London, Austin and the dreaded paper

London and Austin

London was fantastic. Here are some of the highlights.

• Long long long tube/train/bus rides. Not totally a bad thing, it just meant lots of time for Austin and I to catch up. London is HUGE

The tube stop to get to Austin's Flat

• Harry Potter! The movie, plus Austin surprise took me to Platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross Station!!!!! When we were there we met some ( I mean rather a lot) of Americans and chatted with them about their time abroad and things

Hogwarts!!!!

• Pubs and other British things. We went to a real English pub and had English beer. We ate crisps and I got fish and chips... sort of lame touristy but it was worth it :)

At the Pub

Fish and Chips!

• The British Museum. Which has the oldest things i have ever seen. We also discovered that people from ancient times were tiny... like hobbits basically. I am taller than a medieval viking man, which is weird. I am in awe of this museum... it blows my mind the amount of history there. 

British Museum

Old Things!

More old things!

Rosetta Stone

• More movie watching! Oh man I have missed movies. We went and saw Due Date as well, and watched Scott Pilgrim on Austins computer. It was nice, especially since normally I see movies all the time back home. 
• Tourism!! We went to see the London Eye, Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey and Big Ben. All of which were awesome. Tourism for me is like being in a dream... its hard for me to grasp that is it reality and I am actually in these places. 

Skyline

London Eye

Big Ben!

I think that is the main parts of what we did, Austin showed me around some of the places he frequents, like his school. It was sort of a short trip to see the whole of the city. But it was still super great!

The Paper

Its clutch time, the research paper is due in six days. I have about 700 very rough words out of around 5000... so I will be attempting to write at least 1000 words a day. This is going to be the end of me, more than likely you will not hear from me until the end of this awful Paper Quest. 

-Noreen

Snow, Maryn, Lillehammer and the Future

SNOW!

Its snowing in Norway!!! Thursday night at around 10 it started to snow in Hamar and it didn't stop for a day. It was beautiful. It was very exciting for a lot of the International Students who don't see a lot, or any, snow back home. Even the other American's who are from Washington don't see a lot of snow back home and were very excited when it started here. 

Hamar in the snow

MARYN!

Kate's friend Maryn came to visit this weekend which was great!!! We had a lot of fun. On Thursday we made a nice dinner and then went out into the snow to the Disco. From the Disco we took Maryn to get late night kebabs and then got home around 3:00AM. Friday we went to Lillehammer to show Maryn around the Nansen Center and around town. Steinar took us up to the ski jump, to a Norwegian museum and to an art museum which was great! Plus its much snowier up there. Friday night we made tacos and then had a movie night, Bring It On and Social Network. Maryn's brother Glen was in Hamar on this program in 2008 so Kate and I tried to make sure and show her all of the things that Glen probably saw when he was here, which included the Cathedral, the lake, the train station, downtown and the student pub. It was in my mind a hugely successful weekend and I am really glad I got to meet and hangout with Maryn :) 

Lillehammer in the Snow

Me quenching my thirst with some snow

At the top of the ski jump with Steinar

The view from the top

Fred=Peace in Norsk

At the Art Museum 

Maryn and I discussing how creepy Katie is when she takes pictures

LILLEHAMMER

AKA: Field Study or The Longest Paper of My Life

So the due date of my research paper is November 29th, the paper is approximatively 20 pages long with some (in my mind) intense formatting regulations, including an abstract and table of contents. That is much more extreme than any paper I've written at any point in my academic career thus far. It should be interesting, and by interesting I mean rather awful since I have some where around eleven days to write the whole paper. 

Other than that things at Nansen have been going well, Kate and I have been interviewing people, both staff and students. It's interesting the different types of things that the peace center does, though not many of them actually pertain to my research. For my research I have been reading a lot of articles from Ebsco Host and a few books from Nansen's library. 

THE FUTURE

My time in Europe is rapidly diminishing. On Friday I head to London for the weekend to visit with Austin. After that (and before) it's full on writing time until the 29th. The 26th-28th Kate and I will be at a seminar in Lillehammer that is about Democratic Leadership. We present our papers formally the 30th- Dec 2nd and after that we are basically done. Dr. Feller leaves the 5th so Kate and I have decided to also leave the 5th and go to Paris for a couple of days. The 10th we are still planning on going into Oslo to see what we can of the Nobel Presentation. Then Kate and I head to Brussels the 11th. Of course none of these travels are set in stone yet since we haven't purchased tickets... but it is the general plan. The 15th I head back to the states. 

Bon Voyage Daniel

Tonight we had a surprise family dinner for Daniel, because he is leaving on the 8th for America... here are some pictures.

Me and Kate

Chef Hailey

Getting ready for the surprise

STEAK!

Thats all for now, we had a really great time and ate really great food!!

Elverum, Halloween, Countdowns

Elverum


I went with Hailey on Monday of last week to Elverum to visit the Travelers Museum. The Travelers are what the Romani (Gypsy) people are called in Norway and Sweden. The museum was nice, not very large, but interesting. Apparently the Travelers that live in the area were very hesitant to have the museum made and requested that it highlight the culture and positive aspects rather than the way the Travelers were oppressed. They were apparently concerned about the discrimination would come back if people reminded of it. Though the few panels they did have about the oppression were mind boggling, it changed my view of Norway as this perfect country.

We also went to Elverum on Wednesday to give presentations on how our countries view conflict resolution. First though we were treated to a lovely dinner.

Then we went back to give our presentations, but no one showed up to see them. So we gave them to each other and to Steinar, who works at NAMAS (The Namibian Association) (which is where we were presenting/who took us out to eat). It was actually really fun and allowed us to really talk about things rather than just presenting them. Steinar also told us a lot of things about Norway that we didn't know before, like that Norway supplies around 1/3 of the weapons used by NATO in the war in the Middle East. And that they make this one bomb that you shoot into a building and it sucks all of the oxygen out then replaces it with poison gas. Norway as a Peace Nation? Maybe not...

NAMAS also has a second hand store attached to it, it was great, I got an awesome pair of boots that are really warm and waterproof!


Halloween


So for Halloween Kate and I decided to be Greek Goddesses. We decided upon this because of our limited supplies.

Things needed to make a classy Greek Toga: White Sheet, some sort of belt, leaves

This is me ripping up a sheet to make belts

Finished Project 

And again

Then we walked to Hydranten (the student pub) then walked back to the dorms to get Kate's ID. We met up with Gonzalo and walked to met everyone else at the dance club. Here are a few photos of more costumes...

Hailey and Catherine as hippies

The boys as... businessmen? 

Gonzalo and I on the walk home

Gonzalo Gabriele and I, a perfect rendition of each of our personalities

Countdowns

4 Days until we are done with classes

9 Days until Maryn (Kate's friend, and my soon to be friend) comes to visit

17 Days until I head to London to visit Austin

24 Days until Kate and I go to Brussels

31 Days until we turn in our final papers

39 Days until Kate and I go to Bergen

43 Days until I'm back in the States 

I love it here, 43 days sounds like way to few. I miss home, but I know that I am going to miss everyone here as well... Too bad you can't have it all

The Ups and Downs of Week Ten

Week Ten, oh wow already?

This week was filled with some highs and some lows... or perhaps they aren't lows so much as snaps back into reality.

(In order to not bore you with too much text and too few pictures I will be mixing in some pretty pictures of Hamar in autumn courtesy of Kate)

One being that Kate and I are no longer going to the Balkans at all. The tickets were both expensive and inconvenient (spend 2 nights in London and only get 3 days in Macedonia). So we have decided to just do our research in Lillehammer at the Nansen Center for Peace and Dialogue. Which is great in its self. We have full use of their library plus the PRIO (Peace and Research Institute of Oslo) library. We also can of course interview the dialog workers that are at the center while we were there.

Kate and I were also invited to view/participate in a workshop that Nansen is putting on for politicians from Montenegro on how to be a peace promoting leader. This should be pretty great and extremely informational...even if it doesn't exactly pertain to either of our subjects directly.

I have a chosen to focus my paper on the Romani people in the Balkans and their struggle to gain an identity, as well has how the war in the Balkans effected this process. I am also going to look into how dialogue has been used to help their situation.

November is going to be a crazy month for sure. Kate's friend Maryn is coming to visit from Switzerland. Kate and I are potentially going to Brussels for a few days. I am going to London to visit Austin for a weekend. Plus I will be doing all of my research and going to Nansen in between all of this. Our final papers are due the second week of December and we present around then as well.

I got my ticket for back home... I found this great website studentuniverse.com that gets students super cheap flights. You just have to prove that you are a student which is a relatively easy process. My flight was somewhere around $600 which was half the price that we could find otherwise. So I will be home the 15th of December.

-Noreen

3 Observations of Today
1. Medieval Long Bow shooting is sweet to watch
2. Fall turns to winter rather rapidly in this part of the world
3. Time really does fly by

Lillehammer + Ski Jump + Stairs + Field Study + Confusion = Week 9

On Friday we went to Lillehammer,which is about a 45 minute train ride from Hamar. We went to visit the Nansen Dialogue Center, which is where one of our lecturers is from. It is also where Catherine Katie and I are going to be doing our field study here in a few weeks.

It was great, the city is beautiful and we got to meet some actual dialogue workers from Serbia and Kosovo. They talked to us about what Nansen does in the Balkans and what they do while they are there. It was really interesting to hear their different approaches, especially compared to Stienar's (our lecturer) approach because he is not much of a planner and just plays everything by ear.

They not only do work in the Balkans but on occasion they bring people from those countries up to Lillehammer to have conferences and discussions. Part of the conference is touring around the city of Lillehammer, which hosted the 1994 winter Olympic games. This includes walking down the ski jump. Stienar told us that they use this walk as a way to have a common bonding experience. If everyone is sore from walking down a million stairs then you all have something in common to talk about. So we all walked down a million stairs and now have that as a common bonding experience.

The view from the top

View from half way

At the bottom! After 1.2 million stairs

Me+Kate

Yeah, we started at the top

The Olympic touch

Field Study is making me excited. I think that I am going to try to focus my research on the Romani people and how the conflict in the Balkans affected there path to being recognized as an ethnic group. I'm really excited and have started reading some books about it, but here is where the confusion comes in. I'm not sure what exactly i'm looking for, or how to go about finding any of it. Also our trip to the Balkans is not going as well as we were hoping. We were all psyched up and ready to go Belgrade, Serbia until we found out that they don't actually do field work at that office. So now we are hoping to go to Skopje, Macedonia. At that office they do field work and if is a short way from a few other centers that do field work in the area.  Another plus is that we would have our own driver and car to take us around while we are there. However Skopje is really hard to fly into and very expensive. Which is a bummer. So now we are trying to get things worked out there.

So that is the end of week 9 of 18.... Things are great, the people are great, school is great I hope this continue on this path. 

-Noreen

3 Observations of Today 

1.) Family meals, even if you aren't particularly conversing with everyone, are always better. 

2.) Fall is beautiful... It makes up for the cold

3.) I can almost feel winter in the air