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.

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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.

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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!