He Stowed it in His Tucker-Bag

Today was jam packed thats for sure.

To begin with all of the international students met to have breakfast. This meant I got to meet all of the fabulous people I will be spending the next four months with. It was great. Any apprehensions I had about what things would be like here are gone. The three PLU girls that are here and I hung out all day, off and on with some others students from varying countries.

The day started off with a convocation of sorts after the breakfast. This was almost entirely in Norsk so I'm not totally sure what all went on but I'm sure it was the same as what happens at every other University. Though we did all have to sing a couple songs together, which was different. One of which being Waltzing Matilda, I have no idea why we sang that one but it was a good time.

This is one of the music teachers,
he played us a cool drum solo

This is.. I think the Dean of
students

This is Anja, she is a famous
handball player she spoke
about facing adversity and working
hard for want you want

Here we are parading around

After Convocation there was a little parade of all the students through the town back to campus. We had a meeting for our Society and Culture program. Inger is in charge and she is a wonderful woman. Very energetic and excited to teach and to learn. I am certain that things are going to be very fun and that we are all going to learn a lot. After the meeting was a very long tour that left us starving for lunch by the end. So the girls and I cooked up some spaghetti in my room and hung out for a while before going grocery shopping.

This is a crazy map that Inger drew showing all the places
around the world people from our group are from

Grocery shopping was an adventure. Not only are we super poor college kids but things in Norway are expensive. Also, I'm not sure if you are aware, they are in a foreign language. So we spent a lot of time looking at pictures, trying to use our dictionaries and doing mental math. Basically, we looked very silly the whole time. I am sure of that. In the end Catherine and I have decided to split our food for the time being. On our first trip around the store we ended up with a lot of odds and ends but no protein of any kind. After doing a quick inventory of our things we realized we had no main dishes only lots of sides. So we went scouting again. We managed to identify some salmon and some turkey lunch meat, though lunch meet comes in very very small packages. Overall I would say that shopping is one of the funniest things that we will be doing while we are here. Each new item is a mystery we have to solve.

Also we are trying very hard to learn key phrases in Norsk like "Thank you" is "takk" and sorry is "unnsklyd" Some day we'll be good at this but until then..... Unnsklyd unnsklyd

-Noreen

3 Observations of Today
1. Having the sun rise at 4:30 AM does not help with ones sleeping patterns
2. Americans are attracted to Wifi like flies to honey. We can sense it.
3. I will be walking alot