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