Slobs ftw!

I've made a serious effort this weekend to get all my reading and chores done. I promised myself I was going to keep on top of everything this semester. I spent two days reading a book for one of my Scandinavian literature classes - Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, if it means anything to anyone - only to get an email from my lecturer telling me he'd moved that lecture to April(!) and we now had to read a whole new book for Wednesday. Fail.

This morning I thought I'd take a break from the reading to do some food shopping, because I'm down to crackers and crackers. So out I went, walked down to the light rail stop, waited for half an hour before deciding I'd just go to the local shop (which is reeeeally expensive) and get some essentials. I paid for my stuff, and trotted gaily out the door just in time to see one of the trains derail itself and shoot straight towards me.

On a normal day

Moral of the story: just stay indoors, sleep and watch shit TV. It's not nearly as soul-crushing and/or dangerous.

_

Local newspaper's report on the incident: http://www.bt.no/nyheter/lokalt/Bybanen-sporet-av-1237159.html

A new semester

The new semester here in Bergen's got off to a flying start. After one day of lectures I was ready for the weekend, but I think that has less to do with the lectures being hard work and more to do with a severe lack of sleep.

This semester I'm studying Old Norse, Scandinavian literature before 1900 (both taught in Norwegian) and 20th century Scandinavian literature (taught in English, because I'm told it's a good one for getting the basics of literary analysis down, and I suck at that). I'm not taking the linguistic specialisation in Faroese, or this other course called Monsters, Magic and Manuscripts, and I will continue to tell myself this repeatedly until I stop staring longingly at the coursebooks in the shop.

My Old Norse course is actually being taught by a Dane. He said right at the beginning that if any of the foreign students can't understand him we should say so, but he's easy enough to understand so far (except when he reads out dates - the Danish number system is really messed up. The Norwegians don't understand it either). Today we were translating a text from Old Norse into Norwegian, taking it in turns to read a sentence and then translate it. Obviously, the one time he spoke to me directly would be the one time I couldn't understand him.

'This word means -unintelligible Danish word-, and that means -unintelligible Danish word-.'

'I see,' I said, pretending to write down what he told me.

Ten minutes later I asked the girl next to me what he'd said.

'Beats me. I figured I'd look it up when I got home.'

Plan.

_

The first Scandinavian literature lecture - the Norwegian one - went well, except for reinforcing the fact that I don't have a clue when it comes to these things. The teacher's very sweet and enthusiastic though, so I think it'll be fun. Soooo much reading though. I mean, I know that's to be expected of a literature course, but we've got to read about 20 books and 50 poems, and a couple sagas, and apparently 'EN GANG ER INGENTING!' ('One time is nothing!') so we have to read them all at least twice. I've spent a crazy amount of money on books. About £500 or something. That'll teach me to take two literature courses in one semester.

_

Aside from all this, I'm really beginning to stress out about my dissertation. I really don't have that long to come up with a topic now. They're expecting a proposal from me soon. I know I'd enjoy writing about the war or something historical, but I don't know what specifically. In desperation, I asked Facebook what they thought:

Actually, I'm not all that big on pie, but I seriously took a moment to consider it as a topic. That's how bad it's getting - please someone, help me!

Advent-ures (badum tish!) north of the arctic circle

I figured it was high time I wrote an account of my travels to Tromsø before I forgot everything. One of my many reasons for writing this blog is so that I can read it again when I'm done and go 'oh yeah, remember that!' so it really won't do to put off updating it. Anyhow, on with the tale!

I flew up to Tromsø the day after my exams finished. I had to go via Oslo, which sucked big time because Oslo's always FREEZING at this time of the year. It didn't disappoint, with a temperature of -26 making it painful to breathe if nothing else, seeing as I'd layered up to the max.

Tromsø was a lot warmer, a mere -3. They compensated this by having two foot of snow one had to wade through to get anywhere. I even had the brand new experience of falling in a snow drift. I'm lucky I was with someone really, because I'd have had a hard time getting out of it myself (imagine quick sand, but with snow - and just my arms waving around above the surface... fun times).

On the first day, I decided I wanted to go and have a look at the Arctic Cathedral, across the water from where I was staying in the centre of town. I also wanted to see if the cable car was open so I could have a look at the city in all its glory.

View over the water, taken from the bridge over the water

The Arctic Cathedral, which was actually extremely hard to take a picture of due to its proximity to the bridge and all the trees at the back..

After wandering around that a couple times, I started following the road signs to the cable car. I figured I was on the right track when I overtook a group of Japanese tourists that had clearly not found their snow legs yet. They seemed to be enjoying themselves though. I arrived to find that they were still sending one car up so long as they had the people to fill it.

This perhaps gives you a better idea of all this talk about bridges and such. I was staying on the other side of the water :)





We all trudged a bit further up the mountain to get a better view. It was a somewhat confusing walk, and I think we were all quite pleased there was a few of us, because although we all managed to get up okay by walking on top of the snow, on the way down we were all up to our knees/thighs for some inexplicable reason :/



On the way down again, at 2pm

By the time I got down again, played dominoes with a couple Japanese girls and slithered my way back over the bridge again, it was completely dark. I didn't find it particullarly depressing, being somewhere where you only got about 3 hours daylight (and even then the sun never came over the horizon, it was just sort of twilighty), but something in my head goes 'it's dark, almost time for tea/bed!', so I was a bit all over the place.

Tromsø's Christmas lights, which I think are cute, but my mum says they're tacky (you're no fun, mum :p)

Slightly dodgy night photo across the water to the Arctic Cathedral

Statue/sculpture things I quite liked, near my hotel

The next day, I indulged my inner five year old and went to the local excuse for an aquarium, which had four seals (two bearded, two harbour) that I watched swimming around for a slightly unnatural length of time. I like seals. They also had some of the ugliest fish I've ever seen in my life, which seemed to delight in lifting their heads right up out of the water to go 'bleurgh!!' at you. Ew.

Look, she's smiling! :D

Next day - dog-sledding! It was very exciting. A group of us were driven off into the wilderness of Troms, given a sled and five dogs with the instuctions 'here is the brake, now off you go'. Er, okay. I paired up with a nice woman from Cambridge, and I started off driving while she sat in the passenger seat at the front. All we could really do was trust the dogs as we rushed off blindly into the pitch darkness. I did have a light on my head, but it was hard to stop it slipping off. They were very good though, only having difficultly with some of the bigger hills, when I had to help shove a bit and try not to fall off at the same time. We went for quite a long time, probably about an hour and a quarter or so (which is quite a long time when you have to concentrate on controlling five mental dogs/not bashing up your tail bone too badly in the passenger seat).

Photo taken from the passenger seat. Only one I took because it startled everyone slightly!

A couple of the dogs after we got back

Afterwards, we had dinner in a lavvo (a kind of Sami tent), which was wonderfully cosy after speeding through the night in temperatures as low as -22 for the last hour and a bit. Fish soup and lefse - yummy. Although I was kind of looking forward to trying reindeer stew, which my friend had been given when she did the trip two months previously (and which she didn't eat!). But no matter, the soup was awesome. And the whole thing was weeell worth the money. I'd quite like to do it again sometime in the spring when I can see my surroundings.

So that be the fabulous tale of my time in Tromsø. It really is a lovely little place. If it hadn't been for the confusing dayllight hours, I could totally have envisioned myself studying there. People were lovely too :)