year since I updated! I really didn't think it had been that long, which goes to show how quickly time flies (whether you're having fun, or just working really, really hard).

The reason for my blog post is that this week I have vinterferie, winter vacation, usually the next to last, or last week, of February. This year winter vacation occurs a bit later than usual because Påske, Easter, is later than usual. Anyhow, it was indeed time for a vacation! I am very fortunate as a teacher to have extra vacations, but I do feel that I have earned them. The time between December and March seems to drag on, with the grey weather, the negative degrees (in Celsius), dry skin, and general lack of joy and moisture in the air.

February does tend to perk up winter for me though, due to its many significant dates. The first is when my husband and I met for the first time (Feb. 3rd, or the first weekend in February--we haven't quite figured out how to count this date yet), with it being 2007, four years ago!

The next highlight date in February is Valentines Day, which tends to sneak up on us. This year I introduced Platonic love in the workplace to my co-workers through Red Velvet cupcakes decorated with creamcheese frosting, pink and white heart sprinkles and silver balls, along with handmade (i.e. computer designed and printed) Valentines. Quote from my co-worker: "So, you'll be working here a long time, right?" Hopefully "baking skills" on my CV will be considered with my academic qualifications...

Valentine's Day isn't very big here in Norway, although it is gaining more and more commercial publicity. However, since Christmas wasn't so long ago, and our birthdays are at the end of February, my husband and I got each other small gifts and kept it real.

On February 27th I turned 28 years old, and the day after my husband turned 24. We had a lovely birthday celebration at his parents' house with bløtkake and lapper! Bløtkake means "wet cake" literally translated, which is because it has lots of whipped cream, and sometimes has different kinds of jam or fruit between the layers of cake and cream. It is also called marsipankake if it has a layer of marzipan on top, but usually the contents of the cake are the same. Lapper are like small pancakes, usually made with kulturmelk, buttermilk. I will try to put up some recipes or links soon.

On the weekend of my birthday I went to a swing dance workshop in Oslo, called Winter Jump. http://www.winterjump.com I have been an avid swing dancer since I was about 14 years old, growing up in San Diego, which has a very active swing dance community. I used to dance about three times a week, up to five times a week during the summertime! My swing dancing has been severely limited since moving to Hallingdal! So I try to take opportunities like workshops and festivals to keep my swing dancing somewhat at the same level (å holde det ved like), if not improving. The workshops were very good; I took a Balboa class with instructors Dan Guest and Gemma Barson from England. They were very down to earth and taught a natural, logical approach to dancing Balboa. Their main points were to keep it relaxed, don't force the dance, and try to make it feel nice, because if it feels nice, it will look nice as well. At least that's what I got out of it. I thought it really helped because frankly prior to the workshop, I never got the idea that Bal was a relaxed dance! I have mostly seen it danced to faster tempos, which I suppose only actually works well if you are relaxed. It's akin to trying to play a really fast scale/run on violin--it doesn't work if you freeze up and have a lot of tension. But if you have practiced it slowly and relaxed, and worked up to the faster tempos, then it will work just as well if you are relaxed at a faster tempo.

So, apart from anniversaries and birthdays and swing dancing, I have been working my tail to the bone. There was a fire at my workplace in January, so that has affected the semester to a huge extent. I started teaching a new class of students who are beginners in Norwegian, so their introduction to the language has been influenced by the words "fire, fire extinguisher, fire blanket, water, burn, burning, burned, the school is closed, the school is partially open again" and other such phrases that normally don't enter the curriculum of Beginning Norwegian for Immigrants in the first semester! They have been real troopers through it all. We have switched rooms at least 5 times. It has been a very frustrating semester for everyone, with other conflicts at the school between certain students and leadership as well, so the faculty is happy to now move on and get on with educating.

I recognize that I am still a very new teacher and am trying my best. I seem to be one of the three teachers at the school who work fairly late, but at least I know I am earning my pay. This interview with a professor who chronicled his workweek seemed very relevant to me: http://www.philnel.com/2011/02/26/busytown8/. I think I might do the same thing.

I have gotten the impression from many people that they think teachers don't have much work to do. I can see how they might think that, but I believe that it depends on the individual teacher and their priorities. If someone enjoys skiing and the weather is nice, then he/she will probably do his/her work faster in order to go enjoy the weather instead of being cooped up in the office (if that is allowed), or perhaps do the work at home later in the evening after he/she gets back from skiing.

Anyhow, I am very happy to be teaching Norwegian. It helps me improve my own Norwegian every day, and I find that I am able to help challenge my co-workers with questions regarding grammar, which (my argument) helps them to prepare for challenging questions from their students. In return I try to help answer my colleagues' questions about computers and English. I also really like the contact with other non-Norwegians, and being able to help them with their transition to living in Norway.

Teaching fiddle is also going well. My students who started last year are now learning Ringnesen, a well-known Norwegian schottis/reinlender. They thought it sounded very difficult when they began learning it, and now they think it is getting easier and easier. The goal is for them to play at the "Bygdemønstring" on Saturday, May 28, during Den Norske Folkemusikkveka, which is a folk music festival in Ål in late May. The kids are practicing quite a bit and I am so proud of them.

Mark your calendar! http://www.folkemusikkveka.no.

playing gigs

2010-04-25T00:11:00.003+02:00

Spelejobber--gigs

I've been up to quite a few lately. On March 27th I played with Per Olav Noss on his CD release concert at Ål Kulturhus, which was about a half hour long concert with live versions of songs from his album. He sings a genre he calls "Hallingpop", because it is pop music in Halling dialect, and has some folk music elements like fiddle and vocal tralling, and also uses some traditional Norwegian folk melodies. It is really fun to get to experiment a bit and try using folk music in a non-traditional setting.

I played for the Torpo dance on April 11th, which is mostly hallingspringar but some gammeldans as well.

Today I played in Buskerudkappleiken, which was held in Hønefoss this year. The location was a very nice cultural center. I competed in Hardingfele klasse B. There were four fiddlers who competed in that class, and I got 3rd of 4, with 93 points. I am a bit irritated with that result, but that's how it goes. I thought I played extremely well and felt very good about it myself, and got lots of compliments and positive feedback afterward.

Tomorrow I will be playing hardingfele, violin and viola in church at Ål Kyrkje, for a folk music service. They are very popular and many more poeple come to those services compared to "normal" church service. Jo Asgeir Lie has set folk melodies to liturgy which works very nicely.

On May 7 I will be playing with Per Olav for the opening of Flå Kjøpesenter, which is a new shopping center in Flå, the town that is "nederst" in Hallingdal... Directly translated, "nederst" means downward, but in this case it actually means east, i.e. toward Oslo.

I will also play quite a bit during the Norwegian folk music week, Den Norske Folkemusikkveka, in the last week of May. I will play with Hallingdal Låtelag for the concert on Friday at 3 pm to honor Kristian Øvrevollseie, a fiddler who would turn 100 years old this year, and then afterward I will go play with Per Olav Noss for an outdoor concert in Ål.

Then I will play for the springar dance class on Saturday at 10 am, most likely I will play on the Bygdemønstring concert, and possibly compete in a fiddle competition called Fanitullentevlinga.

Then it's Landskappleik time in June and I will probably play for that as well in Klasse B, but still have to register (by May 15).

It's good to play a lot, but it can be exhausting on top of a full time job.

In addition, we are going to buy a house and move in July!!! Super exciting!

Traditional Norwegian Wedding in Hallingdal, Norway pictures from weddings photos on webshots

2010-03-09T23:54:00.000+01:00

Traditional Norwegian Wedding in Hallingdal, Norway pictures from weddings photos on webshots

Here are photos from our wedding in June 2008.

Looking forward to spring!

2010-03-03T20:40:00.003+01:00

Lately the weather here in Torpo has been warming up and the snow is starting to melt a tiny bit. The sunlight is changing a lot day by day as well--during the darkest time of the winter, there was sunlight between about 9:30 am and 3 pm. Now there is sunlight between 7 am and maybe 5 pm. It is great! Mind you there is still quite a bit of snow so I still have time to get in my first ski trip of the winter! There are only 3 weeks left until Easter, so my goal is to gå på ski i Påske! However, I have had some pain in my right knee so I hope that will go away soon.

It was my birthday last Saturday, so I went to a lindy hop workshop in Oslo last week during my winter vacation. The workshop was very fun and educational, but I now understand that I used muscles that I haven't used in a long time. My knee hurt a little bit before the workshop, but it turned out to be fine during the classes, but now it hurts when I stand or walk. I am not sure whether to go to the doctor or not because a) it might just go away, b) the doctor might not necessarily be able to help me, or c) the doctor might just say to wait for it to go away. I went to the doctor before because my knee was always cracking (as knuckles do), but he didn't help me and said it would be fine and that was normal. Apparently it may not be that fine...

I've been learning to identify animal tracks, and have been informed that driving into an elg (a moose) is extremely dangerous, because the antlers can crash into your windshield. Therefore if you see an elg and can't stop in time to avoid hitting it, you are supposed to aim for the elg's derriere!

As I have been driving along Rv7 (Riksvei 7, the main road in Hallingdal), I have been watching for breaks in the snow along the road where moose have crossed the road. You can tell how fresh the tracks are by how crisp the tracks look, or whether more snow has fallen on old tracks. That way you might be able to tell where moose will probably cross the road, and you can drive more slowly. They mostly come out into the road in the early morning and night, at sunrise and sunset. The roads here are salted (to get rid of the snow/ice on them) and the moose like the salt so they come to lick the salt off the road, as well as to find food lower down in the valley where there is less snow than there is up in the mountains.

There are rådyr who live in the forest around our house, and we see them every now and then. Their tracks are pretty easy to identify--kind of small with little cloven hoof-prints. Sometimes we see our cat's tracks far away from our house and wonder what he does during the day while we are gone...

I just started watching the new season of "Farmen", which is a reality TV show about a group of 14 people who live on a farm. The location varies every year, and this year it is on Trane øy (island), nearby Fosen in Trøndelag (nearest big city is Trondheim). It is on the coast of Norway and they have to learn how to fix fish nets (å bøte gåd'n, in Hallingdal dialect), repair boats, take care of the animals, and other various farm tasks. They also had to make 6 oars. The show host interviews local farmers/fishermen from the same area and learn how to do the techniques.

Norway covered the Olympics with most focus on the games that Norway competed in, of course. I didn't really get to watch much, as it aired during the middle of the night. Norway is also getting a lot of publicity about the earthquake in Chile.

It was nice to have winter vacation--a little break not too long after Christmas, but before Easter. I can get used to this! My teaching jobs are going well and I have plenty to do. My class at the Adult Learning Center in Gol is doing very well, as are my fiddle students at Ål Kulturskole. I am proud of all of them and proud of myself that I can manage to teach them Norwegian--although it is really their responsibility to learn the material since I can't learn it for them. I have enough to learn on my own!

Christmas preparations

2009-12-17T22:53:00.002+01:00

Hey folks, lately the entirety of Norway is preparing for Christmas.

Everyone washes their floors, the windows, bakes lots of cookies and cakes and flatbread and all sorts of good things to eat. Except they make all sorts of weird things too, like rotten fish in various forms (rakfisk, lutefisk, sild). There are more good things though, like homemade bread, ribs (ribbe), medisterpølser and medisterkaker (sausage and meatballs made of pork meat), and ribberull (made from ribs I guess, but rolled with spices like cloves), smoked salmon, and other stuff to put on bread.

So far I made gingerbread that are super duper yummy and the cookie tin is now almost empty. I gave a bunch to my fiddle students at our end-of-the-year party and then somehow the rest of them keep disappearing day after day...

I also made flatbread dough on Tuesday for our Basken end-of-the-year party on Wednesday. We have a Christmas tradition of baking flatbread with the kids and it was really fun this year. They were very good at it and their parents or grandparents came along as well and helped out.
They did all the rolling-out of the dough and the other teacher and I baked them on several "takker" which are big electric griddles for which you can adjust the heat. It is pretty cool. Also, you use a flat wooden stick to turn the flatbreads (or whatever you are making, like lefse or rømmebrød, or lapper).

I am hoping to make some more cookies but I think I will have to wait until vacation. My husband and I are definitely looking forward to Christmas vacation. First he will be selling Christmas trees this weekend and hopefully bringing one back for us as well.

I will be having a end of the year party at work with the students and teachers on Monday. My class will be reading a story about "julereier" that happened in Torpo. Julereier are magical beings that come to visit around Christmas and can either be nice or mean. If you are nice to them, sometimes they will help you like making sure you always have milk or plentiful with firewood. But if you scorn them or offend them then they will be mean to you, like taking your food or making sure you never have milk, or all your firewood may disappear. But the most dangerous part about julereier is that they can fly through the air and they can take humans into the mountains with them to work for them.

In Norway it is also popular to have julekalender, which you look at every day as a way of counting down until Christmas eve. There are also "adventkalender" that are usually the same as in the States, like a cardboard thing that has chocolate in little boxes. Also, Norwegians light 4 purple candles every Sunday counting down to Advent.

I hope you all are having a good time preparing for Christmas, however you do it!
Merry Christmas!

link to Gol Vaksenopplæring

2009-10-07T22:57:00.001+02:00

For those of you who can read Norwegian, here is a link to the Kommune website for Gol Vaksenopplæring:
http://www.gol.kommune.no/Tjenester/Skole-og-opplaring/Gol-vaksenopplaring/

Another long hard day at work

2009-10-07T22:43:00.002+02:00

Hello there.

Wednesdays are the longest day of the week. For me, not only do I work the most amount of hours, but it also means that you have worked two full days, and still have to work two more. However, at least it means that the weekend is coming.

On Wednesdays I teach a group at Gol Vaksenopplæring for which another teacher is the primary teacher. That is to say that I teach that group only on Wednesdays. I teach "my" class three times a week, Monday, Tuesday and Friday. There are no language education classes on Thursdays, so that is my time to plan and do correcting, etc. So far I like teaching a lot. At this moment I am exhausted so I don't think I will go into a lengthy discussion about why I like teaching, because I will end up sounding like my students...simple sentence structure and limited vocabulary...with probably a fair amount of misspelling. So that will have to wait until another day with more sleep in the sleep bank.

After working from 0830 to 1400 at Gol Vaksenopplæring, I usually drive home and eat a quick something or other (not lunch, not dinner...) and then drive to Ål Kulturhus to teach two fiddle lessons, 45 minutes each, and then Basken, a children's cultural group, which also lasts 45 minutes.

At school today I spent all day talking about inverted sentence structure. In Norwegian when you start a sentence with a time adverbial (I have no idea if that's the correct word in English), you have to use the verb afterward, and then the subject. So it ends up sounding a little bit Yoda-esque if you use the same structure...Now go I to school. Wednesdays long days are.

So my head is a little mixed up at the moment...

Therefore think I it best that I go to bed now. Tomorrow talk I more about teaching Norwegian classes.

God natt alle sammen!

2009-10-05T21:05:00.002+02:00

There is a fire in the wood-burning oven and we had fårikål for dinner. Høst has officially arrived.

However, it snowed yesterday for the first time this year, so maybe that means it's winter. I finally pulled out my new winter jacket (Merrell, a good brand) that is toasty warm. After buying a couple cheap jackets the past few years, I decided to go for a more expensive jacket now that I have better wages as a teacher. Don't get me wrong--I'm not going on shopping sprees, but I have decided that it is often better to spend more the first time around for an item of quality, instead of buying many cheap things that just disintegrate after a short amount of time.

The snow stuck until today, so we will see whether it melts tomorrow or not. There isn't much left but it still counts. I don't know how many days in a row it takes for it to be counted as winter. Many people think that it is early for snow to arrive, but many other people remember that it has snowed as early as October 3rd in previous years. My husband's eldest brother was born on October 3rd on a year when it snowed, so his parents remember it very well.

It's really nice to have a wood-burning oven to heat the house. The heat is much more long-lasting than the heat from electricity or oil-heaters. It is lovely also to have the smell and the sound of fire crackling. Most people here assume that I dislike winter because I am from such a warm climate, but in fact I really enjoy winter. I am not a huge fan of all the downsides of winter, but I love the upsides: going skiing is actually really fun once you've figured out how to coordinate the motion of both the left and the right leg at the same time, combined with balancing and not racing down the hill, plummeting to your icy snowy death. The first few times were not very much fun, and involved many childish tears and sore bottoms. Well, just one bottom really. That being mine.

Last winter I realized that I needed to go skiing alone a few times to get my skills in place before going skiing with anyone else. I always felt too self-concious to really enjoy myself so I got nervous, which ruins your balance and coordination because stress locks up your muscles. So after a few trips alone with no one to witness my falls and sweat and tears, I improved my caliber of skiing enough to go skiing with other people. I am looking forward to being more social this winter.

Last year I also rode my Snowracer nearly everyday to the barnehage. Luckily it is downhill and not far away, so I had a whirlwind ride to start off my day--very invigorating!!! I highly recommend it for those who have a hard time getting started in the morning. I started looking forward to leaving the house in my snowsuit, clad with woolen undies underneath from top to toe, as they say in Norwegian (fra topp til tå!).

There is something magical about a snowsuit. I am not someone who enjoys getting dirty, sweaty, unnecessarily wet or damp. When you have a snowsuit on, you can play heartily in the snow and are assured that no snow is getting in down the back of your trousers or in under your shirt/jacket. There is no seam that snow can sneak up into! The only exception is possibly inside the cuffs if you are not careful to tuck in your mittens into the cuffs of the snowsuit. All fastidious children in the barnehage insist on "brett over!" which means fold over, in particular either the cuffs of the snowsuit over the mittens, or the legs of the snowsuit over their winter boots.

Another genius detail of the snowsuit (at least the children's version) is a "strikk", a rubber band that stretches under the boot to keep the pant leg down and therefore prevent snow from sneaking into the pant leg. Amazing. I don't understand why the adult snowsuits don't have this feature, but some of the snow pants have a strikk.

Soon it will be Christmas! Marzipan pigs are already flooding into the stores, ready for Norwegians to feast upon. Many Norwegians dislike that Christmas is becoming so commercial and creeping into the stores earlier and earlier. However, there must be a double standard because a woman who works in the candy factory that makes marzipan pigs stated on the radio today that they sell 40% of their pigs in October and November, so there must be some Norwegians that appreciate the early onslaught of pig sweets in the stores.

I am looking forward to pinnekjøtt, dried and salted lamb meat, for Christmas dinner. It is served with kålrabistappe, which is in fact rutebega mash, combined with a little carrot and potato for good texture and taste. Norwegians eat pinnekjøtt only during Christmas. Some people also eat the notorious lutefisk. Many of the older generations enjoy lutefisk, but not many of the younger generations.

There will be a Julemarked in Flå at the Bear park /bjørneparken November 20 and 21st, to which I have been invited to sell things. I will be selling my knitted wares and handmade jewelry. So whenever I am not at work, you can usually find me knitting at home while watching TV, or making jewelry and listening to the radio. Since I had a few days off during fall vacation, I knit like a madwomen and now have extreme pain in my hands, so I must sign off for now and put knitting on pause.

Best wishes for a lovely fall! (and a good start on winter!)

A June wedding in Norway

2009-10-02T01:39:00.003+02:00

Some other news:
Although we got married in August 2008, we decided to wait with the party and wedding ceremony in a church until we were ready and our guests had enough notice to book international plane tickets and such. So we had our wedding in June 2009.

It was a very special occasion and my husband and I agree that it was the happiest day of our lives. I enjoyed the church ceremony the most. We had the ceremony in the stav church in Torpo that was built in 1130. We had both hardanger fiddle music played by my fiddle teacher Øyvind Brabandt, local singing by Margit Myhr (a young local aspiring singer/dancer/musician/actress), accordion playing by Jo Asgeir Lie and Ingunn Stræte Lie, and an incredibly touching song sung in French by my friend Sarah Nagell, who was my roommate in Rauland. We asked our sisters to read the Bible verses, and our "forlovere" Birgitte and Gunnar helped in the ceremony as well.

I loved dressing up and having my hair done and carrying the bridal bouquet and doing all the fun things that the bride gets to do. I had a crown to "top it off" and it felt like everyone treated me like royalty. I definitely recommend that any girl wear a crown if she gets the chance.

My current image is of me on my wedding day, June 20, 2009.
I will post more pictures later.

Now: sleep is calling.

News update from Storedal

2009-10-02T01:24:00.002+02:00

Hi,
I happened upon the blog that my friend from high school writes about her experience in Senegal as a Peace Corps member. It gave me a bad conscience that I haven't updated very often, so here's my attempt at getting back on the horse.

The problem is that when life gets interesting, it often gets busy and then leaves me little time to share it with others because I am busy living it...so that is my excuse.

My husband and I have been eagerly reading the house ads and are trying to buy a house in the near future. We have been through two bidding rounds. We were afraid that the first house would end up being too expensive because it needed a lot of restoration as did the private road to the house. We were outbid so we decided that the outbidders could deal with the work that needed to be done and we would look elsewhere. In retrospect, it was a wonderful property with a lot of potential if one was willing to work for it. However, I am glad that we let it go because it could have quickly eaten up all our free time and money with building projects and restorations.

More recently we bid on another small farm with a much higher asking price. We bid under the asking price, and were turned down. We raised our bid a bit but decided that it got too expensive. Someone else came and outbid us, so we again decided to let be. The price, although reasonable for everything on the property, was just on the edge of being painful for us. The property had two houses which really raised the price a lot, and also would have been a lot of upkeep to take care of two houses. There was a considerable amount of land to rent out, as well as the extra house to rent out, but then we would have been dependant on renters to help pay our mortgage.

In the end, even though it was an amazing place as well, I think it was the right decision to let this one go as well. The job market is not supreme right now, but there will be others. We may not get exactly what we are looking for, but we have a decent house to rent now and are happy with the location, so we are at least not out in the cold.

New JOB!
I have started a new job at Gol Vaksenopplæring, which is Adult Education in Gol. It is part of a Læringssenter in Hallingdal, which means learning center. It is an umbrella term that houses both language education, the equivalent of a GED, and other voluntary courses that adults can take, like hobbies or computers, etc. I work as a Norweigan teacher to immigrants who live in Gol, Nes, Hemsedal, and Flå. There is a separate Vaksenopplæring in Ål, which may also have students who live in Hol kommune. (Those are the six kommuner in Hallingdal, by the way. ) Kommune is like a county but smaller in area than counties are in the States.

I have students from many different countries: Gambia, China, Thailand, Congo, Iraq, Kurdistan, Somalia, Poland. There are also students in other classes from other parts of the world...Russia, Germany, Scotland, USA, Ukraine.

It is very interesting work and I learn much about other places and customs in the world as much as my own and those in Norway. I am happy to teach the things I have learned during my four years in Norway. This is the beginning of my fifth year in Norway now.

Time flies when you're having fun.

2009 news

2009-05-05T20:14:00.002+02:00

Hi everyone,

We finally got our internet connection fixed, so now I can update my blog and check email like a normal technology-addicted person again.

A side note, blog in English is blog, blog in Norwegian is blogg. Same pronunciation.

News: I have been working 80% in Torpo barnehage and that has been going very well. I know the kids fairly well now. But alas, I am going to get a new job! That is both good and yet bittersweet. I am excited about the new job but it will be sad to stop working at the Barnehage. It is a great place with great staff, kids and parents.

My new job will be teaching Norwegian at Gol Vaksenopplæring, which is Adult Learning in Gol.
I will talk to my new boss tomorrow so I will find out more details about it after our meeting. At any rate, I am offered a full-time (100%) position, which is great! I am excited about being able to help other newcomers to Norway learn Norwegian, which can be a tricky language to learn what with all the dialects and two written languages.

Ola Magne and I have been looking at various houses to buy lately. We are tired of renting and are interested in buying a småbruk, a small farm with possibility for some "hobby animals." We checked out one house in Oppheim, but it was very small, not such a great location, and needed a lot of fixing-up, so we weren't enthralled with it. Then we checked out a house in Gol in an area called Åsgardane. It's a beautiful place, so we put in a bid on it on Saturday! Very exciting. It is our first bid, so we will have to wait and see what happens. It is a tvangssalg, which means foreclosure or basically when the bank is forced to sell a house that someone couldn't pay for, due to bankruptcy for example. Therefore this type of sale can take a while because the bank and government have to decide together whether they will accept the bid.

The house and buildings on the property will take some fixing-up, not to mention the overgrowth of grass and other plant life in the surrounding area. However, we think it will become a labour of love if we get to buy it. Here's hoping!

This doesn't rule out a potential move to USA, but we are, for the time being, very satisfied with living in Hallingdal together, and since we are both going to work in Gol starting in the fall, it would be very practical for us to move to Gol.

Other than that, we are doing well in Storedal. We got a new rabbit, a big French Lop, who we thought was NOT pregnant, but in fact WAS pregnant. One day in the barn we suddenly discovered eight small fuzzy rabbit beings who we estimate were about three weeks old! This meant too many mouths to feed, so our former two rabbits have now become food. That's what happens when the head of the house is a butcher.

However, the upside is that we have 8 small fuzzy cute bunnies running around! Yay! We will try to give some away so they don't all end up as food. We have to figure out what gender the rabbits are soon so they don't end up coupling with their brothers and sisters (gross). The two rabbits we had before were offspring of a sibling pair, so we didn't want to help that lineage go any further. Therefore it was better to turn them into food than risk having them couple up later in life.

The reality of living on a farm includes slaughter, and although Ola Magne is very good at that and does it in a humane way, I don't want to be a part of it. I visited my friend instead on that day so I wasn't around. But I want to try rabbit ragu sometime. Well, "want" may be a strong word. I guess "willing to try" is more accurate.

News!

2008-10-03T23:42:00.003+02:00

Hi!
Sorry that I haven't updated in a long time. Life just gets busier and busier.

The biggest news: Ola Magne and I got married on August 22nd here in Hallingdal! We had a civil wedding at the Hallingdal Tingrett (courthouse), which took all of five minutes. The only other people in attendance were the judge and our two witnesses , or the equivalent of a best man and maid of honor (forlovere). Afterward, we walked outside and discovered balloons tied to my car, and the entire barnehage standing there waiting for us! All the staff and children from the preschool were there, even the people who had the day off! It was so cool that they came considering it's 45 minutes away from the preschool itself and they had to rent a large taxi-bus to transport all the kids. Apparently they had practiced singing and throwing confetti before they left, but when we walked out they just stood there speechless and stared at us! Eventually they got into the swing of things but I think they were somehow confused that they actually had permission to throw things at us when we were dressed so nicely.

We both wore bunader for the wedding. Ola Magne had borrowed his grandfather's bunad, which amazingly enough fit him, and I wore mine that I bought in May, with a shirt borrowed from my "forlover"/maid of honor's mother. Her mother died recently and it was amazingly that she loaned me her mother's beautiful hand-embroidered shirt. It is a very special shirt and it was nice to have the memory of her mother with me on my wedding day, because she was very nice to me when I first came to Hallingdal. I lived with them for two weeks and she was really helpful. She was also going to help me make a new shirt and fix some small things on my bunad when we got back from the States. She was a wonderful person, very smart and particularly good at handicrafts. She died very tragically in a tractor accident at home on their farm, which happened while we were away in the States in July. We heard about it when Ola Magne's father called us. It was all over Norwegian news.

I finished my Masters degree in June successfully! Hurrah! My written thesis and presentation went well, despite my trials and tribulations with my laptop. I presented verbally in Norwegian and also played hardingfele in my presentation, showing the differences in the Hallingdal and Valdres styles of "springar" (a dance type). I am proud of my project and very glad to be finished. I however am not excited about being finished with being a student. I would very much like to go on learning and learning, which I plan to do whether or not I am actually enrolled in a "school". I think everyone can learn something everyday.

I have been learning a lot at the preschool actually. I have now increased my position to 80%, i.e. 4 days a week, which is much more exhausting as I have longer days plus one more day than I had during the past year. However, I learn something new everyday, or notice something about the children that helps me and gives me greater experience for the days to come, whether those will be spent working in a preschool, school, or eventually taking care of my own children someday. However, working with 36 preschoolers is a very good method of prevention and I don't think children outside of the working arena are in my near future.

I have also started co-teaching a children's cultural group for ages 4-8 in Ål, called Basken. Eilif Gundersen is the other teacher. He has led the group for many years now, and it is great that he has so much experience. He is great with the children and has many fun activities planned for the year. So far we have taught them some Hallingdal songs and sangdanser and sangleiker, i..e songs with dances. I also came up with a "Basken bok" (book) that they can draw or glue things in every week at the end of our time together. We meet once a week for 45 minutes. It can be kind of hectic after a full day in the preschool, but that's how it goes. It is fun though and goes by very quickly, which is a good sign. We have 12-13 kids enrolled this year.

Other than work in the preschool and Basken, I am playing hardingfele a little bit here and there. I taught beginning hardingfele at HFAA in July in Wisconsin, which was really enjoyable. I had mostly adult students, which was quite a change from working in a preschool, but I applied some of the same techniques and it worked beautifully. :-) I got good feedback from my students as well, which bodes well. I gave a mini-concert in Rauland in August, and also picked up a kitten from my friends at Moslid farm! He is black and white, and his name is Jackson. I didn't name him, but I liked the name enough so it stuck. He is a bit more rambunctious than I thought he'd be, so he's been a handful to take care of. We've had to teach him to not jump on the sofa, tables, window sills, not to eat the plants, etc. Other than that he's a good cat, doesn't bit or scratch unless severely provoked, and is very clean. He's outdoors for the most part while we're at work. And we just got him neutered, so too bad for him but yay for not contributing to the world of stray cats. He mostly sticks around the farm here and doesn't venture too far, except for twice when I was going to walk to work and he followed me. After much spraying with water and shouting, I think he has gotten the point, but I'm still not sure whether I've been lucky that he's been distracted or not seen me when I've left the house the past few times, or that he really understands he can't follow me. We'll see how it goes next week.

So, life in a nutshell:
Got married, finished masters degree in hardingfele, working more in the preschool in Torpo, leading a children's cultural group called Basken, got a cat!
I hope all is well with my readers!

Hard at work

2008-04-17T18:25:00.004+02:00

Hallo!
I have been hard at work on my Masters Thesis recently. Don't expect very many blog updates until after June, when I will be (*crosses fingers*) entirely finished. My written Thesis is due May 16, 4 pm. Eek! One month left! I still have to do the musical analysis part, which is a major part of the thesis. I am analyzing 5 tunes, with two variations of each tune, so essentially that is 10 tunes. I have to do (at the very least) form analysis, bowstroke, doublestop, and ornamentation analysis. That means four things for each of the 10 tunes, i.e. analyzing 40 different ways. Wish me luck! Then it will be off to write up my findings in some sort of understandable manner so it's not jibberish. I hope it makes some sense by the very end!

A recent crisis occurred when my laptop would no longer turn on. I had to send it in to be repaired, which will take about two weeks. In the meantime, I am using our "upstairs" computer, which Ola Magne got from his great-aunt and uncle over a year ago. But the computer itself is ancient, but fortunately is in working order. They also gave him a printer, and I finally got that up and working just last night. It was really frustrating, because it had been put in a box on its side, with ink cartridges in it, which led to leaking all over. Cleaning it up was a very messy process. Luckily it works!! We had to buy a new mouse because the old one did not work well, so after a couple investments, the computer is working well.

It's so frustrating to have computers set you back when I finally have the motivation (read: time pressure) to get really working on my project!

I was in Rauland last Weds. and Thurs. to meet with my advisors. They think I've done good work so far, but just need to get the musical analysis finished and then put it all together in a logical format.

I am hoping to go to Valdres possibly next week to do some more research and music-gathering in the archives at the Valdres Folkemuseum with Elizabeth Kværne, as well as interview some local spelemenn (fiddlers).

In some exciting news, Ola Magne and I have decided to have our wedding next summer!!

Christmas Celebrations in Norway

2007-12-24T13:59:00.000+01:00

Merry Christmas to all!!

It's high time I updated this blog to let you all know what's been going on! In October I went to Riga with the staff of the kindergarten for a business trip. It was very educational and interesting. We took a tour of a kindergarten (barnehage) in Riga (picture to left), which was possibly the complete opposite of our barnehage in Torpo, both tangibly and dogmatically. The building itself was huge, although they only had 20 students at the time we visited. They had special teachers for art, dance, music, and other teachers for each class, and nannies to watch while the kids took a 3 hour nap in the middle of the day. They had a cafeteria with cooks to make full meals. Their class schedule was divided into rigid 10 or 20 minute segments. It was very impressive!

Our barnehage in Torpo is very small (they plan to build on as soon as the community budget has money for it), our barenhage has no classes, all the staff does pretty much all the same things (although we have our own small specialities and foci), and there is no time schedule whatsoever. Ours is a rather "free" type of barnehage, based on play as a learning tool, and the child can more or less decide what they want to do during the day. Interesting concept, although I'm not sure whether I agree entirely. However, the kids seem to have a good time, and I try to teach them on a more individual basis whenever the opportunity arises; since there are no scheduled periods of learning, every minute counts as a new opportunity!

In November, my hardanger fiddle teacher, Øyvind Brabandt, invited me to play a solo concert at Hagaled Gjestegård in Nesbyen. I played fiddle and talked about my progression on hardanger fiddle since I began playing at 14 years old until now. The audience was small, but very interested and received me warmly. That same day my friend Kari arrived, a friend who was a fellow Norwegian major at St. Olaf College. Here she is at the Gol Stav Church (stavkyrkje). She stayed at our house for 4 days and it was very koselig!

After Kari left us, Ola Magne and I went to Oslo for the Oslo Kappleik on Sat. Nov. 17. I played a hallingspringar and a laus, competing in the category Hardingfele klasse B, and I got 3rd place! I can't find results online for this year, but here are some pictures from last year's kappleik: http://www.folkedans.com/stemne_meir/oslokappleiken2006.htm

On Sunday, we met up with my friend Rachel in Oslo, another friend from St. Olaf who played viola in the Orchestra together with me. She came back with us to Hallingdal and spent 3 days. Unfortunately I got very sick and lost my voice! I couldn't tell her as much as I wanted to about Hallingdal, but she had a good time here anyway.

Since the first of December, the barnehage has been preparing for Christmas, with a Christmas workshop where the children made presents for their parents, wrapping the packages, Christmas gatherings every day, going to visit the Julenisse (like Santa Clause, but more of a farm elf version) who incidentally wasn't at home unfortunately, eating nissegrøt (rice porridge), making pepperkaker (gingerbread cookies), eating pepperkaker, and reading beloved childrens' Christmas books.

On Friday, Ola Magne went into the forest and chopped down our Christmas tree! (picture at top) He saw three moose while he was there. Usually Norwegians get their tree and decorate on Dec. 23rd, no sooner, but I explained that anytime after Dec. 1st is fair game in USA for putting up the tree, so we compromised, even though he thought it was entirely too early to decorate the tree.

Now we are going to eat risengrynsgraut/nissegrøt (rice porridge) and find out who gets the mandel (almond)! Whoever finds it gets a marsipan gris (marzipan pig) afterward. I don't really like marzipan so it's okay if Ola Magne gets the almond. :-) Tonight Ola Magne and I are going to his parents' house for dinner to celebrate Christmas with his 3 siblings. They will have pinnekjøtt for dinner, which is salted and smoked lamb meat, steamed using birch twigs in a big kettle. His great-grandparents (father's side) will come afterward for kaffi og kaku (coffee and cookies/cake). Afterward we will open the presents, which I'm really looking forward to!! I have gotten several big packages mailed from the States, and I can't wait to find out what's in them!

I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

In Norwegian, God Jul og Godt Nytt År!

Trip to the States, 2007, Report #1

2007-09-23T18:57:00.000+02:00

First, to announce happy news, my boyfriend and I got engaged on August 5th, 2007!

We traveled to the States this summer for three weeks in July, with an ambitious travel plan ranging from Washington, DC, Minneapolis/St. Paul, San Diego, Dodgeville and Mt. Horeb, WI. We first visited my father and my aunt Sheila, where they showed us around like proper tourists in Wash. DC. We saw the Air and Space museum (right), the Native American museum, American History Museum, and the Holocaust Museum. We tried to go to the FBI Building but it was closed.

We also went to the outdoor Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall, which was exceedingly hot (it was at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit, plus the insane East Coast humidity that Norwegians cannot fathom), but at least it was interesting. I saw the crest of my "relatives" from Northern Ireland on a stone, and played a bad fiddle that some guy from Northern Virginia had for an exhibit of Northern Virginian folk music, and had a good view of the Capitol building as well.

We visited some nearby areas, including Olney, Maryland, where we stayed with one of my aunts and her daughter. Another one of my aunts visited us while we were in Olney, which was very nice of her to come so we could meet again. We also ate dinner at a community dinner at Liberty Village in Union Bridge, a community housing area in Maryland.

After our three days in Washington, DC, we traveled to Minneapolis and St. Paul, where we stayed with my second cousin, Wayne.

Sadly, at this point Ola Magne came down with mononucleosis! Somehow he must have contracted the sickness while in Norway, because the incubation period is 4-6 weeks, and then manifested the incredibly painful symptoms while in the humid city of Washington, DC. In addition to dealing with jet lag, foreign mannerisms and language, a lethal virus overtook Ola Magne's throat and immune system and attempted to bring him down. Our worst point of the trip came early on, when we traveled then to Minnesota and realized on our flight as Ola's throat swelled up more and more that it wasn't just a normal cold. When we arrived in Minneapolis, we were even more devastated to find our lack of baggage. We rented a car and drove to my cousin's house, who was a saint and drove us directly to a clinic where Ola paid an arm and a leg to be seen without American health insurance, and then got prescriptions for three hefty medications, which he bought in exchange for the other arm and leg.

More to come later!

(See, our trip was so long that it must be divided up into many blog entries. Anyway, no one in this day and age has much of an attention span anymore either.)

2007-07-06T10:43:00.000+02:00

Oh yeah, and in May I moved into a great house with my boyfriend. I don't live at Vesledal anymore. I live at Storedal. This house is great, absolutely perfect. Yes, you'll get pictures sometime.

Homeward Bound!

2007-07-06T10:38:00.000+02:00

List of things that aren't really that important to do before leaving the country but you're going to do anyway:
Update your blog.

I'm heading back to the homeland! I leave tomorrow with my boyfriend/sambuar for Washington, DC, Minneapolis, MN, San Diego, CA, San Francisco, CA, Dodgeville and Mt. Horeb, WI, and DC again before returning to Oslo and home sweet Torpo. I'm exhausted already just thinking about it. Wish us luck! (Lykke til!) Looking forward to seeing all you good friends and family!

Note: By the way, I competed in Landskappleik for the first time on June 27th and got 21st place out of 27 in Hardingfele Class B. Not last place! Hurrah!

pictures from Vesledal

2007-04-19T13:52:00.000+02:00

Here are a few pictures from Vesledal, my residence since October.

This picture, Tonje with her horse, was obviously taken during winter (note the snow). The horse doesn't exactly have a name. Actually, I think he does have a proper name, but she just calls him Rampegutten and other such names (approx. trans.: crazy boy). There is also another horse who lives at Vesledal (the farm) and is rented by a couple neighbor girls who are learning to ride.

Here is another picture of the horse when we were out riding in the wagon one day in the last month. Much nicer weather now, although it's harder on the horses to walk on asphalt than on snow. At least now they don't get snow stuck in their hooves...

Tonje, a girl who is very fond of animals, also has a dog and a cat. The dog's name is Røya. Røya is extremely overeager and will lick you all day long if you let her. She is also especially fond of licking the cat. The cat is not quite as fond of this event, but she usually tolerates it.

The cat is adorable and likes to cuddle. She is quite a cool cat. We usually call the cat something like Pus, Pusekatt, Kattepus, Gærning, Rampekatt, osv. I particularly like to call her Crazy. Tonje bought both the cat and dog around the same time, about four years ago, so they have pretty much "grown up together" and are like mother and daughter in some ways. Especially when the dog cleans the cat.

Back in Rauland!

2007-04-19T12:53:00.000+02:00

Whenever real life gets busy, I tend to stop blogging. This usually means that lots of exciting stuff has been going on, but until my life slows down again, you lovely readers don't get to hear about the exciting parts. Granted, my life is always busy (I like it that way), but for the time being, it's a teensy bit more relaxed. Hence--a new blog post!

Right now I'm in Rauland for a MA student samling (gathering/seminar). There have been lectures, discussions, and lots of helpful tips for the first-year MA students who are turning in their 2nd version of their project prospecti. However, it turns out there wasn't so much for the 2nd year MA students, apart from a few lectures. It's good to be here in Rauland again anyway, just to get some feeling that there really is a student milieu to which I belong, and to get some inspiration for my project. It is always nice to see friends that I met last year, and to see their latest "products," such as this adorable little being...

There are usually some concerts and social events at these MA student gatherings. The night before last night, there was a concert by a student named Christian, who took traditional "stev" (short tunes usually with four verses or fewer) and arranged them to be sung together with guitar arrangements. He played and sang and was quite good, as well as funny! There was a particularly humorous song where he put together three different stev, one about ein gammel gubbe (an old man), ei kjerring (an old woman), and ein unge (a child) that supposedly characterized a Norwegian family.

It is actually quite amusing that I post here about Christian: I met him at Vinterkappleik in January and discovered that he has been a fervant reader of my blog since last year. When he considered applying to go to school in Rauland last year, he came across my blog while on a quest for information about Rauland and the school. Fortunately he found it very useful! I'm not sure whether or not my experiences are representative of the average student at Rauland, considering I had many language challenges and my perspective as an American could be rather different from a Norwegian's. At any rate, I hope that my blog has been, and can be, helpful to others in the future.

Last night there was a concert by Svein on guitar and Sindre on fiddle (previously featured in earlier blog entries). Svein comes from the Lofoten Islands and usually plays electric guitar in a heavy metal style. He decided to hold a concert with Sindre on hardingfele as part of their folkemusikk studies. Unfortunately, yesterday afternoon, he broke an essential part of his guitar and couldn't play any of their planned repertoire. They chose to go through with the concert anyway, although Svein had to use an acoustic 12 string guitar. He was still extremely talented (dyktig). Sindre played a couple tunes from his region of Sunnmøre, springar #33 and laus #9 of 6 different hallings, mysteriously numbered from 9-11a and 11b. He also played a telespringar from Bø in Telemark, and a couple Setesdalgangar as well.

Yesterday I met with my two advisors, Per Åsmund Omholt, and Leiv Solberg. I got a lot of good feedback and criticism from them about my project. I originally intended to finish my MA degree project by June 2007, but I decided in the last couple weeks, and finally yesterday, that it will be better for me and the project itself to use another year on my project and finish in June 2008. This will also help me get permission to live here another year, since it's easier to renew existing permits than to get new ones, like a residence permit based on work.

Before this entry gets too long, I'll just state the obvious: I am having a great time in Norway (particularly in Hallingdal, after having met my adorable boyfriend and his wonderful family) and intend to stay here next year...if not for the rest of my life. ;-) However, my boyfriend is as enchanted with America as I am with Norway, so we'll see whether he ends up staying there after our trip to the States this July! I think I prefer scenes such as these.>>> (Bergsjøfjellet)

I hope everyone is doing well! I will try to update my blog more often in the future and tell you about my Easter vacation with Ola Magne and his family, and also about my summer job! <:-)

2007-02-19T16:08:00.000+01:00

Also, in other good news, I have several gigs coming up:
-playing hardingfele for the Ål Eldrelaget årsmøte (annual meeting) on Wednesday morning
-playing viola with the Gol Kulturskole for a performance in March
-I will be interviewed on the radio by Folkemusikktimen (Folk music radio program) in March as part of a series of interviews with foreign students who study Norwegian folk music.

Plus, soon there will be Kongsberg Marknad at the beginning of March, and Buskerud kappleik in April!

Bygdefest

2007-02-19T15:35:00.000+01:00

About two weeks ago I went to a party here in the bygde in an area called Opheim. Bygde approximately translates to "local village, countryside, small town, the sticks, the boonies, the outback"...something to that effect, but not quite as white-trash, just very quaint. The point is that the bygde is small and everyone knows everyone else and everything about them and their family and perhaps everyone they've ever met. Opheim is technically a short distance away from my house as the crow flies, but to get there one must drive down the mountain from my house, Vesledal, then drive up again through the mountains 3 km to Opheim.

My house and Opheim are both located within the small town of Torpo, in the county of Ål, whose town center is about 12 km away. Torpo doesn't have much of a town center to speak of, just a grocery store and a dance hall/community center of sorts. Gol is the other "big" town nearby , also about 12 km from Torpo. Anyhow, everyone at the party was from either Opheim or Torpo and knew everyone else. The point of these parties, as I see it, is to see old friends and get drunk and have a good time. Getting drunk usually helps along the having-a-good-time. My roommate knew some people at the party and thereby introduced me. It's nice to get to know the people in this area, after having lived here ca. 6 months and no real social network. I met a local guy who runs a catering service, where I might be able to work on weekends sometime in the future. Unfortunately there was no live music, as the scheduled accordianist got sick and cancelled. No one asked me to bring my fiddle, so we were stuck listening to CDs, but no matter--involve enough alcohol and any party is a hit. (Right...or not.) But the most important part of the evening was that I met a boy.

(dramatic pause)

This particular young man is from Opheim and works in Gol at the slaughterhouse for Gilde, a national meat production company. As a former vegetarian for 8 years, I never would have thought that someone who cuts up various animals for a living would appeal to me, but his profession turns out not to be so much of a hindrance as I thought it would be. He is actually an apprentice for the company and works under a master for one more year, after which he can get a permanent position. He was first going to go to school to be a cook, but decided the hours as a chef are not so appealing. I myself considering cooking school, so this was definitely a point of interest for me.

This weekend, on Sunday afternoon, we went for a ride in the tractor (my first ever!) to rescue a guy from Oslo who'd driven off the road into a ditch and couldn't get his Jeep out. Fortunately for him, my new boy came to the rescue with all his tractor-driving skills at the ready. Afterward, we drove around Opheimsåsen, an area farther up in the mountains, and he showed me the three summer farms that his father uses to feed the sheep in the summer. (His father has a farm in Opheim and owns a lot of sheep.) There are also a lot of hytter (cottages) in that area as well and everyone was out on skies to enjoy the new 15 cm of snow that fell on Saturday. The sun shone upon the new snow and glistened off the dark green trees while the powerful machine chugged along and we enjoyed the view and our newfound twitterpation. I met his whole family this weekend, who are very enjoyable people and not at all scary like I thought they would be. The boy himself is cute, witty, charming, smart, gentlemanly, etc. etc. etc. Without writing too much more lovesick commentary, I'll just say that things are going quite well with us and his company is of the most highly enjoyable sort!

recent accomplishments and kitty cat friends

2007-01-08T04:48:00.000+01:00

The mittens I knitted for a friend in Chicago, her extremely fluffy cat Steve, and wonderfully soft cat Kevin:

2007-01-05T00:28:00.000+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ico17iG0dFc
Earl "Snake-Hips" Tucker, excerpt from "Crazy House" 1930

I attended the Rhythmic Arts Festival in San Diego over New Year's Eve weekend and took a workshop in "Snake-Hips". We did the combination that is the first part of this video, and it was amazingly painful the first time and nowhere near as impressive-looking as Earl Tucker.

Back at the ranch...in Torpo...

2006-11-14T15:41:00.000+01:00

I had a great time in Oslo visiting fiddlers. I learned about four new Hallingspringar tunes and a a Valdresspringar as well, which I still have to practice to really get the hang of them. Osafestival in Voss was a lot of fun, seeing old friends from Rauland and making new acquaintances as well. I learned three new Vestland tunes there during a workshop, but the most fun was just sitting in on jams with a lot of really good musicians. Eventually you learn the tune after several repetitions, even if you didn't know it when you sat down! I went to a lot of great concerts, one of the best being a "bestillingsverk", i.e. a composition someone requested him to compose (what's that called in English?), by Gabriel Fliflet (sic). Majorstuen was great as always, although Andreas broke his bow when he threw it in the air to do a trick and didn't manage to catch it again. I met his kjæreste, Tone, who is really sweet and sassy at the same time, and plays a mean flat fiddle.

Now I've been back in Torpo, very nearly literally "at the ranch." The place to where I moved is a småbruk, a small farm--not a full-fledged farm. Tonje, my housemate, has two horses, a dog and a cat. There were also two sheep and a goat, but she got rid of them because it was too much work to take care of all the different animals. It's been nice to settle in there. The house is very old and thus very cold, but with enough wood in the two ovens, it can be quite cosy. The wood is free, but a lot of it is still in big planks. Thus, Tonje, a neighbor named Kari, and I got together to chop some wood like the tough, mountaineering ladies we are. The first day I wasn't very much help, only held the flashlight while Kari used the motorsaw and Tonje held the wood on the horsebench-thingie. (whatsit called??) Then we ran out of bensin (gasoline). A couple days later, Tonje bought more bensin, and the day after I took the gas and oil up to Kari's house. We filled the saw with more gas and oil and worked for about a half an hour, when the saw basically stopped working. Turned out that we had used the wrong type of gasoline, so now the saw has to be repaired before we cut anymore wood. We have enough for a while at least... (crosses fingers).

On Sunday I went horseback riding with Tonje! It was a bit scary, but she rode in front and the horse I rode was very accustomed to following other horses in a long line, so he behaved himself just fine. I had been riding once when I was about 8 years old at a dude ranch in Denver, CO, but this was completely different...riding in the steep mountains of Norway covered in green trees and fresh white snow, instead of dusty, brown, dirt-covered mountains of Colorado. However, we stuck to mostly flat paths, so it wasn't dangerous or difficult to steer the horse.

Today I am in Ål sentrum, otherwise known to the locals as Sundre. This afternoon I played some minuets with Olav Luksengård Mjelva, a very flink young man who plays hardingfele, flat fiddle, viola and guitar (not limited to only those four instruments). He has project going with a friend regarding some baroque minuets written by a Norwegian musician, Erik Haugen, who lived and played music in the area of Røros for the rich folk who lived there. Olav Mjelva is from Røros but also has roots in Ål, where he now lives part-time meanwhile he commutes to diverse playing jobs around the country. It is very refreshing to get together with someone on the same musical level to sightread duets! He has also been teaching me a few hallingspringars.

Now I am going with a friend to Nesbyen for her to look at a kattepuss! I hope I won't be tempted to get one myself...

ch-ch-ch-changes

2006-10-24T13:05:00.000+02:00

Last Thursday I moved from Votndalen to Torpo, a different area in Ål. I moved because I was lonely living by myself, and now I will be living in my friend Tonje's house. Living with a roommate helps save money by sharing expenses, namely heating--which costs quite a lot in Hallingdal since the valley is so cold. Torpo has much more convenient local bus routes and routes to Oslo as well. There is a kitty, a doggy, two sheep and two horses on Tonje's mini-farm. The house is cosy, where I can keep warm, practice fiddle, analyze music and write my thesis.

On Friday my new housemate, Tonje, and I drove to Olso to attend the Oslo kappleik on Saturday. I competed and felt pretty good about my playing. I got 4th place out of 5 fiddlers in my division, so at least I didn't get last place. The evening dance was very fun and featured a group called the Øvrevoll Spelemannslag who dressed up like jockeys and played a rollicking good CD release concert. Afterward there were many fiddlers who played for dancing throughout the night. We left rather early (midnight) because we got a free ride back to the apt., but later heard that people were still playing and dancing until around 5 am.

I am having fun staying with my American friend in Oslo, who I know from the HFAA in the USA. But lest you think my life is all fun and games, I'll have you know that I am doing serious research on my project here in Oslo. On Sunday I played with a lady from Hallingdal, today I am playing with and interviewing a man from Hallingdal, and tomorrow I am playing with and interviewing a man from Valdres. Okay, I guess that is all actually fun too. :) On Thursday I will continue my research, heading to Voss to attend Osafestivalen and to play with Arne Anderdal (who I visited last year and mentioned in my blog then). On Monday I will head back to Hallingdal to work on analyzing this music I am recording/collecting, and also to get settled in my new setting. I will continue to gather recordings of the tunes I'm analyzing, hopefully including some old recordings of fiddlers from Hallingdal that are on tapes in the archives in Ål. Soon it will be Christmas, and I need to get some serious work done before then!!!

If you want to send me letters at my new address, I would be most appreciative!
my name
Vesledal
3579 Torpo
Norway

Coming full scope since arriving here a year ago...

2006-09-10T22:54:00.000+02:00

One of the first things upon my arrival in Telemark was to go to Dyrsku'n, a country fair in September located in Seljord, Telemark. Last year I went with Sarah, my roommate at the time, the two of us with fresh eyes looking upon the Norwegians' idea of a country fair...

The Norwegian farmers huddle over tractors, mincing about in regnbukser, dark green, black and brown mountaineering pants, shopping for fjellsko (boots), wool sweaters, socks, undershirts, and any other article of clothing you can imagine. The hordes of men, women and children alike swarm around stands selling spikjemat, while the sellers throw their voices upon the crowds, lawding the various types of sausages made of cows, bigs, elk, moose, all with various flavorings. The farming families, peppered with an amusing dollop of city folk from Oslo and Vestlandet, roamed around the fairgrounds in a delightfully lazy way--relaxed yet with proper posture, with no schedule other than to cast their their eyes upon the husflidutstilling (handicraft exhibition) with norsk designer textiles and knives with stunningly carved handles, and to cast their money on unending rows of salebooths. At times you run into familiar folk, acquaintances you haven't seen for months, or perhaps that strange man you met at a folk music festival last summer and hadn't particularly hoped to ever see again, or beloved friends with whom you rejoice together over the coincidental meeting.

It was the same this year.

The Norwegian country fair is not that different from an American fair, including the opportunity to witness both folk music icons and livestock in action. I traveled to Dyrsku'n this year with Tonje, a friend who lives in Torpo (within Ål kommune). She really likes animals and was thus much more concerned with the horses being shown than with hearing Knut Buen and Torgeir Straand play hardingfele and tell stories about folkmusikk, with which I was quite concerned. In both American and Norway, the country fair experience is rather dually pleasing and excruciating, in that "I'm eating way too much fried food for my own good, my back is stiff from tusling (ambling) at .01 mph for 8 hours, my eyes are stinging from staring into the sun while watching horses and cattle 9 times my weight amid an audience of whom 50% care, and I have no more money in my wallet although there are 12 more things I want to buy without which I've managed to live my entire life" kind of way.

After Dyrsku'n ended on Saturday, we went to a dance featuring live music of Sven Nyhus qvartett and Vestlandets Fanden [the dance deserves its own post, including a post about folkemusikk in general, both bygdedans and gammaldans]. Then, it being 1 am and us not fancying setting up a tent outside amidst the drunken revelry, we ended up driving an hour west to Rauland and stayed with some of my friends there. They coincidentally had a birthday party there, so we went to bed about 3:30 am, managing to fit in some felespel by Sindre, Satoko and myself. Tonje and I left Rauland about noon, drove all day to get back home, but stopped along the way at the house/farm of the people from whom she bought her horse. Inger, the woman there, was veldig koselig and showed us all her sweet horses who were out in the pasture/forest. When Tonje told her that I was American and that I play fiddle, Inger told me her onkel (uncle) was a rather famous fiddler--Steingrim Haukjem, fra Veggli i Numedal--and that she had his old fiddle, if I wanted to see it. Did I??? Of course I did!!!

It is an Erik. J. Helland fele, from 1859. 2006-1959= 147 years old.
The last time it was played was about 2 years ago, when her son was studying hardingfele.
The understrings were still in tune.
I played about 5 tunes on it, a couple hallingspringar, a Valdresspringar, and a few Telemark tunes. The men, her husband and their nephew, were surprised to come in from their last day of taking in the hay for the summer (slåtten, i.e. the cut) to hear felemusikk in their living room! We were invited to stay for coffee and dessert. Det var berre utrolig koselig. After that, we continued the lovely drive home with gorgeous views of changing leaves, beautiful golden, autumnal deep reds, and darkening browns and greens of the trees, interspersed with sparkling blue lakes and shimmering silver rivers.

*That* is stas. (stas=seldom, fun, very special)

photos of new house!

2006-08-16T02:10:00.000+02:00

Hugs!!

Ny adresse!

Send meg masse post!!

*remember! new address! write me lots of letters!*

new address!

2006-08-12T00:00:00.000+02:00

I just moved to Hallingdal!!
new address is:

My Name
Votndalen
3570 Ål
Norway

same mobil phone number...if you have it and want to use it.

a view of the kitchen...

and a view from inside the house looking out...

more description later...

Hej frå Stockholm!

2006-07-23T02:24:00.000+02:00

Hej alle! I'm in Stockholm, Sweden! I've been traveling for about a week and a half with my sister. We took a train from Oslo to Stockholm, which was a bit of an ordeal because instead of being a simple overnight, non-stop train between the departure and destination locations, it became a complicated train with a stop in Göteborg around 2 am, after which we switched trains around 5 am, then finally got to Stockholm, exhausted, at about 10 am.

On our first night in Stockholm we stayed in a hostel called City Backpackers, which was decent and therefore we are now there again for these 2 nights. We left Stockholm last week for Herräng, a town about an hour and a half away (i.e. if one were to drive directly from point A to point B, although of course that would be too simple...). Herräng is known worldwide as an international destination to learn lindy hop, the swing dance form of the 1930s and '40s. Anyhow, we got there and despite it not living up to our very high expectations, it was still a fun week of excellent dance classes, live bands, great djs, good dancers, and guaranteed crowded dance floors until the wee hours of the morning. Frankie Manning, inventor of airstes, was there along with Chazz Young, Skip Cunningham and Dawn Hampton, who are all great dancers and performers.

Pictures and more description will be posted once my travels come to a halt! (...as if that will be anytime soon!) ;-) I leave Stockholm on Monday on a train back to Oslo, where I will stay for a couple days with friends, maybe even meeting up with my former Norwegian house roommate from St. Olaf College!! Then I will travel to Valdres again for Jörn Hilme stemnet, yet another folk music festival and competition. Finally I will return to Hallingdal and try to find a place to live for the next year. Huffa meg, so much to do! Wish me god tur!

One Heckuva (an?) Update!

2006-06-22T03:05:00.000+02:00

Hello! Life is going well for me, and in a hectic fashion. Lately, I've been cramming in traveling and music into my life as much as possible, a trend which will continue for at least the next 38 days. At a later date, I will add pictures to illustrate each of these places/adventures.

EXTREME VOSS
Quite a while back, in April, I traveled to Voss to see a spelemann (fiddler) named Arne Anderdal. He is from Hallingdal, where I will be moving and the music of which I will be studying for my Masters Project/Degree. I returned to Rauland filled with eleven hallingspringars and much musical happiness. Hurrah!

OSLO
In May, I met up with Jenn Turbes in Oslo for Syttende Mai (the 17th of May), i.e. Norway's National Constitution Day. The weather was very nice for my first day in Oslo, but dreary and rainy for 17. mai. We stayed with my friend Thomas Halvorsen, who also went to St. Olaf College, and saw the huge parade that takes over the town. During the following days we shopped and saw various touristy sights around Oslo: a picturesque and rainy Vigelandsparken, and a contemporary art museum displaying a sweet Norwegian fashion designer who studied in Paris. However, my favorite was the Oslo Folk Museum where my friend Elise works, and where I managed to set off an alarm because I looked too closely at a hardanger fiddle on exhibit. (Go figure.)

DOKKA
Jenn and I then traveled to a smaller town in Oppland called Dokka, where Jenn has a 93 year-old relative, who still lives on a farm by herself with very little outside help. It was really great to meet this strong old lady, Lovisa, and also the amusing taxi driver who drove us the 13 km from the town center. All the experience in translating between all these people and Jenn was admittedly a bit tiring, but very good experience in retrospect, since I wouldn't ordinarily have met these people. An all-around enjoyable experience! (four stars...)

ÅL
From Dokka, Jenn and I traveled to Ål, a town in Hallingdal where Den Norske Folkemusikkveka took place. That means The Norwegian Folk Music Week. Yes, "the" with a capital T--very modest, these people. It was a great festival with lots of concerts (I went to 14!!) by deservedly famous folk musicians and a competition. Yes, I competed, nope, I didn't win and didn't really have a chance, but it was good experience and introduced me to the folk music community a little bit as somebody who is at least willing to put her balls to the wall...so to speak. We stayed for the first few days at my friend Birgitte's house, which is really called "Gammelstugu," an old building on their farm homestead which is really cool, decorated with rosemaling and everything. Lots of my friends from Rauland came to the festival as well, so we all stayed in hyttes (rustic cottages) during the festival and that was fun. Jenn left for Scotland after the festival, and I stayed on a few more days with Birgitte while she and looked for houses. I am going to move to Ål, potentially sharing a house with either Birgitte and/or a girl from school named Live. (Lee-vah) I really like the town--there is a great cultural center, two organic food stores and one fabulous yarn shop! (hee hee...) Yeah...I think I can get along pretty well there. :)

STAVANGER
After hanging out in Rauland for a while longer, doing Raulandian things, I went to Stavanger to visit Rachel Nesvig! I met back up with Jenn Turbes here, who had briefly gone to Scotland. Unfortunately I only had 2 days, but managed to see the lovely city in beautiful weather. I will definitely be going back! It was super fun to hang out with Rachel and meet her friends in her dorm and from her school. I also managed to twist my foot rather badly. :(

KRISTIANSAND
After Stavanger, I took the bus further along the Southern coastline to Kristiansand. It was a long bus ride, but with gorgeous weather there are always breathtaking views in Norway so the time goes by quickly. My foot continued to hurt but I was a trooper. I spent two days with some fellow Fulbright friends, whose sons are very musical. The 9 year-old son plays violin and has been studying hardanger fiddle a tiny bit this year, so I taught him half a fiddle tune on hardanger fiddle. The six year-old is adorable and plays piano remarkably well. Because they are both so young and impressionable, they've picked up Norwegian like sponges and even have the most adorable little Kristiansand dialects. :) Awww...hopefully their dad will get a job in Trondheim for next year so they can stay in Norway, like me!

RAULAND/HAUKELI
I took the bus up from Kristiansand through Setesdal, back to Rauland. I got my foot fixed up by the local physiotherapist, who used some kind of laser therapy. (?) Anyway, it feels much better now. After a week or so back home, our local fidders' group, Falkeriset Spelemannslag, was called upon to play for dancing at a music festival at Haukeli seter. A seter is a flat place where animals can graze during the summertime, but this place in particular is a passing-through point for many buses that travel between Western and Eastern Norway. At first we begrudgingly went along to play with the lag, but soon found out it was an awesome music festival with more musicians than general public. This audience definitely influenced the feel of the festival, because (sad but true) it gave musicians the opportunity to be more musical. The weather was perfect and it was gorgeous all around. Proof lies in the pictures:

I met some great fiddlers from Shetland, and many other amazing and well-known musicians from Norway. Great contacts for the future!! I loved it so much that I went back for the 2nd day, as did my friend Satoko. Fortunately we both got in for free because we played the night before, and we even found room to sleep on our friends' floor for free, so we stayed overnight.

BERGEN
After the weekend at Haukeli I went back home to Rauland, where I've been packing up all my stuff and cleaning in preparation for traveling and moving out. I will be going to Bergen tomorrow to give a concert on Friday with Sarah Nagell and two boys from my school (Sindre and Jamie). You can find more information on my website, http://www.freewebs.com/rlofft/music.htm. I am really excited! My Mom and Grandma are actually here in Norway, coming to visit me, so I will meet up with them in Bergen so they will see the concert! Then we are all returning to Rauland, where Sarah and I will give a concert at a American-Norwegian immigrant museum on Sunday, performing pieces that came to the States, where we learned them, and then found out that they are also still played in Norway.

THE FUTURE...
Then comes Landskappleik at Beitostølen, Valdres: the much-awaited, the annual folk music competition/festival of all Norwegian folk music festivals/competitions, where all my friends will be, as well as my Mom and Grandma. I will have to part with Sarah here, for she will soon after return to the States. After LK is a short trip through Hallingdal with my family to see our relatives on the Norwegian side and also to find me a place to live. My sister will meet up with us there. Then we take a return trip to Bergen to see a concert with Kirsten Bråten Berg (amazing singer who performed at Ål), from where my Mom and Grandma will leave Norway and head home, but my sister and I will head back to Rauland to take more of my stuff to Ål. Then we will go to Oslo for a couple days, and finally go to Stockholm and a week-long lindy hop camp at Herrang, Sweden! My sister will leave from Stockholm, but I, because I just won't have attended quite enough music festivals by that time, will return to Valdres for Jørn Hilme stemnet, another folk music and dance festival/competition. Finally I will go to Ål and attempt to move in and establish a normal life, including job and hours of daily musical analysis for my Masters Project.

Uff da. Pardon the novella!

I created a Slide Show! Check it out!

2006-06-15T22:20:00.000+02:00

Hei fra Voss!

2006-05-03T16:25:00.000+02:00

Hei alle! Det går bra her i Voss. I am in Voss studying with a fiddler named Arne Anderdal, as I mentioned in my last post. I got here Sunday night and have so far learned four new Hallingspringar, reviewed four old ones, and learned a Valdresspringar from Håkon Åsheim at the Ole Bull Akademi. I am using the student computers at the Akademi in the basement.

Yesterday I read a little bit of a book called Det Tilla og Det Læt, by Paul Breiehagen, which will be very useful for my Masters project comparing Hallingspringar and Valdresspringar. I read only the first chapter, which was about fele-makers, both the ones of fiddles used by fiddlers in Hallingdal, and the fiddle-makers from Hallingdal. I also looked a bit at the Valdres Bygdebok bind 6, where I read about some fiddlers from Valdres. That book is really cool because it tells stories about each fiddler and paints a small portrait of each. I think these will be of very much use to me!

Today I got a chance to walk around Voss for a bit and visited some stores. Time for middag!
Ha det bra!

sweet sweet music

2006-04-29T04:45:00.000+02:00

I just came home from another nachspiel, this time at the house of Juss, an Estonian bagpipe player and fellow master student. Andal came as well, the bubbly 3rd American girl (the other one besides me and my roommate), and Ingolf, a fellow master student who teaches dance classes, does metal working, and embroidery. We all played a little bit on various instruments (fiddle, guitar, munnharpe, Estonian pipes, seljefløyte and various other flutes), but we mostly talked together and had a very koselig time. I found out much information from Juss and Ingolf about how to make a munnharpe (mouth harp), and also how to catch bears, crocodiles and polar bears using tweezers, a boring book, a small jar with a very tight lid, and pulling-inside-out techniques.

The masters students were here this week particularly because the second Masters' students seminar was Tuesday--Thursday, when we each presented our project plan and received feedback and criticism from the professors and other students. It was very helpful for me to present my plan to others and get some comments and new ideas. Plus, I was really happy to see the other students again, since I last saw them in February, but actually it was December since I saw Juss. He and his samboer Janne had a baby, who they named Mattis (spelling?) and both mother and baby are doing well back in Estonia. Janne visited Juss in Rauland last semester. During that time, Sarah and I got to know them pretty well, mainly because they speak English and no Norwegian, and it seemed very natural that we fellow foreign students get to know one another since we have an equal lack of understanding. :-) I was really happy to see Juss' photographs of Janne and the baby, which are beautiful. The baby was born February 23rd, only 4 days away from my birthday! I was definitely thinking of them around my birthday time and wondering if the baby had come yet.

Tomorrow Sarah and I will probably get together with Juss and play with him again. He taught us a few tunes last night, continuing in the tradition from last semester, when he and Janne taught us several songs. It's really great to play those songs again with Juss. He is an excellent musician, one of those people naturally drawn to music and pretty much manages any instrument you throw at him. His master's project will be to make Estonian mouthharps using Norwegian techniques, because they are the only two kinds of mouthharps in the world that use wedge techniques. There are only 3 remaining Estonian mouthharps of this kind, which are from approximately the 14th century, broken, and unplayable. Juss plans to remake the harps by studying under a Norwegian mouthharp maker (incidentally, the best maker in the country). I am excited to see and hear the results!

On Sunday I will go to Voss to visit Arne Anderdal, a fiddler who teaches at Ole Bull Akademi. He is from Hallingdal, the area from where my Norwegian relatives originate and the area whose music I am going to study for my Master's project. I am really excited to learn some Hallingspringar tunes from him and to find out his opinions and thoughts on my project. I will also take recordings of him (if he says it's okay) for my project. I am studying the detailed differences between Hallingspringar and Valdresspringar, a subject that could potentially cause a bit of a row in those valleys, depending on what I say and how I present it. I am very excited to finally begin my project! I will probably spend a few days in Voss and also play with Leif Rygg, one of the most famous and greatest spelemenn from the western coast of Norway (namely in Voss).

Next Thursday my friend Rachel Nesvig is coming to visit me here in Rauland! She is American as well, a student from St. Olaf College studying abroad for the semester in Stavanger! She plays hardingfele as well, but primarily classical violin. In Stavanager she is studying those two musical styles, as well as jazz improvisation. The first Thursday night of every month is Folkmusikk Pub night in Rauland, so I am super stoked for her to experience it. I missed the last one as well, due to my US trip, so I'm excited to get back. This weekend all the undergraduate students at Rauland HiT are doing their semesteroppgave (semester/year assignment), which is either a 25 page paper or an intense practical assignment (example: a sculpture for a student in woodworking), so next week will be the party/celebration week once they've turned in their assignment. Yay! I am also excited because I have my violin back here with me and it is so nice to play it again!! I never used to think that I'd want to play violin again, but the truth is that it's so much easier than viola!! Viola is so heavy and hard to make a sound, although it's definitely worth it when you do. I have been practicing all day today and I think the violin will begin to sound quite good after a while of playing on it. At the moment it sounds very closed off from lack of playing, but I think it will open up. It's fun to have a new instrument and to think that, now, I really do play three instruments! :-) Have a great weekend everyone!

Website Launch!

2006-04-21T02:03:00.000+02:00

Announcing the launch of my new website!

Find Your Knitche!
now available at http://www.freewebs.com/rlofft

Please keep checking the website as I will continue to update it and post new pictures and information. I hope to eventually obtain a more catchy domain name, create a "Purchase" form, and accept credit cards. I'd appreciate your comments and feedback for any ideas you might have for improvement!
Please spread the word! Thanks for looking!

good news!!!

2006-04-17T14:39:00.000+02:00

I have fantastic news! I received the Lakselaget Scholarship for $1000 to continue my Masters studies next year at Høgskolen i Telemark!

I am still looking for other ways to fund my next year, as I will no longer have the Fulbright. Yes, one can reapply, but in my opinion I don't think it's very polite to do so the following year, on that whole "let someone else have a chance" principle. If any of you come across any other grants or scholarships that may apply to me, please do let me know!! Takk!

These are pictures of the Høgskolen i Telemark at Rauland in the winter! This is where we wait for the bus, and you can see the signs for the Akademi/HiT.

videos and pictures

2006-04-16T18:13:00.000+02:00

Due to privacy concerns and consideration of others, I have reconsidered publicly posting all my pictures and videos online. My apologies if you came to this post hoping to find them. If you strongly desire to view said pictures and videos, please email me directly and I can send you a personal invitation. I will not grant wishes to anyone who does not already have my email address. Thank you for understanding.

downhill skiing in Rauland

2006-04-16T00:50:00.000+02:00

I thought I'd post a few pictures from going skiing in Rauland since I mentioned it in my penultimate post, although I don't mean to confuse you in the story timeline of my trip to London and the States. This was the 3nd time I'd been downhill skiing. My last time skiing during the Fulbright ski trip weekend in February at Gausdal was very positive. However, my first time downhill skiing was a very frightening, although amusing, occurence at Lutsen in Minnesota involving unintentionlly running into a patch of black diamond slopes and, much to my humiliation, being forced to slide down the slope on my rump. With my recent success at Gausdal, this time I was determined to stay attached to my skis with minimal falling. Admittedly, my first few times down the hills were terrifying. At the top of each run, I considered with great foreboding that I very well might never play fiddle again, were I to break a wrist or somehow injure my spinal cord. eek!

Fortunately my fearless friend, Sindre (above), was with me to reassure me, risk his wrists in kind, and blatantly peer-pressure me into actually going through with it, arguing that I'd already rented the ski equipment (for much too much money). Eventually I improved my technique so that stopping and slowing down became easier for me, thus minimizing my fear factor of falling face first into the snow in front of a beautiful Norwegian ski god instructor named Thor. The last couple runs were quite alright and even bordered upon fun. :) It was a beautiful day! Rauland is famous for its skiing, so come and visit me while there's still snow! That means you have at least one more month, but hurry because it's starting to melt!!!

home again, home again, jiggity-jig

2006-04-16T00:02:00.000+02:00

Greetings! I realize I've been rather delinquint in updating my blog lately, particularly considering everything that has happened in the last month! I have had many adventures, but it would be to overload you dear readers were I to spill everything at one time. :) Instead, I shall let it seep out bit by bit, along with some photographic evidence. I hope to eventually post most or all of my pictures onto another, more photo-friendly, website, and also some videos of myself and others playing fiddle or doing other folksy type activities.

When I left you last, I was sitting in Torp airport, a couple hours outside of Oslo, waiting to board a plane to London. I had just purchased 2 bottles of Gammal Dansk and Akevitt from Duty Free for 170 kroner (a steal compared to Norwegian alcohol prices) and was rather excited to bring them home to show to my friends and family. After my flight arrived safely in London, I managed to successfully fill out a Customs Entry card, requiring me to put down the Duty-Free bag containing the bottles and my trusty mittens. I walked away in a post-travel daze, unaware that I left my Duty-Free bag behind until I had already passed through customs, in search of my luggage. By the time I returned, the bag was gone. This was a great travesty, and I would now like everyone to take a moment of silence in honor of the lost alcohol.

...

Thank you.

Moving on, I arrived safely in London and took the Stansted Express train into central London, where I stayed overnight in the Generator Hostel. http://www.generatorhostels.com It was a rather large hostel, with as many as 800 beds! It is nearby the Russell Square and Kings Cross tube stations, a decent and not too shady-looking part of London. I managed to find the hostel location with the help of a couple maps and lo and behold, there was a clean, well laid-out and reasonably cheap hostel waiting for me. I had booked a bed in a 12-person dorm room online the night before and was very eager to see if the reservation had actually gone through. It turned out that it had, but for some reason the 12-person rooms were full, so they upgraded me to an 8-person room (just fine by me). Yes, these were mixed gender rooms, although female-only rooms were available for a higher price. It turned out that there was only one guy when I came in, who was already asleep.

But before heading to bed early, I visited the Generator Bar for a quick lookaround. In addition to the Generator's custom drinks available for notoriously cheap prices, the Generator offers TVs and games. Some people were playing an interesting game that looked similar to pool, but used only yellow and blue balls. I first assumed it was some type of cheap pool set that was on sale due to its missing ball colors, but I later discovered that this game is snooker. Those of you interested in the differences of snooker and pool, consult this simple explanation given here: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/cue_sports/57948

Only one other person came into the room during the night, possibly around 3 am, but left again around 8 am! Odd...but definitely not so odd compared to other people I've witnessed in London hostels. The next morning I got ready in peace and managed to meet the guy who'd thankfully been asleep the night before until I was fully dressed, a fellow from Denver area. He and I chatted a bit, both glad to see a fellow American. We ate breakfast together (provided gratis at the hostel) and discussed plans for the day, traveling, Norway, and numerous other interesting subjects.

I planted my luggage in the hostel luggage room and went out to explore the city. A Thursday afternoon, I decided to take in whatever promising matinee was playing: The Cut, with Sir Ian McKellan (Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, Magneto in X-Men...etc.). It was an excellent show at the Donmar Warehouse, a very intimate theatre that fit the show and cast perfectly. http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/ I eventually picked up my luggage from the hostel and attended a swing dance that evening, which marked the start of the London Lindy Exchange, an event which I must explain in greater detail. The LLX certainly warrants its own post with numerous pictures! Cheers until next time!

ah, boredom and lack of sleep

2006-03-08T15:30:00.000+01:00

I am sitting in Sandefjord Lufthavn Torp, the airport that may have the most unnecessarily longest name in the world. My flight has been delayed approximately twice, the first for an hour and the second time for about 20 inutes, saying it is expected to arrive at 4 pm. During this extra time I managed to buy a pølse, 2 comic books (Nemi and Asterix, both på norsk), a 50 cl bottle each of Taffell akevitt and Gammel Dansk, and to lose my scarf and find it again. I also discovered the wireless internet works here, and have been checking out places to stay in Valdres for Landskappleik.

Since I can never sleep before a big trip, I am extremely tired today after only about 3 hours sleep. However, I think I managed to pack really well for this trip, which was a challenge. I am going to London today for 6 days for the London Lindy Exchange, until Tuesday. After that, I will go visit my 3 best college friends in Chicago. I'm also going to take a weekend driving trip from Chicago to St. Olaf College to pester people there, as well as to help teach hardingfele at a workshop (lagspel) and perform on International Night. I am really excited to go back! I didn't think I would be so eager to return, but I miss the people there a lot.

Then I am spending two weeks in San Diego, and finally heading home in reverse order of my travels with a tiny stop in DC. It will be a lot of arduous travel, but I think it will be worth it. Ok, I think it's getting about time to board. Ha det bra! Eg skal skrive igjen da eg kome til London eller USA. I can't wait to play fiddle for people and show everyone what I've learned!
Oh, also I had a great birthday party last Saturday night at Låven, and went downhill skiing on Monday. I only fell 3 times and the hills were much bigger than those I skiied at Gausdal a couple weekends ago. Hurrahurrahurra! Man, am I sore now though...

Gratulerer med dagen...til meg!!

2006-02-28T02:58:00.000+01:00

Did you know that the Norwegian birthday song is actually in telespringar rhythm? Initially a telespringar, it was eventually converted over to a standard even 3-beat waltz. Olav Sem, a well-known kvedar (folk singer), performed it this weekend at the Kongsberg kappleik, which I attended. The lyrics go a little something like this:

Bursdagssangen:
Hurra for deg som fyller ditt år,
ja deg vil vi gratulere.
Alle i ring omkring deg vi står,
og se nå vi vil marsjere.
Bukke, nikke, neie, snu oss omkring,
danse for deg med hopp og sprett og spring.
Ønske deg av hjertet alle gode ting
og si meg så hva vil du mere?
Gratulere!

It's actually a really difficult song to sing, which says something about the Norwegian culture. Most people here like to sing the American birthday song nowadays, but I wouldn't tolerate any of that. :) Tonight I invited over my 5 closest friends: Sindre, elise, Satoko, Andal and my roommate Sarah. We chatted, ate cake and drank tea together and regaled each other with our vinterferie (winter break) adventures. We actually all sang the bursdagssang (birthday song) together in springar rhythm and then I pretended to blow out nonexistant candles on the ice cream cake.

Throughout the night we examined the subtle differences between my roommate's matching newly purchased/loaned 2002 fiddle by Hauk Buen and my 1995 Hauk Buen fele. We also compared them with Sindre's brand new baby fiddle, which was finished in desember 2005. My friends really liked playing with my violin bow, which makes me really glad I purchased it when I did. I just got it rehaired when I went through Oslo last week to give my Fulbright presentation. I will post more pictures of last week in Oslo, Gausdal, Kongsberg later. My friends are throwing me another, larger, ordentlig (proper) party on Friday night, in a bigger house with beer and many more fiddles present. :-) ! Look forward to more pictures from that too! However, it might take me a few days to recover from it, so don't hold your breath.

love,
a 23-year-old me.

answers to questions

2006-02-04T05:22:00.000+01:00

Since many of you readers left questions in comments, here are a few answers:

Yes, snow is fun! whee! There are snowmobiles here and they are extremely annoying, as I fear for my life and hearing everytime one bursts into the still quiet paths of Rauland. Granted, I imagine they are very fun.

I take the bus to a nearby town called Åmot and then a smaller bus to get to Moslid. It's about 40 minutes trip. I suppose one could ski if one were determined...

A woofer (girl) is a volunteer worker who goes from farm to farm (usually small ecological/organic farms) to work for room and board. My friend Carmen is such a girl. And yes, there are woofer boys too. Plural: woofers. :)

I would go with 'et' blog. But that's a guess in the breeze.

Ja, jeg snakker norsk! Anonymous, ja, vi kan snakke norsk når du har et blog til deg sjølv! Jo, det var et ganske fint forsøk på norsk!!

Medic12965, it's most excellent to run into you in this venue! It's definitely the same Moslid farm in Vinje, and I will be happy to put you in contact with Ole and Jenny.

And now a question for the "one who writes about science" --who are you?

Vinterkappleiken!

2006-02-04T04:25:00.000+01:00

I recently competed in Vinterkappleiken last weekend, 26-27 januar, at Raulandsakademiet/Høgskolen i Telemark, Rauland. The Folkmusikk 1 class organized the entire kappleik; it was very inspiring to watch my friends work together to organize such a big event. Several students competed in the kappleik, but not as many as I expected. They ran a couple fake versions of the kappleik during the week before, so I got a dry run to practice before the real thing, which I believe helped me to be less nervous during the real competition. You can check out the results at the webpage under the heading "resultater" on the left series of links. http://www.vinterkappleiken.com/

I competed in Class B, which is the class for all fiddlers between age 18-60 who haven't won enough points (114?) to make it into Class A. I'm a little sketchy on the rules and classifications, but I know 114 points means something special. Anyhow, I got 97 points and 9th place out of 13 fiddlers, including both fiddlers on vanleg fele (flat/ordinary fiddle) and hardingfele. Apparently usually they separate the types of fiddlers, but not in this one. I was surprised that there were only 13-14 fiddlers in Class B--I thought there would be many more fiddlers competing. I'm pretty content with my placing, as it was my first kappleik experience and I'm American. Apart from my Japanese friend Satoko, everyone else in Class B was Norwegian and had been raised with whatever tradition from which they played in the kappleik.

I played Mehanken, a valdresspringar etter Olav Jørgen Hegge, and Gangar etter Knut Brynulfsson, etter Torleiv Bolstad, which is also from Valdres. I learned Mehanken from Sarah Kirton a couple summers ago at HFAA 2003, when they focused on Valdres. However, I forgot it and then relearned it from Jan Beitohaugen Granli's CD Lite Nemmar. Even after playing it decently well for kappleik, I've realized in the last few days that I am probably playing it with more of a Telemark emphasis on beat 2, which is the heavy beat in telespringar. In valdresspringar, beat 1 should be heavy and short, followed by a lighter and longer 2. Oh dear, assymetrical beats are always confusing to explain.

Anyway, I'm content overall and am now just more focused on playing as authentically to whichever style I learn. It's very difficult situation as an outsider/American, because I want to learn some of everything, even though native Norwegian folk musicians would typically only learn tunes from their region in Norway, which decreases the need to hone an ability to play in many different styles. As an American hardanger fiddler, I know I will be expected to play a smattering of every hoved (main) dancetype when I go back to the States and play for dancing. "Play some telespringar! No, valdresspringar! Hey, do you know any hallingspringar!" That's how it usually goes. Since I find all the dances and their respective music interesting, I have a hard time choosing which tradition to follow.

However, for my MA project utføring (fulfillment?) next year, I will try to focus mainly on hallingspringar and briefly compare it to valdresspringar so that I can gain a heftig (hefty) understanding of both. I want to look into hallingspringar so that I can follow my "roots" to some extent, as my maternal Grandmother's parents came from Hallingdal, but I also want to understand the similarities and differences between Hallingspringar and Valdresspringar. It will be a long process to shift from playing telespringar this year, which is the hardcore opposite of valdresspringar. Telespringar has a heavy and long beat 2, with a short and light 3. Valdresspringar is somewhat the same, but you can think of it as shifted over a beat--it takes Telemark's short, light beat 3 and turns it into stronger but short beat 1, a lighter beat 2 that follows very quickly after beat 1, and a medium weight and length beat 3.

If that isn't confusing enough, I'll probably find out later that's wrong and have to correct it, but it's my understanding at the moment...which happens to be 04:47 so I think I"ll go to bed now. Tonight I went to Sindre's house and learned tunes from him with Satoko. I have learned so many tunes in the last week! My friend Laura visited me for the kappleik. She is Canadian and here on a visit to Tore Bolstad as a sort of extension of her scholarship to Ole Bull Akademi in oktober. She has really improved a lot in her playing and plays a mean valdresspringar!! On søndag Laura taught "Firefingerlåtten" to me and Satoko, a valdresspringar which uses the fourth finger a lot. Then I learned a gangar, Hoppe Hægre, from Per Åsmund at Falkeriset Spelemannslag on onsdag, 2 setesdalsgangar from Vidar Lande in a lesson on mandag, then a hallingspringar from Per Åsmund last night at Folkmusikk Pub, then a vestlandspringar, Ola var Lang, tonight from Sindre! This brings a new light to being a Fulbrain scholar.

more snow than I've ever seen in my whole life

2006-01-21T12:19:00.000+01:00

Sometimes there is so much to say that it is daunting to even begin writing. Therefore, I will skip over describing Christmas, New Year's and getting back to Rauland and shall simply say that there is a ridiculous amount of snow in Rauland. It snowed non-stop for the last two days and finally stopped this morning. As I had no appointments, many DVDs to watch in the apartment, and no motivation to go outside in thigh-high snow, I didn't actually leave the house for those two snow-filled days. This led to significant cabin-fever, which in turn led me to take a late-night romp in the snow last night. Afterward, I scooped up some snow in glasses and made orange juice snow-cones!!

Today my roomate and I are going to Moslid Farm for a going-away party for Carmen, the German woofer girl who has been working at Moslid for the last few months. It will be sad to see her go, but it will be a fun party as well--lots of Northern Americans, as my Canadian friend, Jamie, will be there too and also the new American girl, Andal, who joined the Folkemusikk 1 class this semester.

Juletide greetings from Oslo!

2005-12-21T23:18:00.000+01:00

Hei alle!
I am in Oslo visiting my Norwegian friend Thomas, who studied at St. Olaf for two years, including one year when we lived together in the Norwegian House with him as an Resident Assistant (and resident Norwegian). I have been mostly walking around the city by myself, enjoying the festive and hectic Christmas atmosphere. After living for four months in a town of 1000, Oslo is actually quite overwhelming. However, there are still charming small-country traits, such as the Majorstua skole Korps (band) parade I saw pass by the major T-bane stasjon at Majorstua during my optical exam! It was really cute, with all the kids and adults wearing matching Norwegian sweaters and red hats. All the opticians ran to the window and we even interrupted my exam to both run over to watch. :) They called it a "nissekorps", which sort of translates to "dwarf-band." Nisser er small gnomes that watch over a farm and are treated particularly well at Christmastime so that they will keep the animals well during the year. Even just en nisse can cause much mischief by himself, so therefore you must leave a bowl of porridge out on the steps for him so he will be nice to your animals.

Tomorrow I leave Oslo to spend Christmas with my Norwegian relatives (third cousins?) in Hemsedal. We will hopefully bake a lot and visit other relatives throughout Hallingdal. Expect more stories later! I wish you all God Jul og Godt Nytt Aar!!

Årsmøte...a smashing good time

2005-12-12T18:27:00.000+01:00

What is an årsmøte?
Let me try to describe it...well, to begin with, my roommate and I were invited because we are part of the Falkeriset Spelemannslag. Johan Vaa hosted it, who is the son of a local famous artist Dyre Vaa and is thus part of a well-known local lineage of fiddlers and dancers. As I understand it, an "årsmøte" is officially a yearly meeting to arrange specifics of the group (in this case, the fiddling group), such as who will lead the spelemannslag next year, who will be in charge of teaching the group's tunes to new students, osv. (etc.) However, after the official meeting part comes the partying!! I heard through my roomate who heard from our friend, teacher and well-known young fiddler, Jan Beitohaugen Granli, that the årsmøte is a really good time, so we decided to cough up the 200 kroner and go experience a real cultural Norwegian event. Without further ado, my experience of the årsmøte!! (drum roll...)

The Årsmøte was really fun in a strange kind of "hanging out with a lot of old Norwegians who adore getting ridiculously drunk" kind of way. Sarah came back from a study session to our house around 6:30 pm with other kids from the spelemannslag. She had planned to walk together with them to the party, but since they were itching to go before I was ready, she was benevolent enough to wait for me and let them go on ahead, promising we'd be there soon. However, neither she nor I really know where we were going. We had directions from Halldis' house, which I was positive I knew where it was. Turned out I was dead wrong about where Halldis' house was. Her house was at least half a mile away from the house I thought it was. "The big yellow house?" "yeah, I know that one! the one by the big old barn-like thing?" "Yeah!" ...Turns out there are two such big yellow houses by two such big old barn-like things. Whod'a thunk. ...This is what happens in small communities where everyone has the same address which is based on one zip code for the entire area, and you have to know where people's houses are in order to find them. A proper Catch-22 situation, and one of the best yet that I've experienced.

Long story short: It was a good hour later of "five steps forward, three steps back" and eventually we got to the party after about 5 different phone calls to everyone we knew who was at the party already to explain directions to us. A couple of them thought we were drunk already because we kept giggling and explaining in confusing terms where we were, but we were mostly just slightly delirious from the cold and the walking and the hunger. Turns out it would have been easier if they'd just told us, "walk until you think there is no possible way possible that there is anything still in that direction to walk towards, then find the only streetlamp visible for miles and turn left at the creepiest path you can ever imagine." I think the host's house was probably at least a mile or two away from ours. Anyway, with all our doubting, second-guessing and walking back and forth, I'm pretty sure we walked two miles to get there, even if it was actually only one mile.

We finally found the end of the long creepy path and went into the most inviting-looking building nearby (candles lit, lights on inside, etc.) and found shoes of people we know. After praising The Powers That Be, we disrobed our many layers of coats and fiddles, walked in through the main door, and discovered an immense old-fashioned table with 25 splendidly-arrayed people laughing at us. We smiled and laughed at ourselves as well and the host pointed us to our seats. The table was covered in food, which the host explained to us that he had just listed everything to the guests and wouldn't do it again. Fortunately, people were nice enough to explain things to us as we passed them around the table.

We proceeded to eat rakfisk, a kind of fish that is caught and then left in water and salt for several months, various parts of reindyr (heart, tongue, steak) served with rømme (sour cream) and tartar sauce, an odd but delicious salad concoction of tomatoes, leek slices, feta cheese and olives, amazingly good potet salat (potato salad), flatbrød (flatbread), brød og smor (bread and butter), not to mention my three shots of akevitt (each shot was a different type!!), three glasses of red wine, and some cognac later, as I already mentioned. [Don't forget that becoming inebriated is all part of the cultural experience. ;-) ] There was a sumptuous marzipan cake for dessert with layers of white cake soaked in cream layered with raspberry jam, and an almond and chocolate torte along with the coffee and cognac. (Holy Cow!!) I didn't know Norwegians actually made good food! It's good to have a few surprises in life now and then.

We watched many of our professors and esteemed elderly generation community members get superbly inebriated, including the secretary of our school and her husband, who is an amazing fiddler and has been the musical leader of our spelemannnslag this year; another professor of Sarah's, who is a very respected musician but is notoriously mind-numbingly-boring at storytelling, which he relishes and attempted to draw out even longer than usual last night, while everyone else yelled at him to shut up; a very old man who kept singing old folk songs at Sarah and grabbing her hand emotionally; a 70 year old woman who kept telling us how fortunate we were to be invited and then proceeded to invite us to her house to play sometime.

Our friend Sindre talked to us for over an hour about our bowing and what separates us Americans from the Norwegians by our bowing styles. I appreciated his thoughts and observations, but I would have rather scheduled a lesson with him rather than talk about it while both of us were tipsy. However, I think that it was actually necessary for him to be inebriated to tell me, because that seems to be how the Norwegians work--be brutally honest while tipsy and then later you can always ignore your behavior when you're sober. But I think that's how most western societies interact anyhow... It was actually very nice that he was so frank in telling us what we needed to fix. It's the kind of thing that most teachers here kind of shrug off or aren't very good at describing exactly what we need to change to get that "traditional" sound of hardingfele. Sarah and I ended up taking a taxi back home with our landlady and another friend and got home around 3:30 am.

Good times. Only 200 kroner for all you can eat and drink, and as much hangover as you want (or don't want) in the morning!!! Thank goodness it only happens once a year... (pictures of årsmøte to come later!) Now back to studying for my Master's exam on Thursday!!

a slightly belated Thanksgiving update.

2005-12-08T17:46:00.000+01:00

I recently returned to Moslid Farm to celebrate Thanksgiving. When I told Norwegians that 'd be celebrating Thanksgiving, many people asked, "what exactly is that holiday all about? I have never really understood it." Their responses led me to realize I wasn't exactly sure of its meaning as a national holiday either. I realize it started with the Pilgrims and the "Indians" (Native Americans!!), as we were told us by the history books back in grade school, and supposedly the Pilgrims thanked the Indians (Native Americans!!) for helping them survive in the new country. I suppose that happened before the Pilgrims killed the Native Americans and took their land. However, I thought it might give Norwegians a more positive, more modern perspective on the American holiday to tell them what Thanksgiving means to me, and hopefully to many other modern Americans--a day of thankfulness when you pause your normal activities to look around you and realize your blessings/fortune, and thank someone for it. Jeg mener også at det er en dag å bli sammen med familie og folk som du er glad i--I think that it is also a day to be together with family and people you are fond of and love.

Both my roommate Sarah and I really wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving, as we are both thankful to the natives for helping us survive in this new country thus far. Since neither Sarah nor I have close family relations living here in Norway, we opted to visit our American friend Jenny at her farm, Moslid. We decided to celebrate early, on the Saturday before proper Thanksgiving, because we figured Norwegians most likely wouldn't know or care which exact day the feasting should occur. Jenny's children Nellie and Aslak (picture above) were visiting from out of town, so the house was full with us there as well, plus her husband Ola, son Ola Martin, and their new German girl woofer (a worker for their farm) named Carmen.

Sarah and I figured it'd be easier to cook the food at our house and bring it to the farm, considering Moslid doesn't have running water or electricity. As both of she and I have had the fortunate experience of learning how to wash dishes at Moslid, we decided to try to reduce the amount of dishes necessary to wash after the meal. However, we neglected to really consider the amount of things this plan would require us to bring to the farm. Getting to the farm is a bit of a trek--first we have to walk down the hill to the Høgskole, where the bus picks us up and drives us half an hour to the town Åmot, where we switch buses and ask them to take us to Moslid, which is about 15 minutes and drops us off at the side of the road by an old wooden sign with "Moslid" carved into it. Then we walk down their hill and go through a great many gates (for the geiter, goats!) to get to the main farmhouse.

That being said, imagine us trying to walk/travel this distance while holding the following:

1 hardingfele on my back
1 double case with hardingfele and fiddle, on Sarah's shoulder
a backpack filled with bowls holding stuffing, croutons, whipped cream, rosemary, 3 spice bottles, bouillion cubes, other miscellaneous food
another backpack filled with pajamas, extra sweaters, numerous knitting projects, slippers, wool socks
1 apple pie in heavy pie dish
1 pumpkin pie in even heavier heavy pie dish
1 pot of pumpkin soup with a very rickety lid

We live about 15 minutes from the school and left the house around 1 pm, give or take 5 minutes. This was about 10 minutes too late, as the bus stops at 1:17 at the Høgskolen. Sarah and I waddled down the hill, our arms aching and us complaining no more than 3 minutes after we left the house. Halfway down the mountain, Sarah attempted to jog a bit to make up for some time. Sarah was carrying the soup and my fiddle.

Soon both she and my fiddle were wearing the soup.

We knew we'd miss the bus if we went back to clean her up, so we persisted and half jogged to the bus. Even so, as you can probably guess, we missed the bus--the last bus of the day. Thus, we decided to at least preserve the Kodak moment (left). Having time now, Sarah went inside to clean up and I sought out our Estonian friends, Juss and Janne, to see if their car would perhaps start and if they would perhaps like to join us for Thanksgiving. ;)

I knocked on the door of Juss' and Janne's little hytte (behind the school), and they welcomed me in. Their raised eyebrows indicated that they knew something was up, so I cut to the chase and asked if they could drive us and they were welcome to stay for dinner with everyone at Moslid. It turned out that they had nothing better to do, and their car did indeed start, so they picked us up in front of the school and drove us there! Hurrah!

We finally made it to Moslid about 2 hours later than expected and stuck our frozen turkeys in their wood-burning oven. We left the birds in the oven for about 2 hours meanwhile we scrubbed Jenny's potatoes, carrots, parsnips, leeks, and Jerusalem artichokes for a delicious root vegetable ensemble. I made mashed potatoes, and eventually the table ended up looking like this (to right and below):

left, r-l: Juss, Janne, baby Gustav, Ole (Oo-la, not oh-lee), myself

We ate my homemade pumpkin and apple pies, and I made two new Norwegian converts and one German convert to pumpkin pie! (below right, r-l, Sarah, Nellie, Jenny, Aslak, Carmen) The next day we spent playing music, washing dishes, knitting, and playing with the kids. Sarah engaged in quality sledding time with the kids and I kept Jenny and baby Gustav company inside with my fiddle as I didn't bring snow pants or boots. A good time was had by all!! I plan to return to Moslid Farm at the beginning of Christmas break/juleferie (definitely only called "Christmas break" here, as Christmas is huge holiday in Norwegian society) and then stay with my cousins in Hemsedal. More on them later!

Fulbright Report #1

2005-11-23T23:05:00.000+01:00

Hi everyone!
I will eventually get to writing about Setesdal (which was fun) and also my makeshift Thanksgiving at Moslid Farm, which we celebrated on Saturday. However, first I will tell you a bit about how my project (both for the Master's program and for the Fulbright) is coming along. To do so, I will post portions of my (lengthy) responses to the first Fulbright Report. It was actually quite a good exercise to write this report, as it forced me to think through my project a bit more detailed and also reflect on my experiences here thus far. I hope you've been enjoying reading about my year here as much as I've enjoyed living it. :-)

In other news, tonight at spelemannslag I learned a tune called "Springar etter Myllarguten." Our landlord taught it really quickly, as he had to get to a rakkefisk celebration,where approximately 120 people are gathering to eat the fish they caught and dried three months ago. Apparently it is a big typisk norsk celebration. At any rate, it sounds somewhat better than lutefisk since there's no lye involved. Due to his rask (quick) departure, we only learned about 3/4 of the tune, but it's better than nothing. I played fiddle for the halling workshop on Tuesday and Ingolf, the dance teacher, thanked me and asked me back for next week. I notice my playing is getting stronger and more soloistic, and hopefully my dance beat is better too. After the halling workshop there was a Finn-Skogs pols workshop. This dance comes from a Finnish area on the border of Norway and Sweden. Emil (the Swedish guy) is really good at playing these tunes, which are played on flat fiddle, so he played and I got out of having to play for the second dance class. Last week they taught valdresspringar, for which I learned a bit of the boy part. I only know three valdresspringar tunes, whereas Satoko knows many more so she could play for that class. It's fun to finally learn new dances!!
Enjoy reading my project descriptions!

Fulbright Report #1
1. Please provide a brief overview of your study/research project or teaching assignment. Have you been able to pursue your project/assignment according to plan, or have there been major changes?

I originally proposed to study and research hardanger fiddle folk music of Norway, specifically repertoire regarding Norwegian mythical creatures called "huldre," a female type of troll. Since proposing this project I discovered there are not as many pieces of this genre as I previously thought, and this topic would be rather obscure and difficult to research. Before coming here, I also thought about researching the concept of "variation" in hardanger fiddle music and how it is related to some genres of American music, such as techno (dance club) music. I discussed this idea with my program advisor, who agreed that "variation" would be a more worthy topic for research than perhaps "huldre" music. When I discussed these project ideas with my roommate who attends the Folkmusikk 1 program at my school, she mentioned the concept of "småmotivoppbygging" in folk music, translated as small motive development.

I realized this was a more precise definition of what I had been calling "variation" in hardanger fiddle repertoire, and that the term "variation" applies more accurately to the variety of ways that diverse fiddlers may play a tune. The term småmotivoppbygging describes music that is comprised of many small motives that develop throughout the piece and is very particular to Norwegian hardanger fiddle. I hypothesize that småmotivoppbygging may also occur in the development of techno music, and I would like to compare the two genres toward the end of my project. As techno/dance club music is a part of popular culture today in America, so were Norwegian dances a part of the popular folk culture in the time of their development. Although comparison of these genres will not be my primary focus, I think it would interesting to consider the possible connections and similarities between the two genres/forms of "folk tradition."

My revised plan for studying hardanger fiddle repertoire and "småmotivoppbygging" is to first select approximately 3 to 4 tunes that fall into the category of being built up with small motives. I will ask my advisor Vidar Lande for suggestions regarding such tunes, as he has a repertoire of over 2000 hardanger fiddle tunes in his head. I will first study these tunes' written notation from available written transcriptions. Second, I plan to travel around the country to learn the tunes from various well-known fiddlers in order to learn the variations which each of these fiddlers plays. Learning tunes is very important to the aural tradition of passing on tunes from fiddler to fiddler. I am curious as to the type of variations that occur during such an aural tradition process, and will try to study the phenomenon of "variation" by learning the same tunes from different fiddlers across the country. After learning and recording these variations, I will then study both the development and the varations of the tunes. This will be a mostly practical study of the tunes, focusing on learning to play the tunes and their variations, followed by theoretical analysis of their composition and variations. As a final outcome of the project, I wish to compile a CD recording with each of the fiddlers playing including some of their variations, followed by my playing of the tunes with some of my own variations. I have already learned approximately 20 tunes through the local spelemannslag and other student fiddlers, some of which apply to my project. I am in the process of contacting several master fiddlers to arrange meetings with them next semester, including Arne Anderdal in Voss and Jan Beitohaugen Granli in Valdres.

2. Academic involvement. Please describe the academic interaction with your host institution in terms of your research, teaching, and professional relationships. If you have attended classes, please list the names of these as well.

I have been attending classes in the Master's Program here at Høgskolen i Telemark, Rauland with 12 other Master's degree students, each studying various subjects within the overall heading of "tradisjonskunst" or traditional arts, which includes folk music. Our classes are divided into four subjects: 1) Tradisjonskunnskap 2) Kunst--estetikk, 3) Kultur og Identitet 4) Vitskapsteori--måter å forske. In addition to tenured faculty, we have numerous guest lectures given by teachers from across Norway, each well-known in their respective field. The lectures are interesting and, although they are completely in Norwegian, I understand approximately 90%. My language comprehension has improved quite considerably since moving here and I expect it to keep improving. There are myriad dialects here and most people speak their own dialects and write in nynorsk, which is quite different than the bokmål I learned at St. Olaf College. Fortunately people here are very kind to help whenever I need translation. I experienced a kind of frustrating plateau while adapting to the language about one month ago, but have since moved past that and feel quite competent in my Norwegian language abilities.

I discovered that I actually learn more about folk music from other students at the school than from the professors, since the Master's program focuses largely on theoretical and philosophical topics. Therefore I find it of extremely valuable learning experience to go to parties, dances, and the pub, where students gather to play music and dance together. Every first Thursday of each month the local pub hosts a Folkmusikk pub night, where the entire school and community gathers to play folk music together, listen, and dance. Dancing is inextricable from the Norwegian folk music tradition and is a very large part of the local society of Rauland. I play fiddle weekly for folk dance classes on Tuesday nights, taught by another MA student. This experience has helped my dance fiddling skills enormously. On the occasion when they teach a dance for which I don't know corresponding fiddle tunes, I take the dance workshops. I recently started attending Sunday night dance workshops in the town center as well.

3. Please comment on the adequacy of facilities, resources, teaching aids, institutional politics and attitudes, and the extent to which you participated in professional activities with your host colleagues.

The school here has very clean and useful facilities, which are open during convenient hours apart from Sunday. There are excellent practice rooms for my fiddling practice. The library has a wide selection of folk music recordings, which are helpful for my research in finding tunes that comply with my project topic. The school seems very open to each student's individual topic, and my advisor Vidar Lande is very helpful in advising me regarding my project topic and in pointing me in directions for research. They are very open to international exchange, and are encouraging to myself and the other foreign students to share our talents and customs with other students.

Regarding professional activities with host colleagues: The Rauland community is rather small, so there is much interaction with my host colleagues here. At the beginning of the year I joined Falkeriset Spelemannslag, the local spelemannslag (fiddling group), in which both local fiddlers from Rauland and students from HiT play together. The students meet every Wednesday at 6 pm to learn tunes from with my landlord, Per Åsmund Omholt, who teaches at HiT. At 7 pm the local fiddlers join us to play our common repertoire. Last weekend the group traveled together to play a concert in Setesdal. I also introduced our pieces to the audience in Norwegian during a 15 minute section featuring the students. I also played with the lag at a function for pensjonister in Rauland last Friday.

6. Cultural involvement. Participation in school and community activities, in cultural and professional meetings. Did you speak formally to local audiences, write for local publications, were you interviewed by the local press? How were your efforts received?

See paragraph above in response to question 3 regarding Falkeriset Spelemannslag. The efforts of our concert were received very well by the audience in Setesdal. My roommate, also an American, arranged a traditional Norwegian tune in a rather innovative and avant-garde manner, which was also received well. Approximately two months ago the Vinje county press interviewed me at a folk music concert in Vinje regarding why I came to study in Norway and why I or other students would attend such a concert. I was also pictured in the local newspaper among other foreign students. It seems from the article that the local community is very happy to have people traveling from far away lands to study their music and culture. My advisor Vidar Lande is very accomodating to me regarding language difficulties and prepares a rough English summary of each of his lectures for me and also for a young man from Estonia who does not speak Norwegian.

I attend many of the local concerts given often on Tuesday evenings. HiT brings in well-known folk music groups from around Norway and Sverige who attract a majority of the school's students and faculty. Usually after these concerts everyone gathers to play music and dance together. As I previously mentioned, I play fiddle for dance classes on Tuesday nights and attend the classes when I am not needed for playing. I recently started attending local dance lessons on Sunday evenings. The participants in this group are rehearsing toward competing in the January Vinter Kappleik which is hosted by our school and organized by students here. I have volunteered to work at this Kappleik.

8. Additional comments: Please list any other concerns or comments that you may have at this point in your stay.

I am enjoying my stay in Norway immensely and learning much everyday. I am very glad to be placed in a small community as it allows that I get to know people quite well, perhaps more so than in a big city like Oslo. I observe that my new friends here learn from me in return whenever I inquire about particular cultural traits or phenomenons, or when I tell them about my cultural background. Many people have said to me, "I never thought about that before! Thank you for asking!" which I think is proof of a very positive form of cultural exchange. I have been keeping my family and friends informed of my experiences here by writing frequent entries in a weblog, which is publicly available at http://lofft.blogspot.com. I post pictures and detail my experiences in this venue to record my Fulbright year. I strongly encourage you to look at it sometime, as it provides a clear overview of my activities.

*wink* It's like advertising, but not really.

Falkeriset Spelemannslaget goes to Setesdal!

2005-11-11T02:47:00.000+01:00

No, it's not a chapter from some Norwegian barnebok (child's book). I'm going to Setesdal tomorrow with the Falkeriset spelemannslag (the lag in Rauland). We're playing for a concert tomorrow night with various ditties played by the entire lag (~group), a dance demonstration by some people in the lag, and 5 tunes played by just us students! We get to stay overnight there in hyttes or something (I'm a little sketchy on the details and plan to just act like a sheep, sans belching-baa noises ala Moslid Farm, see previous entry http://lofft.blogspot.com/2005/09/pictures-from-moslid-farm.html).

We've been rehearsing for a long time and it's been really fun to get together with the other students to prepare. It's much more koselig to rehearse at our friends' houses than the usual spelemannslag meeting place, although it's a great room with a breathtaking mural of Draumkvedet (see previous entry http://lofft.blogspot.com/2005/09/draumkvedet.html for explanation). The "koselig factor" isn't only related to the location though--we're much more at ease without a bunch of adults watching over us. It's good to learn the tunes at regular Wednesday night meetings, but then it's also good to practice them with each other in a more relaxed setting. It will be fun to perform together after all our hard work! Og så etterpå, en stor fest med alle!! Many of the students have traveled together before, for instance to the Olso kappleik a couple weekends ago, but I haven't been able to travel with them because of my Master's studies (I have a different class schedule, etc.). It will be kjempe koselig to get to know them even better! Expect pictures upon my return! (I hope.) Here's a few pictures of some people from the lag:

Sindre is in the middle, next to Elise (left) and Kaja (right). He's probably the best hardanger fiddler out of all the students here and tends to lead us when it's just us students playing together. He's learned from Vidar Underseth, a guy from the West Coast (of Norway) who has a CD with Tore Bolstad, a well-known fiddler from Valdres. Tonight Sindre played some awesome tunes in alternate tunings from that CD, so I'm gonna get together with him sometime to learn them from him. Sindre is hilarious and very charismatic and is the best friend here of Emil...

The guy on the left is Emil (although I found out tonight that his real first name is Jørgen, but I bet it's got one of those Swedish umlaut things over the o, not a Norwegian ø). Emil, as you may have just deduced, is Swedish and plays wickedly delicious harmonies on Swedish flat fiddle tunes. He plays flat fiddle, hardingfele, viola d'amore (a cross between viola and hardingfele!), guitar, banjo and anything else that might have strings on it. His brothers and friends just came to visit him last week and played at Folk Music pub, which was some of the best pub music I've heard in a long time. The girl across from him is Nina, who plays flat fiddle and therefore isn't in the hardingfele lag, but is nonetheless cool and an amazing player.

This is Halldis, who hasn't played hardingfele very long (only 3 years or less). (Sindra and Elise are in dancing in the background!) Halldis mainly dances to folk music, rather than playing it, and has been away many weekends to take dance courses in various other cities, such as Trondheim this past weekend. She actually is in the textiles course here, which shows how multi-talented people are here. There are many more students in the spelemannslag, but I'm sure I will have better pictures of everyone after we come back from Setesdal. Ha det!

more info about Rauland

2005-11-07T06:17:00.000+01:00

below: Rauland summer map
In my search of information about our school's January Winter Kappleik (folk music and dance competition), I re-discovered a webpage about Rauland Akademiet which had much helpful information (see first link below). I found two maps that show Rauland in relation to Norway's "big" cities, and the roads you can use in both summer and winter. The fact that there are two different maps for the roads you can use during winter vs. summer says a bit about the amount of snow to come...I've heard that most of the roads remain open during the winter though...I thought about posting the winter map, but the only difference was the route 45 on the left from Valle to Stavanger was gone, so now you know.

If you're interested in knowing about the Norwegian høgskole system, see the latter link below. Høgskole sounds a bit like 'high school,' but it's not; it comes after grunnskole, it's not quite undergraduate but might be applicable as such toward a Bachelor's degree...anyway, it's interesting and that's the system through which I'm getting my Master's degree. Rauland is the only campus where you can study Folk Music at the Master's level. For some reason the Master's degree isn't listed on this webpage (maybe it's an old link) but the explanation of the system is really good. Don't worry, it's in English. :)
http://www.raulandakademiet.no/
http://www2.hit.no/hit/info/hitinfo.English.htm

I took this picture of an old building during August, the first month I arrived, long before all the snow came and then melted, leaving everything dead and covered in mud. Charming, I know. This building is along the main road through Rauland.

more scenes of Rauland:
below left: Lake Totak, a 15 minute walk past the school or our house.

below right: our house! Specifically, we live in the lower white part with the three right-most windows. The 1st window is our kitchen area, the 2nd window is the living room area, and the 3rd window is our bedroom. (The living room and kitchen are really the same room.)

Below right is the view of the mountains by Lake Totak from a farmer's yard through which we usually walk on our snarvei (shortcut) to/from school. Sometimes the clouds are simply amazing. I like walking to school because I get to see how the nature changes everyday. During the first couple months I got here, the view from our house was nearly perfect and cloudless. This picture shows a storm moving in.

As you can see in the picture below/left, it's been getting colder and more rainy; at times it is so foggy and cloudy that you can no longer tell the mountains are there anymore. It's very reassuring when the sky clears and the mountains are there, steady as ever. :)

I am excited for the skikkelig (proper) winter to come and cover everything in snow again. I will probably fall a lot more often (especially when I try skiing again), but at least it will be in white snow and not disgusting mud.

O Happy Day!

2005-11-03T02:17:00.000+01:00

Finally I'm starting to hit that "click" point! You know, the one that so many people speak of when moving to a foreign country and trying to understand the native language! I don't really have to think about it anymore. I haven't dreamt in Norwegian yet, but I hope that's the next step. Maybe today was just a good day. There are definitely days when I don't understand the lectures or the conversations at lunch. Actually, both of those happened today, but it was more just that it didn't bother me as much. I feel like I am starting to grasp details from conversations and lectures more often than previously and that I can actually respond in a fairly confident manner. So exciting!! I actually teased my professor today!! hee-hee! (I probably shouldn't get so cocky that I do this everyday...)

Fiddling is also going well! I'm gaining a lot more confidence, trying to get a better, more solid & reliable and dance beat, bigger tone and resonance from the fiddle. Also more ring from being in tune. It's harder though, because your expectations continually go up. I always want to have more fire and spirit in my playing. (Those of you who know me can probably believe I can stand to have more. It's good for the heart-rate, but I am much too mellow for the good of my playing.) I played at our Halloween party and it was so fun--I had just enough wine that I played confidently but didn't screw up. I took risks I haven't before, and my roommate said it sounded really good; plus, people actually danced to it, 3 or 4 songs in a row! I figure if my beat wasn't solid enough, they'd sit down, or if I was out of tune, they'd grimace politely and leave the room--at least, that's what I'd do. But they didn't! So now I'm trying to remember how it felt to play that way, and trying to imitate that sans wine. Wine is good, but it definitely shouldn't be the magic aid to my playing well. :)

Incidentally, I made a successful pumpkin pie on Halloween out of a pumpkin which was imported from Bergen! (ooh, ahh...that's the west coast of Norway, y'all)

I went to pre-spelemannslag tonight, when student fiddlers meet at kl. 18:00 on Wednesday night to learn tunes from my landlord. We learned a tune called Nesland Fenta (the traveler, version from Nesland) and it came really easily to me!! I think this is because I have been listening to the Spelemannslag CD repeatedly, so by the time I take up my fiddle, all the notes are clambering around inside my head and scrambling to jump out onto my fiddle through my fingers. It's so awesome. It really is practically like the Think Method. :) (Music Man reference)

When it reached 19:00, my friend wanted to go to film club, so I decided to ditch the "real" part of spelemannslag (when the grown-ups show up) to go along with her. Earlier today I realized how much I miss seeing movies and films, even when they're just on TV or showing in somebody's room in the dorm... It's such a luxury to be able to rent films, especially with such a huge selection as is in the States. I have about 10 DVDs and there are two TV channels in Norway. (There are cable channels available, but I'm definitely not spending my stipend on that. Beer takes much higher priority.) Anyhow, I am so glad I went to see the film because it was amazing. It's called "Så som i Himmelen," which translates to "As it is in Heaven." It's a Swedish film, but there were Norwegian subtitles. I found that I understood 99% of it, at which I was pretty suprised. Between hearing the Swedish, which is close to Norwegian, and reading the Norwegian (which is often easier for me to understand than hearing Norwegian), it came pretty easily to me. The story is amazing and so moving--I highly recommend everyone, especially musicians, see this film. It's about a conductor/composer who goes to a small Swedish town and buys an old schoolhouse in order to get away and truly "listen." He ends up getting roped into being the choir director at the town church, basically, and it's all about what happens from there... SO. GOOD. It's worth tracking down in the foreign films section or even ordering!! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382330/
http://interaktiv.vg.no/filmextra/film.php?id=7313

After the film, my friend invited me to hang out with the other fiddle kids to have "kake, kaffe og te" at some girls' house. Turned out the rest of the students from spelemannslag had gone there as well, so it was a "skikkelig fest!" (a proper party!) ...but not really, just in a mellow, relaxed cake, coffee and tea kind of way. And the language there went really well for me too! I understood all their jokes and stories.

Then, I borrowed a Håkon Høgemo CD from the girls and I've been listening to him while writing this. He is a *really* tops fiddler. http://www.cdroots.com/nor-hogemo.html
I think he's won Landskappleik or something big like that, if not several times over. He plays a lot of West Norway repertoire (Voss), some of which I learned from Dr. Een, so I am excited to hear it more.

Overall, it's been a really good day! I don't know why I'm in such a great mood, particularly when it just started getting dark around 4:30 pm, but wow...I could use another month's worth days like today!!!

p.s. Halloween party and snow pictures from a few days ago (also picture at top:)

my life in Rauland on a Friday

2005-10-29T02:18:00.000+02:00

I am finally reading Watership Down and enjoying it quite well. Enjoying is not quite the right word, as it is suspenseful in a rabbit sort of way, but I think it's a very good book thus far. The beginning was a bit slow, but now it's really getting going.

My day consisted of: not having class, yet waking up at 7:45 AM because Sarah and Jamie had class--he came over last night to make dinner with us, which happens about once a week, and usually means he sleeps on our couch because it's so far to where he lives (30-45 minutes walk, or longer with serious snow). I guess our couch is comfortable enough--he hasn't complained yet. I ate breakfast with them, read Watership Down for a bit, went back to bed, woke up about 2 pm after Sarah had returned from class many hours prior. I slowly woke up and eventually we learned a tune together called "Førnesbrunen" from a CD.

The tune is named after a horse from this area of Telemark that carried the bodies of people who had died in the plague to be buried over the mountains at a church. On the way, the driver felt that he was starting to get sick (from the plague as well, or maybe just from the cold?), so he climbed in the back and the horse kept on going. It had been there so many times that it knew the way by itself. On its way, it got stuck in a snow drift and both the man and the horse died. Eventually they were found, and this tune was named in honor of the horse. (not the man...lol.) It's a very good tune!

I am part of this local fiddling group called a spelemannslag, and we're going to travel to Setesdal to give a performance on November 11. We're gonna play three songs, one of which is Førnesbrunen. I was absent from last week's spelemannslag meeting when our landlord taught the tunes, so now I have to play catch-up. Luckily I've heard all the tunes quite a bit, both at spelemannslag meetings and also because our landlord made us a CD of all the tunes the group plays. Sarah and I tend to play the CD quite a bit so that the songs get in our ears, and then they come much more easily to the fingers. It's amazing how well this technique works.

After learning the tune, we made a delicious dinner of pesto linguine with chicken, and salad with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and bleu cheese, with lots of fresh ground pepper! yumb!!! (Eating is exciting, as there's not much else to do around here.) We started to watch Gosford Park, but after about five minutes we heard a knock on our door. It was only about 8 pm, but we weren't expecting visitors. I answered the door and found Ingolf, who is in my master's studies class. He had been checking on his horse up at the riding center, which is nearby our house, and just decided to stop by! It is awesome to get visitors, especially on a cold Friday night when nothing else is happening. He ended up staying about 2 1/2 hours and we all had really nice conversation, ice cream, and two pots of tea. He is a real character and one of my favorite people here. I'll have to write more about him sometime--he deserves an entry all of his own. :) And a picture too, maybe. :)

After he left, we watched Gosford Park and I finished knitting what I hope will become a camera case, and came a good distance on my brown shawl. So much knitting, so little time, and so much repetitive stress syndrome in my hands! :( Boo! Tomorrow we are going to have a Halloween party! :-0 Wish us luck that a) people actually show up, b) we can find the house ourselves (it's at a friend's house, not ours), and c) that at least someone else besides me dresses in costume. What are y'all doing for Halloween???? Natta!

koselig internasjonal kveld!

2005-10-23T02:55:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I invited my friend Jamie and his girlfriend Yuri (who is visiting for three weeks from Japan) to dinner at my place where we had meksikansk mat (Mexican food)! I made something resembling burritos/soft tacos. (Yes, it's nearly possible to make Mexican food here! I wouldn't call it authentic, but it was pretty good! Yuri knits and makes jewelry, so we showed each other our latest crafts. I showed her the red and blue felted purse I knit (and felted), and she loved it so much that she wanted to buy it! I also showed her some of the jewelry I made, and she bought two pairs of earrings and two necklaces from me. Here is Yuri with my purse/her new purse!

In turn, Jamie and Yuri invited me to Jamie's place tonight for a Korean-inspired dinner. Our friend Dina came over as well. Yuri made us delicious gyoza (potstickers/dumplings), small battered things with ham and cheese inside *YUM* and a noodle dish with translucent noodles made from potatoes, along with cabbage, beef, peas, carrots, onions, and many other vegetables. She also made rice balls, which had sprinkles on top that she brought with her from Japan. There were three types of sprinkles--one kind of green and fishy, one yellow-colored made of egg, and one more orange-colored which was spicier than the others. The rice balls were rolled in a shape that many Americans might think of as sushi, but they were much bigger and didn't have any fish rolled in them. (=not sushi) She made a couple rice balls with seaweed wrapped around them as well. She also gave us sheets of seaweed called Happy Snacks (that may not be the real term...) which were somehow treated to be extra yummy. :)

We also drank some beer from Christiansand that Jamie bought in Setesdal when he was there a few weeks ago. After dinner he took out some Suntory whisky that Yuri brought from Japan, and a different kind of Japanese whisky that he bought while he lived in Denmark. I tried both and I decided I quite like whisky, although not too much at a time...just little tastes. Yuri also served Japanese green tea with the meal, which we carried over into dessert. She gave us a dark brown soupy type thing for dessert which looked a bit like chocolate sauce, but it was actually made from red beans, but was quite sweet. There were also small white squares in the bottom, which she said were rice squares. A few weeks ago Jamie got a crate of apples (one of which I also have at home in the refrigerator!) and since he needed to use them up, Yuri made an apple crisp type dessert. I definitely didn't expect to indulge in international culinary delights when I decided to go to school in the mountains of Norway! My tummy is happily surprised!

It was so nice (koselig!) to join with people and eat delicious food together, and then share our common interest: knitting! As we sat around the table, sipping on our green tea and whisky (not at the same time) and munching on the apple crisp, Yuri showed me some of her knitting, which included several pairs of wristwarmers (they're quite popular here in Norway, and apparently in Japan too?) and gave me the patterns for them. In Norwegian the word for "pattern" and "recipe" are the same (oppskrift), so now we've taken to calling them "knitting recipes" in English now. :-) Dina worked on a hat with a special technique that requires a lot of concentration (I don't know what it's called). I worked on nothing, as I didn't take my knitting along, but Dina lent me some yarn and needles so I practiced one of the recipes that Yuri gave me.

It is quite inspiring to be around people who are so skilled at their crafts. A few nights ago Jamie taught "tvebinding," a two colored knitting technique, at the knitting cafe. Yuri helped him, and actually ended up helping one lady, who turned out to be the leading Scandinavian expert on machine knitting! Yuri was a little embarrassed after that. Dina is the one who taught me "nollebinding" and now Yuri has taught me these new recipes! :) Yuri is quite talented. She gave me a few ideas for making jewelry as well, and was so generous that she gave me her earrings because I liked them and thought I could make a pair similar! I hope to make a pair of wristwarmers like this soon.

Knitting is a great hobby to have during the winter, which the season has just decided to become! Today was the first snow of the year! It was beautiful to walk home from Jamie's house. It's about a 30-45 minute walk, but I didn't mind; the midnight light reflecting off the snow was peaceful and gorgeous.

norsk mat

2005-10-22T03:57:00.000+02:00

I love me some norsk mat (norwegian food)!

At present I am eating a permutation of the smørbrød, an open-faced sandwich:

Wasa knekkebrød (flatbread, above) with Tine kremost med urter (cream-cheese with herbs, above), topped with skivet tomat (sliced tomato) and minced chilipepper.

the process of felting, or "toving"

2005-10-22T01:58:00.000+02:00

This (above) is the felted purse I made, prior to felting it.

To make a felted object, you must first knit it extra large (possibly twice the size you want it to end up), and then wash it with soap and hot water either in a washing machine, or with soap and hot water by hand with lots of rubbing against a washboard or something like that.

Here's a close up photo before felting:

Here's a close-up after felting, followed by a picture at a distance:

a view from the top, a bit further away...

Before felting, an object is generally huge, loose and floppy. After felting, the yarn (which must be 100% new untreated wool for it to work) binds together so the object becomes quite strong, sturdy and thick. If you felt (or "tove" på norsk) the object by hand, the appeal is that you can control the amount of felting that happens instead of blindly throwing it in the washing machine. This was just an experiment, and I didn't really care what size it ended up being, so I just threw it in the washer. Plus, I'm lazy. However, I tried to plan its proportions so that it'd turn out well no matter how much it shrank. Turns out it's exactly what I wanted. :-) *satisfied*

Vigelandsparken

2005-10-21T01:22:00.000+02:00

Vigelandsparken is such a huge, fantastic place that one could photograph for hours there. The weather was cloudy and overcast, but it was actually a rather nice day for a walk in the park. For those who don't know, Vigeland was a famous Norwegian sculptor. He namely became famous because of his shrewd deal with the city of Oslo: in exchange for a workstudio, he would gift the city with all of his sculptures upon his death so that they could be displayed publicly in a park. This thereby assured him a studio and fame after death, if not before. His sculptures are bigger than life-size and simply awe-inspiring.
Much of Vigeland's work focuses upon the circle of life, age, and various inter-personal relationships, such as parents to children, children to one another, elderly, and children. Thus is his work so accessible to all ages and types of people. One can see many different interpretations in his sculptures...I hope that you will enjoy these pictures of his marvelous works.

2005-10-21T01:14:00.000+02:00

My trip during fall break first took me to Oslo, where I went to Vigelandsparken and the Viking Ship museum. As I previously did not have a camera at either location, I was delighted to get another chance to photograph these two impressive sights. The first is of one of the Viking ships, and the next two pictures are from Vigelandsparken.

2005-10-20T03:52:00.000+02:00

Oh yes, I minded the gap.

London-ho!

2005-10-10T01:48:00.000+02:00

Last weekend I went to Trondheim for the first annual Trondheim Lindy Festival! Ursula Ledergeber and Mike Faltesek taught, and these pictures are of them and me at the dance and class venue. It was good times.

Now I'm off to London for my school's "study-week," a.k.a. fall break. I plan to do some dancing, see some theatre and some friends, rock the Tube, and generally kick it in the big city. First I head to Oslo tomorrow morning to show my friend around town, and then we're off to see Big Ben and such. Hurrah! Expect to see more pictures when I get back! Here's another from today's walk to the lake.

Trondheim Lindy Festival!

2005-10-02T19:46:00.000+02:00

Hei alle!
I am in Trondheim, having taken an overnight train on Thursday night to get here for the first, hopefully annual, Trondheim Lindy Festival! I am taking workshops with Mike Faltesek (Minn., US/Sweden) and Ursula Ledergeber (Switzerland) in Lindy Hop. I'm very tired and exhausted, which means it's going well. Today was the last day of classes and now I'm going to the last social dance with my host, Jorunn. She is "kjempesnill" (really nice) and we've been having a good time getting to know each other på norsk. I learned some parts of the car today from her as well as various ways to say "cool" på norsk. Pretty "artig," if you ask me. I better go get ready for the dance! Pictures later!

pictures from Moslid farm

2005-09-28T01:34:00.000+02:00

This is Moslid Farm. The leftmost building is a stabbur, a building typically used to store things like food and provisions in, but is being used as living quarters for people who come to work on the farm. The little brown building next to it is a half-painted woodshed (they ran out of paint). Next to it is a big darker brown barn that stores equipment and also has the outhouse in it. Behind these buildings are the sheep pen, goat pen, and chicken pen, as well as the area that we tried to herd the sheep into the pen but failed miserably.

Plucking wool from sheep: Good times, Great wool. Actually that's a lie, as it was a huge pain. The wool should have been collected last spring, but the guy didn't come like he promised the farm owners. Thus, the wool became extremely dirty and felted-together, thus making it very difficult to collect. We tried for about 30 minutes to collect it with our hands, which should have been easy, but after that we resorted to clippers. We plucked wool from two sheep. The first was patient, with bad wool, and the second was impatient but yielded better wool.
This is the view from the main farmhouse, which I will show in my next post. This overlooks the sheep grazing area, and the horse is kept down below in the flat field. We walked down this mountain to get to our sleeping quarters, i.e. the hay loft, and then much further to get to the bathing facilities, i.e. the river. Hi Sheepies. BLEEEEECCCCHHH!!!! (That's the sound sheep make, apparently.)

Moslid Farm

2005-09-28T01:30:00.000+02:00

As there is way too much to update about this weekend at the farm, I will simply have to list all the exciting new things I learned.

Things I learned over the weekend at Moslid farm:
-It's good to escape your comfort zone.
-I was definitely raised a city girl.
-When there's no electricity, handicrafts and live music become a much needed distraction in the evenings.
-The ancient Viking technique of "nollebinde," or needle-binding with a bone or horn needle is still a living craft.
-When there's no running water, you learn how to spare on washing dishes; after doing dishes twice in one day for 9 people, re-using dishes becomes a well-beloved habit.
-When the toilet is a hole in the outhouse in 0 degree Celcius weather, you learn how to pee really quickly and come to care more about throwing down the wood shavings than using much toilet paper.
-When your only bath is a briskly freezing river about 1/2 mile away from the farmhouse, you realize soap is not going to be of much use when your main goal is to keep breathing and get out again as soon as possible, much less worry about the other four people seeing you naked.
-You won't care whether you're naked because you'll still want to jump in again.
-The best time to river bathe is about half an hour before the sun goes down for optimal river warmth.
-When there are sheep to be plucked, do it. It doesn't matter how dirty your hands get or how smelly your clothes become.
-It's perfectly acceptable to wear these same sheep wool-plucking clothes again for three days, particularly if you took a river bath sometime in the last two days.
-I am a really bad shepherd.
-A little dirt is good for you.
-Please don't step on the baby.
-It's possible to make delicious food entirely from one's own garden.
-You must pick the potatoes before the frost comes, which might involved a half hour picking through mounds of goat shit by moonlight. If you're lucky, everyone else will pitch in. The city kids will be amazed that food comes out of the ground and thus will commence to make self-debasing jokes together about how "potatoes in our home towns grow in paper bags." No one who grew up on a farm will laugh at these jokes.
-Goats go Maaaaa, but, contrary to popular believe, sheep don't go Baaa. They go "BLLLLLEEEEECCCCHHHHHHH!" like a big, huge, disgusting belch.
-Goat milk tastes good once you get used to it.
-Just because you like goat milk doesn't mean you will like cultured milk.
-A dram of Akevitt with breakfast is mighty tasty after sleeping in a hay loft at 0 degrees Celcius and hiking up the mountain in the morning.
-Body heat through cuddling is really neccessary to surviving two early winter nights in a hay loft. So is a good hay pile without holes in it.
-A drink of well water is so much better than tap water, and indian food makes some people sweat much worse than usual.
-I really like farm living, and I wanna go back. But maybe in the summer.

Farm!

2005-09-23T02:32:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow I am going to a nearby farm for the weekend (half an hour away by bus) without electricity or running water! I will be helping pulling wool from sheep, milking goats, knitting a bunch, learning how to spin wool and cotton, and playing fiddle for everyone! yay! The couple who runs the farm lives entirely off of their own products, and invites people to come work for them for periods of time. I will probably have more information for you when I get back from the farm, likely after taking a long hot shower. Sheepies! Nice wool, but smelly.

Draumkvedet

2005-09-18T01:48:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I went to Åmot, a town about half an hour away, with my roommate and her friend, where we bought vintersko (winter shoes)! I am really excited about mine because they're actually somewhat fashionable! Mine are red and well, I'll just post a picture sometime! Now we don't have to be cold in the winter, yay! After going to Åmot, we ran into our friend there who needed a ride to Vinje because she was going to a forum this weekend on folkedikt, folk poetry. We took her there and discovered this see-saw and a swing-set; we thus took advantage of the sunshine and serendipitous situation.

Last night I attended a concert of Draumkvedet with my roommate and three other friends, held at the church in Vinje as part of the folkedikt forum. Draumkvedet essentially means "dream ballad": draum means dream, and kveding is the type of Norwegian folk singing that students study here at the Akademi. The ballad comes from the 13th century and has approximately 59 verses, although there are many versions and there is not one authoritative version as far as I know. The ballad is about a man who slept for 13 days and having dreamt about his descent into Hell, woke up suddenly and ran into the church to tell everyone all the gruesome sights he saw.

This picture to the left is of the church at Vinje, which is painted with unusually bright colors for a Norwegian church. We received a tour from someone working there who told us that the original floor from ca. 1200 (I think?) was used in its rebuilding, and the original door is on display as well. The painter is Henrik Sørenson, who is apparently a rather famous painter among Norwegians. He painted the entire church, from inside to out, which is very elaborate as you can see from the picture to the right.

The man in white between the pillars is Sondre Bratland, a singing professor here at the Akademi. He teaches my roommate Sarah occasionally and gave my class a lecture a couple weeks ago, which was less of a lecture than it was more of his life's story...although was nonetheless interesting. :) He has a deep, rich voice that is calm and soothing, while powerful and gripping at the same time. He sings mostly church-related repertoire but experimentally so, as well as traditionally.

As you can vaguely see in this picture to left and the next to right, the church in Vinje stands in the middle of a graveyard. There is actually a recurring chorus verse in the ballad that speaks of the moon shining down, and last night the nearly full moon shone down upon the gravestones in an eerie manner, helt perfekt for a performance of Draumkvedet.

As Sondre sang, I could picture the moon shining outside and I imagined the recently-awakened man bursting into the church in a crazed fit of divine inspiration. Sondre's interpretation of the ballad was very simple and wise. I could imagine another singer trying to put too much emphasis into the music and possibly becoming "overdrevet" or overdriven, i.e. exaggerated. However, Sondre was quite laid-back in his presentation of this dramatic tale. At times he simply spoke the verses in a dramatic manner, which brought out the meaning and gave a break from the repeated melody lines. However, the verse melodies changed when the overall section heading, ergo subject, changed as well, holding the listener's interest. Despite the repetitive melodies, Sondre varied each verse with his own interpretation and brought out the tekst (text) so each verse was interesting in its own right.

Although 59 verses sounds like it would take a long time, the concert lasted about half an hour. Sarah brought her English translation for us to follow along. We managed to sit in back and follow for the first two pages, approximately 20 verses, but got sufficiently lost after Sondre used a different order of verses. The difficult ancient Norwegian language certainly didn't simply our comprehension issues either, but I fortunately did understand a considerable amount with the English translation to help.

*On a completely irrelevant side note: there are "taco tubs" being produced in Norway. I find this a shocking situation, and I am tempted to think this is a disgrace to ekte (genuine) Mexican food, but I am determined to try them before I condemn their existence and production. Three days ago we attempted to make Mexikansk mat (Mexican food), and it worked surprisingly well! We will certainly try it again, and perhaps give the taco tubs a try. :)

Norwegian Architecture

2005-09-13T01:31:00.000+02:00

As per request, here are some examples of Norwegian architecture. The first is our landlord's house (the upper, rear portion of it. in which we do not live). Our bedroom is below the deck that you see in the picture. Our kitchen-bathroom-living room area is all underneath the rest of the house.

The second picture is of my roommate in front of Rauland Akademiet/Høgskolen i Telemark, Rauland. It turns out that there are actually two institutions housed in the same building, and that an addition was built onto the original Akademi for the HiT. I don't quite understand the difference...but now I finally realize I go to Hit at Rauland, not Rauland Akademiet. It's still very confusing and I think that it may be part of a larger plot to confuse Americans about the Norwegian system of schooling. Just kidding. The school is pretty ugly from the outside and hard to photograph, but the inside is nice.

This third picture is of Loftet, the loft! Of course I had to take a picture of it!! :) (Sadly, it has just one "f" in Norwegian.) This is one of the funny little buildings behind Rauland Akademiet that are still used for classes and such. Some of them are used for the tradisjonsmat classes, traditional food. I think these buildings have been built more recently and were modelled after older ones. There are actually many, many buildings here with grass roofs. I have kind of gotten used to it already! The Rauland electrical company, Rauland Elektriske, which we walk by every day on our way to school, is one such building!

2005-09-13T01:21:00.000+02:00

By the way, I just wanted to give you an idea of the beauty of this area.

I witnessed the most beautiful sunset of my life thus far a few nights ago.

These pictures cannot even compare to the real thing, but I guess they will do as mediocre representations.

2005-09-13T01:14:00.000+02:00

It's time to catch you up on my amusing activities! Last Wednesday my roommate and I hosted a small gathering of people (sometimes we call it a "party"). This one turned into a knitting party of sorts. We also played fiddle for each other and practiced dancing gangar, which means "to walk" and therefore is a couples' walking dance, as opposed to a springar, which means "to spring/jump," and translates to a couples' running dance.

While these sorts of party activities (knitting, folk dancing) might gather strange looks at parties in cities of populations slightly higher than Rauland, such as San Diego, Chicago, LA, New York, here they are actually considered COOL. It is totally smiled upon to whip out your fiddle or your latest knitting project and, in fact, you might even get some help with it. In the picture, Jamie is helping Sarah start knitting her set of pulsevarmere, pulsewarmers, or wrist warmers. Meanwhile, Jamie asked Dyne to fix the holes in the last sweater he knit. After she was done with that (not an easy task, which we both intently watched her do), Dyne resumed working on a sweater arm using nollebinde, an Ancient Viking textile technique. Nollebinde involves using a needle type of verktøy, utensil/instrument, and seems to lie somewhere between sewing, crocheting and knitting. I don't really know how it works yet, but I bought one and Dyne promised to teach me how.

Where might one buy a nollebinde needle? God spørsmål. Good question. My roommate and I went to Dyresk'uen this Friday, which is a huge country fair in Seljord, a smallish town about 1 hour away from Rauland. (It's much bigger than Rauland, mind you.) This fair showed animals, and sold crafts, homemade foods and goods, miscellaneous Viking related items, and as usual for any fair world-round, lots of unhealthy fair food. Yes, there were rides as well. There was even that ride that's kind of like a Tilt-a-Whirl, and the bungee-jump ride too. Picture those kinds of rides, surrounded by the beautiful mountains of Norway...quite surreal...

Early that morning, we drove to Bø, a town about 1 1/2 hours away, with our friend from Estonia, and incidentally became quite carsick. Norway is a winding, winding country. The purpose of going to Bø was for an utlendingstudenter (foreign students) gathering, i.e., to meet students from other countries and attend a lecture at the Høgskolen i Telemark, Bø campus, after which everyone would head to Dyresk'uen. Carsick and very tired, the lecture on jordbruk, Norwegian agriculture, proved to be less than riveting, but I fortunately got some work done (politely) on my strykking, or knitting.

We continued to Seljord and, once at the fair, we saw some of the Folkemusikk 2 class perform, after which our Estonian friend performed on his Estonian bagpipes around the fairgrounds. After watching him play for some time, Sarah and I left to go see the opening events, where they judged the best cows. They were indeed nice looking cows. Per Anders Buen Garnaas was also scheduled to play hardingfele at this opening, along with his mother, Agnes Buen Garnaas, who was supposed to kved, a type of Norwegian folk-singing. We saw Per Anders, but quickly grew tired of the speeches and left to find some food instead of waiting for Agnes.

After chomping down on some Norwegian fair food, involving a vaffel, waffle (YUM), and a bakt potet, a baked potato covered with Thousand Island dressing, corn, and little squares of ham (less yum), we met up with some folks from Sarah's Folkemusikk 1 class. We walked around with them and finally found some fiddling going on! There was a very small hut with Torgeiir Strand and Magne Herrefoss playing hardingfele in it. I met Torgeiir about two years ago at Amerikappleik at St. Olaf College campus during the summer, so it was good to hear him play again. After hearing some beautiful fiddling, our day had finally come to the end, but not before I I managed to query a friendly-looking woman selling Viking goods about the nollebinde technique, and eventually purchased a needle from her for 50 kr. Yippee!

On our way out, I saw a skein of pink, naturally dyed, ren ny ull garn, untreated new wool yarn, that I wished very much to purchase but was unfortunately not for sale until Saturday. Serendipitously enough, without having even known which one I wanted, my roommate went back the next day and purchased the exact pink skein that I wanted. Superb!! I was ecstatic. Now I am hoping to perhaps make a pair of nollebind-ed armwarmers with the yarn. Vi får sjå!! That's dialect for "We shall see!!" Hope you all had a good helg/weekend! Ha det!

Visit To The Lake No. 2, i.e. A Romp With Nature.

2005-09-05T02:44:00.000+02:00

The day before yesterday, the weather was so beautiful that my roommate and I scampered around the area surrounding our house. We found numerous mushrooms, but have not thus far have not picked any.

After scampering, we adventured down to the water's edge of the lake! I went to the lake a few days ago, but this time we went to a different side than I was at last time. Since neither of us had approached the lake from this side, we had a fun time figuring out which little road to take to get there, but it was beautiful weather so we didn't mind a little exploration.

Here is the view from the road. There are several farms that extend all the way down from this road to the water's edge. We saw some sheep yesterday...although first we heard their bells, which was helpful. Our fiendishly knitting-obsessed friend often expresses interest in salvaging wool from such sheep in order to spin it into yarn. We thought of him fondly, and kept walking in search of vann. As we continued on our way, we found a road that looked like it led closer to water. We passed some houses where we saw friendly locals. We explained in rudimentary Norwegian that we søker på vann, i.e. we search for water, and they directed us further down the hill.

We found it eventually.

By then we really had to pee, but as luck would have it, there was nothing but water all around. We walked home rather quickly and found this luscious currant bush along the way. No, we did not pee on it. It called to us, in its funny berry-dialect Norwegian, "Vær så snill å ta bærene mine og spis dem!" (A rough translation: "Please, take from me and eat my berries!") Being kind-hearted girls, we did just that. mmm...

no, I haven't died yet.

2005-09-05T02:39:00.000+02:00

Hoorah for long weekends and lovely weather! Even after a few days of purely introductory classes in Norwegian, it was nice to have a bit of break. Yesterday I took a walk with my roommate and another fiddle girl to get the latter girl's fiddle fixed. Someone fell on it at a party, where we were all playing, which you can see in the picture to the left. Norwegians, particularly folk musician students, can throw a good party. Yes, that is an accordian the girl is playing to the lower right of the picture.

fantastisk dag i dag!

2005-09-01T01:50:00.000+02:00

I have had a great day! It felt like today was really my first day of school, even though we had some orientation yesterday. Today we had a school meeting that basically took care of some kjedelig stoff (boring things), and then I had two classes. However, they weren't real classes, because the teachers just talked briefly about what they are going to talk about. However, I found out that technically the reading isn't mandatory, just highly recommended. I find that a little paradoxical.

After school jeg gikk på tur i skogen (I went walking in the forest) with the Estonian guy. He goes everywhere barefoot. For now anyway, until winter. Anyway, he knew a lot about nature that I didn't know, so it was kind of a nature walk for me. He says he usually hangs out and goes walking with biologist friends who know more than him, so now he passed along the knowledge to me. I picked some tuttebær (a kind of cranberry sort of berry) that grows here, as well as some blåbær (blueberries). Don't worry, he told me which kinds were poisonous and we didn't eat those. There were a lot of sopp (mushrooms) too, so maybe we will get some of those another day. Today was an utrolig (unbelievably) nice day, so I will share pictures with you later from our tur. He plays pipes, so he brought one of his many recorders and played it by the lake shore when we got out there.

After we came back from our tur, I walked up the hill where Sarah and Jamie found me along the way. They had bought food, so we went home to our hybel and cooked a sumptuous dinner of ground beef with a gravy sort of sauce over boiled-mashed potatoes. (REAL FOOD and not pasta!) Add a salad and some Gato Negro vin that costs too much, and we had ourselves a fantastic dinner. After cooking dinner we went back to school to find Estonian guy and jam a bit before the concert. We didn't find him, so Sarah and I jammed by ourselves. She taught me a bondesal and I played a Swedish tune that I happened to remember.

Then we went to the folk music concert. It is late and my post got lost, so I will have to tell you about it later. Ha det!

more pictures of our house/area

2005-08-29T12:53:00.000+02:00

Her er kjøkkenet!
Here's the counter/sink side of the kitchen area.

Her er stue!
Here's the living room part. Through the doorway you can see our bedroom, sengestue. There's really not much more to the bedroom besides a closet, skapet, along the wall. To the left of this picture there is a bathroom, do, and a hallway plus another room for storage that we share with the family renting out the hybel to us.

2005-08-29T02:22:00.000+02:00

This is where I live.

This is our kitchen area, in between the sink/counter area and our living room area:

more later!

irritating comments

2005-08-29T00:15:00.000+02:00

I don't appreciate these anonymous comments left by people who are only advertising their own blogs or things that aren't even blogs at all. I think it must be some kind of spam, so please don't click on their links. Thank you.

By all means, please do leave comments if you actually know me or find my blog interesting. Thanks!
--Rebecca

Fulbright weekend in Oslo

2005-08-28T23:24:00.000+02:00

I just returned this evening from a weekend trip to Olso for the Fulbright orientation. On Thursday afternoon I took the bus from Rauland to Åmot, where I had only half an hour to drop by the police station to show them my residence permit before I had to catch the next bus to Oslo. Unfortunately, the guy in charge had to ask to keep my passport because he had not yet received some important documents about me from a city called Rjukan. It made me very nervous to leave it, but he copied my passport and stamped the copy officially, plus he signed it and wrote his number on it in case any questions were asked about it. After the nerve-wracking half-hour between switching buses, I made it onto the Oslo bus and spent four hours doing that annoying half-asleep head roll thing until we got to Oslo. My friend Thomas, my former housemate from Norskhuset '04-05, and his friend Kristin met me at the bussterminal. We did some errand stuff, then they took me to his apt. in Oslo and we made dinner, relaxed and watched some good ol' American TV (King of Queens) on DVD, plus some Vicar of Dibley (hilarious).

The next morning, they both escorted me to my hotel, Coch's Pensjonat, where I checked in and then we quickly cut across the Palace/park area to the Fulbright office, where I met all the other Fulbright in Norway grantees. We ate lunch together (Dolly Dimple's pizza) and chatted together. Various people from the Fulbright office gave several informal type informational sessions. Thus far, most of the information has been passed along electronically without any face-to-face meetings or phone calls, so it was really cool to finally match names to faces. The other Fulbright grantees introduced themselves and many of their projects sounded quite interesting. My friend and fellow Norwegian major at St. Olaf, Knut Christianson, the other St. Olaf Fulbright grantee, was there, and it was good to see him again since we just graduated together. The grantees are spread out all across Norway, so now we will all have people to visit if anyone wants to travel within the country. My area is very remote and involves a five hour bus ride from Oslo, but I invited them to visit me all the same. One guy is a roving scholar whose ancestors come from Rauland, so he is certain to visit.

After all the meetings on Friday, Knut and Kristin and I headed out for dinner. We sought after a good cheap bar named Evergreen, but alas, could not find it. Instead we found a nice restaurant called Sofies mat og vin, and it was fairly cheap but good food. I had breaded, fried fish with potatoes and vegetables for 100 kr, which was actually really affordable. There was a bit of a mix-up with the ordering of wine though...I asked for "et glass av husets hvit vin," which should mean one glass of the house white wine. I didn't make a mistake, but instead the young waiter brought out a whole bottle and two glasses. I was confused, but didn't say anything. He let me taste it, and then poured me a glass. I stopped him and said that I meant for only one glass. He looked confused, and slightly angry, so I apologized and he took away the bottle and the second glass.

We thought everything was fine. Then he brought out a full glass of white wine and set it in front of Kristin, who definitely hadn't ordered wine. We weren't sure what to do, since the situation was kind of awkward. Kristin muttered to us that maybe she would drink it, but after a while she decided she wasn't in the mood. Finally, a different waiter came by and I explained the matter to him, so he cleared it up. He looked like the young waiter's father and was much friendlier than the young man.

After dinner, Knut and I wandered over to the University area by Blindern, the law students' sector, and met Magnhild, my former Norskhuset '03-'04 housemate from Snåsa, who now studies law at the University of Oslo. The law students were throwing a huge garden party where the entrance fee was 90 kr and each beer thereafter was only 30 kr, but we decided that was too expensive since we only wanted one beer, not tons of beer. We went to a coffeeshop/bar off of Karl Johan's Gate called Ett Glass, and had coffee and a beer. Therefore I was wired until 2:30 am, but it was just as well since the bar below our hotel was apparently one of the most popular spots in town.

The next day I fit in as much as possible by waking up early (yawn) and meeting Thomas and Kristin down at Trafikanten by Oslo Sentrasstasjon (train station), where we took the IKEA bus to IKEA. Thomas works there, so we went shopping for my apartment and found lots of good cheap, yet high quality, items, among them a really nice dyne (duvet) cover and sheets, plus miscellaneous kitchen stuff and a dusjhylle, a shower organizer. (On Thursday I had also picked up a suitcase containing winter clothes from a professor who had been storing it for me during the summer after I dropped it off with her during the Orchestra tour. I tried to pack as much IKEA stuff in there as I could, but I still ended up taking an extra bag home mostly because the dusjhylle and hangers were awkwardly shaped.)

After going to IKEA, I headed to Vigelandsparken for a tour with the other Fulbright grantees. I'd already been there during the orchestra tour, but it is one of my favorite places so I was glad to go again. However, this time, our tour guide was crazy. No, not crazy. Rart. Weird. Like a teapot, he was short and stout, and also very unlike any Norwegian I've ever met, i.e. outgoing. He constantly asked us how the artwork made us feel, but answered his own questions for us. Quite often he took us up to one statue, said about two sentences about it, then proceeded to wave his umbrella for us to walk with him to a new statue. However, the next statue was usually only two feet away from the first statue. Why we couldn't just see it from our original position, I'll never know. Personally, I think he had control issues because he kept making people move for our group at least four times when it really wasn't appropriate or necessary. He interrupted a skateboarding contest, and an adorable family taking pictures. <:( Anyhow, it is always nice to see Vigeland's work.

As it was a long and eventful weekend, this entry is also very long and I shall continue it later! In my next entry I will talk about seeing a-ha play at Vigelandsparken! Thanks for reading!

Jeg er i Rauland!

2005-08-24T14:32:00.000+02:00

Hei hei dokker! Det betyr dere på norsk. Sorry to those of you who don't speak norsk. I was talking about the dialect that Telemark people speak here. They say dokker instead of dere, which is basically a word that means y'all.

Alt går bra her! Everything is going well. I arrived on Monday after a very long and expensive flight confusion. I don't know if I will be reimbursed for much of the additional cost but I will try. I took an extremely long bus ride from Oslo to Rauland, upon which I found Sarah, my roommate, along the way in Seljord, not far from Bø. We chattered the whole ride from there to Rauland and have been getting along quite well. It's really good to see her again! Our apartment is really cute, rather small but adorable and manageable. I am actually glad it's not bigger because it would be harder to care for if it were any larger. Our bedroom is very small, not good for anything but sleeping and possibly taking clothes out of the closet, but it's almost too small to even get dressed. :) We have bunk beds, which reminds me of Olaf, but fortunately they're a lot sturdier than the ones at Olaf. Hopefully we shall not collapse anytime soon.

Per Aasmund Omholt is our landlord who lives above us with his wife Christine and two girls, 7 and 10. They are adorable. Hopefully we can prate engelsk with them sometimes for them to practice. So far they know how to say I have got a rabbit. As Sarah and I mentioned to Per and Christine, they know about as much English as we know Norwegian. That's not really true though--Sarah and I are getting along just fine with the language. I think today's meeting was a bit overwhelming for her, but she is doing much better than most people would, I think. I've gotten used to a few new dialect words so far, and most people have complimented us on our speaking thus far.

Per took us grocery shopping on Tuesday just as soon as we got in and put our suitcases down. Grocery shopping in a new country is always an overwhelming experience, particularly when one is jet lagged. Even so, we managed to get some basic food for about 300 NOK. Yesterday Sarah and I walked into the actual town, about 45 minutes walk from our apartment, and bought 600 NOK worth of food. All of this was pretty much basic food and supplies for the apartment, yet that equals approximately 150 US dollars. Good grief. This is going to be an expensive year without much gourmet cooking, or even vegetables or meat for that matter. Hello Mr. Lee ramen noodles, about one dollar per packet.

Today I walked to the Akademi with Sarah, who is taking the Folkemusikk I, first-year. Her first class/orientation meeting was today, so I went to the meeting with her just to help her in case she missed something in translation, and also for my own sake to start getting accustomed to hearing norsk all the time, plus to just find out some information about the school. After the meeting we met some nice students in the kantina (cafeteria), where they serve dagens rett, the dish of the day. Sarah and I brought our matpakker, sandwiches wrapped in baggies or wax paper, and a thermos full of Earl Grey tea. It was a decent cheap meal, but now I am hungry again and am thinking of going back to the house while it still isn't raining.

The area is gorgeous, both around the school and by our apartment. I will soon figure out how to post pictures. I took many bilder yesterday since it finally became sunny, but today it is misty and rainy once again. There is wireless internet in our hybel/apartment and also at the Akademi, so I am sitting in the common area at the Akademi, typing away. Suddenly a bunch of adults have entered the building, possibly for a tour. I think I shall go home for å ta en lur (take a nap), spise noe (eat something), og øve hardingfele (practice hardanger fiddle)! Ha det!

p.s. Jeg traff en ganske fin gutt i dag som strikker og skal gå på tekstil kurs her. Han er canadian, men han snakker ganske bra norsk som er egentlig litt mer sånn dansk fordi faren hans er dansk, men familien hans bor i Canada. Han interesser meg!

Camp Norge

2005-07-27T10:16:00.000+02:00

Camp Norge was soooo fun, due mostly to the counselors who were actually my age and very cool people. The rest of the staff (teachers, cooks, etc.) were all over 50 (or 60?) and very boring sticks in the mud whose motto seemed to be "it's always been that way." Sorry, if any of y'all are reading this, but it's the truth and you know it. You even said it yourself! Thus, I hung out primarily with the counselors and the kids. The kids were awesome, although largely dysfunctional to some extent. A lot of them were adopted or had some kind of disorder, like ADHD. Let me tell you, that made teaching a breeze...er...maybe not. The kids on medication were alternately zombies and then bouncing off the wall like psychotic SillyPutty. There were only a couple really creepy kids, like the one that threatened to throw things at her counselor in her sleep. he other one, who wouldn't put down the butcher knife and stop staring at himself in the mirror during kitchen duty. Yup. But they were mostly good kids. But basically, the kids were adorable. There were several who really took to Norwegian, as well as several who were absolutely lousy and couldn't give a rat's ass, but that's cool. I understand.

Well, I could go on and on about the camp, and I will, but later. This weekend I am going to Wisconsin to attend the Hardanger Fiddle Association of America's annual meeting in Dodgeville. I am mega-excited because the tradition they're teaching this time is from Hallingdal, where my family is from in Norway. Our cousin Sissel is teaching dance, and we met her at a dance workshop in Julian, CA many years ago...sometime around 8th grade. I'm stoked to see her again and hopefully I can come visit her in Norway (as well as my other cousins) while I'm there. Turns out she actually studied at Rauland Akademiet! I'm excited to ask her about it and also to hear their dialects! :) Wow, I am such a Norwegian geek. Heck yes, I am.

excited for camp!

2005-07-04T00:55:00.000+02:00

Post-Norway tour, I've been at home in San Diego for the last few weeks and things are going well. I'm eating as much Mexican food as possible before I leave for Norway in August, as well as enjoying the beach areas. In about one week I'll be teaching Norwegian at Camp Norge in northern CA, near Sacramento. I've never taught Norwegian as a class before, only one-on-one tutoring at St. Olaf College. I'm betting that tutoring college students is probably a bit different than teaching a class full of 8-13 year old kids. I also haven't been to camp since probably 8th grade. Oh dear. I really don't like getting dirty. I prefer to be well-primped, makeup-ed, and generally clean. Well, there's a time for everything, and I guess now is my time to get over my love of cleanliness.

So...I hope I'm ready. I need to prepare a bit more material for the class ("a bit more" meaning, some, anything at all) and brush up on my own grammar so that I'm ready to answer the kids' questions. Maybe I should be studying particular vocubulary that 8-13 year olds would appreciate, such as "slug," "snot," "booger," and "fart." I have no idea how to say those. I take that back: I asked my Norwegian professor one time how to say booger. I don't really remember though. :-( sad. It ended with -mann, as if it were a little man living inside your nose. Ah, Norwegian, how you amuse me.

The camp directors haven't told me whether they care how I teach the class. I think they must assume I know what I'm doing. Man, are they wrong. ...I'm only sort of kidding. I just hope that I can discipline the kids well enough so that they don't get out of hand, but not too much so that they won't think I'm a hard-ass either. I know everyone says you can't be their "friend" at first or they'll walk all over you. Does anyone have any tips for me so I don't become a walking Norwegian teacher carpet?

finally back!

2005-06-20T03:42:00.000+02:00

Hello! I am back in Minneapolis and I have officially been up over 24 hours straight, not counting the couple hours of crappy airplane sleep which almost seem to detract from your state of mind rather than improve it. I was one of the few in the worst flight group which had to be at the airport at 4:30 am, only to wait 40 minutes until the check-in actually opened Eventually we got on board, then went to Amsterdam with a decent layover, then to Atlanta with an altogether too generous layover of four hours, then finally to Minneapolis. I am deliriously tired now, so I will hold off updating more about the rest of tour until later. I hope everyone else got back safe and sound! I am safe but not quite sound again yet...

Trondheim!

2005-06-15T18:09:00.000+02:00

Hallo alle sammen!
We have been many places since I last wrote! I already told you about Bergen, but I shall continue the stories of our adventures. Bergen is a very picturesque city, with a beautiful colorful wharf (Bryggen) and many good restaurants, places to shop, etc. Our second night in Bergen, I went to a pub called News with some of the violists. Also, Rachel Ricker, a violist who graduated last year, came to see me and several other orchie friends, as well as to hear our concert in Bergen at Grieghallen. The concert there went extremely well! The acoustics were fabulous for the orchestra. We played all of our American pieces (Barber, Gershwin, and Bernstein), which made a good program and avoided being cliche since we didn't play Grieg in Grieghallen. Even though that would have been very cool, it was more appropriate for the 3-organization concert format to play our American repertoire.

After Bergen we drove a treacherous route through an area called Trollstigen, which is an incredible windy road that goes through a mountainous area. The four band and orchestra tour bus-caravan made quite a spectacle driving down into the valley from the very top of the mountains. I had been mostly asleep for much of the drive prior to our stop at the top of the mountains. When I awoke, there was no longer the typical lush, green forests and rushing water to which I have grown accustomed. Instead we were surrounded by enormous white, snow-covered mountains and a six-foot high pile of snow that had been brushed aside to clear the road. Many students took pictures next to it, and some even climbed on top of it since it was sturdy enough to stand on.

After making it alive through Trollstigen with many kudos to our amazing, invincible busdrivers such as Einar and Tom, we arrived in Molde. We had a lovely one-night's stay in Molde, which is a very cute little coastal town--big enough to live in comfortably but still with a small-town feel. Our concert in the Domkirke went really well. The ring was very long, and playing Grieg there was beautiful. We also played the Barber and the Shostakovich, during which I could actually see audience members smiling. Molde was the most welcoming town we have had thus far. Not only did the almuni exchange student who arranged everything give us a very heartfelt welcome after the concert, he had also arranged a fabulous cruise around the fjord for us! I think nearly everyone went on the cruise along with several townspeople. It was a great community time for the band, choir and orchestra to come together. It was basically the most perfect moment I have ever had as we watched the sunset on the fjord and the mountains around 11 pm.

Unfortunately, many people (about 12) ate something bad that they gave us on the cruise and have been sick since then. Most of them have recovered by now though. The weather here in Trondheim is beautiful! I met a friend of a friend through swing dancing yesterday who is named Alf, and he showed me and several other dancing friends around the city. He is a student at the University of Trondheim, so he knows the city pretty well. We walked around the less-touristy areas, quite a delight, and saw a couple touristy things too--a fort of some sort and a bike lift. I have never seen a bike lift before, with good reason: it looked very awkward and Alf said that it takes very good balance to manage it. Alf's tour around the city took us to some gorgeous viewpoints. Afterward he took us to a salsa club, since there was no swing dancing to be found on Tuesday nights. On Thursday he has organized a dance for us! Sometimes I can't believe the generosity of the Norwegians I have met. However, I won't be here for the dance since the orchestra is leaving tomorrow for our concert in Stiklestad, but the bandies will be back here on Thursday so I'm sure the dancing bandies will have a good time with Alf and his dancing buddies. I'll be super jealous though! I love to try dancing in new places!

Today I walked around with Rachel Nesvig, Aria Peters (who are my triple roommates) and Hayley Wender. First we went to see the Nidaros Cathedral, where our concert will be on Friday, and afterward we walked roughly the same way that Alf took us last night since there were some cool sights I wanted to show them. Tonight we're going to find dinner at a place recommended by Alf, Bare Blåbær. That means "just blueberries," in Norwegian, which is basically a common phrase that means "not a problem," or "no big deal," or something to that effect. So, we hope that will be fun and not too expensive. Tomorrow we leave early in the morning again and have two concerts in one day , which I absolutely cannot believe. They are joint concerts with the band, which means I have to translate commentary. So far that has been going well and I think the Norwegians think it's really adorable because they always clap for Rachel and me. Anyway, wish us good luck and more importantly, good sleep!

After Stiklestad we go to Snåsa, where St. Olaf College's founder Bernt Julius Muus is from, and we'll have host families there. After that we'll come back to Trondheim, drive an "utrolig" (unbelievably) long way to Olso (8 1/2 hours) and then my flight leaves superduper early in the morning back to Minneapolis! Whee! Hopefully I will get to update again before we leave, but if not, ha det bra! (have it well/goodbye!)

haircut in Bergen!

2005-06-11T12:37:00.000+02:00

Hallo igjen! Tonight we are playing our concert at Grieghallen in Bergen, and I am super excited! Yesterday we saw Troldhaugen, which was pretty cool but I've been there before ...still gorgeous though...beautiful view. Some girls and I took pictures on the rocks posing as if we're mermaids!

My roommate and I just got haircuts! Yesterday we saw a couple cheap places and looked there, but one was only for men and the other looked very sketchy. Apparently the guy is Turkish and unfortunately seemed to only know two haircuts...probably one for men and one for women. Since that was sketchy, we went to the salon next door, which had student women's haircuts for 290NOK, which is about $50...passable, for a very stylish Norwegian haircut. So now we both have fabulous Norwegian haircuts! Hurrah! Tonight we will play well and in style!

Also, our friend Rachel Ricker is visiting from Spain! Hanging out with her is a blast!

Time for lunch (another smørbrød?) and then rehearsal!

Bergen!

2005-06-10T14:04:00.000+02:00

We just arrived yesterday from Voss, which was a lovely little city. For some unexplicable reason, Voss is purported to be a large center for "extreme sports," like sky diving, kayaking, etc. We stayed in a "vandrerhjem," which is a youth hostel for travelers. As with any of our locations, we pretty much took over the hostel, and the city, for the few days we were there. I was very excited to be in Voss because I have heard very much about it from my hardanger fiddle teacher Andrea Een. Dr. Een played two movements of Peter Hamlin's hardingfele concerto on our concert, which went very well. It was a particularly special concert because it was the 100th anniversary of Norway's independence from Sweden. I liked Voss very much and hope to go back there. We found a great piano bar and I hung out with three of the four busdrivers. That was really fun because they all speak different dialects of Norwegian, so it was good listening experience for me. Also, Einar, the bald one, is going to lend me a CD of hardanger fiddle music sometime. He said he lives very nearby the area where my relatives in Norway live, which is exciting.

Now we are in Bergen. My roommate from last year, Annie Woudenberg, is walking around the city with me and we are looking for a salon to get hair cuts. Hopefully we won't spend all our money or come back with mullets! Wish us luck!

Hei hei alle!

2005-06-04T14:49:00.000+02:00

Hello everyone! I am finally able to update this blog! I am in Lillehammer and the orchestra is enjoying a free day. Last night we played in Domkirken, the Glass Cathedral of Hamar. It was such an amazing experience to play under a roof of glass in 11th century ruins of a bishopric. The acoustics were gorgeous and Mr. Amundson was smart to choose softer string music instead of our louder, more flashy pieces that would have just been lost in the five-second echo. We had delicious stew for dinner provided by the cafeteria. Unfortunately we were all very tired after the concert because of all the necessary trucking. We got to the hotel in Lillehammer around midnight and after a midnight snack of coffee and many glasses of milk, we fell asleep in the wonderful puffy feather beds.

Since I have not had a chance to update since our Oslo concert, I should say that Oslo is a fantastic city and the concert was amazing. It was so exciting to play for the queen of Norway, who evidently enjoyed the concert. She, and everyone else, clapped for an eternity. I thought we would never sit down! On Thursday, our last night in Oslo, several of us went to a very small bar called Evergreen and found some friendly Norwegians, Kjetil and Aslaks, who showed us to another very cool, underground-type bar. We chilled with them there til the wee hours and managed to find our way home in the few hours of darkness around 2 am. Kjetil has a band, so check out www.sj5.no if you want to find out more about them! Our Oslo hotel was on St. Olavs plass, which I thought was very appropriate. I love the Norwegian breakfasts here! Our hotels have had magnificent spreads of meat, cheese, bread, and other lovely things. Well, the library is closing! Ha det bra!

first day in Oslo..internet isn't quite working in the hotel, but all is well. more later!

2005-06-01T13:28:00.000+02:00

Velkommen alle!

2005-05-27T19:27:00.000+02:00

Hi everyone!
Welcome to my blog! I am a violist in the St. Olaf Orchestra, and I'll be recording my activities during the St. Olaf 3-organization tour in Norway in this blog. The tour starts May 30 (Monday, the day after I graduate!) and ends June 19. Many people are traveling after the official tour ends, but I will be heading back to Minneapolis with the rest. I really looking forward to this tour because I am a Norwegian major, so I am excited to use my language skills! That sounds really dorky, I know, but just think how cool that will be to talk to people in their own language! I went to Norway once in 8th grade on a two-week family vacation, but I only picked up a few words then. Now that I'm fluent (more or less) I'll be sure to keep you posted about all my exciting travels and I'll slip in some good orchestra gossip from time to time! Check out my friend Claire's blog too, she'll be updating as well.

Stay tuned! (preferably to A440...if you got that, you're a music nerd too.)