Happy solstice, everybody!

So i meant to post this last weekend, but me and my very busy schedule...... i didn't get around to it. :) Last weekend, we did a couple of fun things. Saturday we got up and went to a local farmer's market. It was absolutely pouring down rain, but that didn't seem to keep anyone from coming out and enjoying the goods. There were tons of cheeses, jams, and sausage... and lots of samples! yum! We picked up some elgpolse (moose sausage). Odd and confusing language twist: "elk" is norwegian for "moose"... apparently there are no actual elk in norway. Didn't stop the sausage from being a pretty tasty snack with a baguette and some cheese! We also went by a tent that was making belgian waffles... the smell was unbelievable! of course I had to have one. :) It was topped with sour cream and "wood berries" the woman told us - she didn't know the english names.
In good news, we switched our shipping company from fed ex to the postal service, so our boxes are currently en route and should be here next week. Its a good thing, because i think i'm getting carpal tunnel from computer games...
We walked up to the fort that stands over trondheim last week. It's a pretty good hike up a steep hill but well worth it. the views of the city, the river, and the cathedral are beautiful from up there. And it's just a little jog back down the hill and into Rosenborg, the area of town where our apartment is. (By the way, if there are any soccer fans out there, i just found out that the Rosenborg soccer team is the top ranked team in norway at the moment. or, at least, i think thats what the tv said. the announcer may have said "the rosenborg soccer team is the #1 worst team ever!")
The summer solstice was last sunday at exactly 7:45 pm here. so we walked around town, took some pictures in town square (check out how high the sun still is in the pics!), and had a beer in a pub along the river to celebrate. We tried to get a few shots around midnight to show folks how light it is all night long. that definitely takes some getting used to. we don't have the super dark shades in our apartment, so i keep waking up at 3am thinking it must be 10 in the morning. :) Depending on the light to judge what time it is doesn't work so well.
This week has been beautiful weather, especially compared to when we arrived. Our first week was cool, wet, and rainy, around the 50's every day. this week has been sunny, blue skies, and low 70's. Of course, when it's nice in Norway, be prepared: don't expected any guys walking down the street to be wearing shirts, and bikini tops are to be worn under anything so that at a moment's notice you can rip your clothes off and lay down in an available patch of grass to worship the sun. The weather is interesting. Walking around town, I often think it feels hotter than it really is. mid 60's feels like mid 70's... but there isn't any real humidity, so i think it must have something to do with the sun's intensity this far north. Yesterday afternoon we went to a nearby cafe for kaffe and an eplemuffin. It was about 4 pm and we sat outside on the patio enjoying the sunshine. After a bit we realized that 4 pm sun in norway is rather like 1 pm sun at home - pretty high in the sky and likely to fry a white little girl like me. Good thing that revelation hit before I ended up looking like a lobster.
During the days i've been doing some short runs around town.. Of course, this is when I see some really great scenery and never have the camera with me. My favorite run takes me down the Bakklandet, pretty section of town with restaurants, cafes, and shops in the old style painted wooden buildings. Then a little gravel path takes you down right by the River Nid, with great views across the river of the cathedral. I go across a cute little wooden footbridge to the other bank, run along the far bank for awhile, and the turn back across the river over the "Old Bridge" or the "Gamle bybro" in norwegian, which is probably the most photographed place in town. The only problem with this route: running on cobblestones through Bakklandet is not easy!

midnight:

bring on the flotemysost!

So i'm feeling a bit better about the whole "no clothes" thing.. thanks to a 39 kroner (8 dollar) latte. Ain't nothin coffee can't fix. (Can i get an amen from dad and barb?)
I decided to brave walking around town by myself this afternoon - which i hate when i don't know the language. it generally just takes me a few days to get over that. :) I did the daily grocery store trip and decided to pick up some of the local cheese called flotemysost. It is a brown sweet cheese that is supposed to be good on bread or for dessert with fruit. It's actually really interesting - part cow's milk and part goat milk (apparently the more goat's milk in it, the sharper it is). It tastes like it has caramel in it! definitely a much sweeter cheese than i am used to, but good. :)
A couple of other interesting food notes (of course, these are the things I notice!): a "tex-mex" sandwich around here has tzaziki sauce on it... and an "american" pizza has "kebab sauce". i'm not really sure what kebab sauce is, considering that kebabs around here are a little different than what we consider to be kebabs. "Kebabs" are apparently the ultimate after drinking food. The routine is to get your friends together, drink at home for a few hours, the go to the bars for a few hours, then go to the clubs for a few hours, then some kind of "after party thing" (i think, anyway, we didnt get a good translation on that last one), and then after the long night of drinking you go get a kebab. There are TONS of kebab places in town! From the pictures we've seen, it looks like chunks of meat, sauce, lettuce, on a pita (like a gyro, almost) and then french fries stuck in the pita as well. definitely gonna have to give that one a try before we leave.
I walked around the mall across the street a little today and spent my 150 kroner "allowance". I found a BIG (yay!) grocery store that carried cheddar!!! So now i can make my "smack and cheese", as karen calls it. :) that makes me very, very happy... need a little comfort food, and especially since we are completely cooking everything at home it helps to have some standards. I also found a book store with "engelsk" books, so i picked up something to keep me entertained for a while.
weird thing i noticced walking around today: you don't always get change when you buy something. I gave the woman 40 kr today for my latte, and she didn't offer me 1 kr back. Same thing at the grocery stores - if something is 29.50, they won't bother giving you the 50 cent peice. Actually i just discovered today that they even had them when i stuck my money in an automatic machine today and got 50 cents change. weird. Also, the smallest bill you can have is 50 kr.. a little less than 10 bucks. Today i ended up with pocket full of change that was around 30 bucks. :)

arg!!!!!

I am more than a little upset this morning... we got an email from the admin at mit saying fedex won't ship our boxes... something crazy about norway not allowing you to ship "personal effects" like used clothing into the country. which doesn't make any sense to me. Basically i'm really ticked for a couple of reasons.. reason number 1, which is really my own fault - had i known this, i would have packed completely differently. (obviously.) basically when i packed, it didnt matter to me whether something went into the boxes or the suitcase i was taking, so i just threw stuff wherever. which means, currently, i have lots of pants but only about 3 shirts, for the entire summer. i just figured it didn't matter because we thought the boxes would be here around monday at the latest. The 2nd, and worse, reason i'm upset about the current situation - All my "to do" stuff is in the boxes. i have three months worth of books, my resume stuff i needed to be working on, some important emails, all my running gear, and our norway tourguides. So right now, i have three months and literally nothing to put myself to work on. (and yes, i do need the running gear in order to run more than 3 miles. it has my diabetic pouch, my shot bloks and gels, my yoga mat...) And i just finished the only book i brought with me today. Grrrrrrr.

Jeg snakker bare litt norsk!

Wayne left yesterday morning to head up to the university to get his check (yay! paying rent!). I went with him so i could get a run in on the way back. even with my really poor sense of direction, i only got a little lost. :) Back at the apartment, some workers were in the midst of painting - aha!! so the lack of steps IS only a temporary thing! i said hello on the way in - the quickest way to let people know you don't speak norwegian, but apparently the message didn't go through, because they started telling me something that sounded like the muppet's swedish chef. i probably looked something like a deer in headlights and said something completely intelligent like, "duh... is the door wet?" To which the construction guy said, "oh. oh, yeah. we just painted. be careful, the door's still drying." It's really amazing how prevalent english is here.. even folks checking us out in the grocery stores have known english.
Later in the afternoon we went back to the grocery store - this seems to be a daily occurrence - to try to get some flour. wow. only one type of peanut butter anywhere but about 15 different types of flour. After about 15 minutes and consulting the norwegian -english dictionary, we figured out "hvelte mel" was wheat flour.. unfortunately every pack of hvelte mel had some other decription on it too, like "fin" or "sammalt" or "grov"... and none of those words were in our dictionary. a half hour later we left with no flour because we couldn't figure out which brand was plain white flour. :)
Appliances have been fun, too. we made some ham sandwiches for lunch and i decided to melt some cheese on mine in the convection oven. Now, the knobs were actually in English, but this didnt end up helping me much! i turned it to the "grill" knob and turned it on for 30 seconds.. when i opened the door, the whole oven was smoking from the top.. bad sign! maybe it imparts the food with a "naturally smoky flavor"? not sure, but i think i'll be using the regular oven from now on...
We've been losing track of time - really easy to do when the sun doesn't go down. Yesterday we ate "lunch" at 5:30 pm and "dinner" near 10:30.
Today's plans were to get to a bank to get our "D" number so we could start a bank account and then tackle the laundry. This morning was cold and rainy and we both were pretty much soaked by the time we made it to the bank. After an interesting conversation with the receptionist at the bank - the first person we've met that didn't speak english, and the conversation took pretty much what norwegian we do know (we speak very little norwegian. do you speak english? -no. you dont speak norwegian? - no. -not any norwegian? -no. -i dont speak english. - yes, we gathered that.) we applied for our "d-numbers" which should take 3 weeks to get. Until then, we are bank accountless, which is slightly cumbersome. plus, we had to pay 75 kroner just to get our check cashed (about 15 bucks).
Back at the apartment, we tackled the washing machine, with its secret compartment for soap and norwegian buttons.. i sat in the bathroom with a dictionary translating while wayne searched the web for user instructions. thanks karen and maciej for the advice on the washer.. we would never have figured it out if you hadn't warned us pre-trip! When something that you normally think is simple takes a long time to figure out (pretty much everything we've done here) you feel really oddly proud of yourself when get it done, even though it's stupid.... case in point, flour and wash. :)

To Hell and back - literally!

So after a 6 hour flight to London, a 2 hour layover, a 1.5 hour flight to Oslo, another 2 hour layover, and an hour flight to Trondheim, we finally made it. well, almost. The airport is actually in a town called vaernes. so then it was onto a bus for another 40 minute ride. We did drive through the town of Hell. So it's true folks! In the winter, Hell really does freeze over.
We arrived in Trondheim to discover that our apartment building has no front steps... and it quite a jump up to the door! Not sure if this is a work in progress or a permanent thing -my rudimentary norwegian doesn't allow me to read the sign on our door telling us when it's our week to clean the communal stairs in the building, much less figure out why my door is 5 feet off the ground. :) Our apartment is on the third floor of the building. it's super cute, with a nice kitchen, living room, and 2 bedrooms. The roof slopes on one side of the apartment, so we'll have to try to remember not to jump out of bed suddenly or we risk major concussions.
After unpacking and discovering an english tv channel - there is a god, and he wants wayne to be able to watch "the King of Queens" - we decided to hit the market to stock up on some groceries. This proved to be way more challenging than anticipated... recipes on the back of boxes call for measurements like "ss" and "dl"... i have no idea what that means. We spent a lot of time staring at lunch meat packages trying to figure out what was turkey and what was some other mystery meat. shopping is pretty frustrating when you can't read the packages! i found some peanut butter - yeah!! But i was able to decipher on the jar that it's made with "88% peanuts". i can't quite figure out what the other 12% is.... the peanut butter i buy in the states is just peanuts and salt. I thought Eurpean countries were supposed to be more "whole foodish"?? In the end, we only ended up getting enough stuff for breakfast and one other meal.. (yay fajitas!) and we spent close to 55 bucks. :) shew!! i know Norway is expensive but i still get sticker shock when i go out.
Tomorrow's task - i'm going to tackle trying to figure out how to use the washing machine! all the instructions, of course are in Norwegian, so this may end up being a bigger thing than i'm anticipating.