My First Week

My first week in Norway has felt like a month. There has been so much crammed into such a small amount of time that I don't even remember half of the things that happened. It was only last Sunday that I met my family and now it already feels like I am home. My host family consists of the nicest people you could find in Norway. I feel so lucky to have gotten them as my family for a year. Everyday feels like a new adventure and a new start. I wake up and think, I am going to talk to do this today, and what I think I will do never actually goes as I had thought.

Everything is different here. From the food, to the school, to the stop lights, to the juice. First lets talk about food. An average Norwegian breakfast is bread with meat and cheese on it, but my family was nice and bought me honey nut cheerios so it would be similar to what I ate at home. Then for school lunch you have what is called a "matpakke", literally translated to packed food. It is basically a sandwich. But not an American sandwich that is meat and cheese between two slices of bread, but an open face sandwich. And you don't put it in a brown bag with some chips and fruit on the side, but it is only the sandwich either in a Tupperware container or wrapped in a special white paper to give it the effect of looking like a paper bag. Now lets move to dinner: this week we have had salmon (with vegetables and bread), meat cakes (with potatoes and surkål, which is like sauerkraut, smothered in a brown sauce), and fish cakes (with vegetables and potatoes, smothered in a yellow sauce), and an Italian soup (with bread). We of course had dinner the other two days of the week I was here, I just forgot what we had. The meat cakes and fish cakes are a traditional Norwegian dishes.

This is a picture of the fish cake in the yellow sauce. 

Everything that I have tasted so far I have liked, except for the surkål. Luckily, my host mom said that we probably won;t have that very often. 

Now the driving. In Norway the roads are very narrow, however, two cars going opposite directions manage to go on the road at the same time. Do you want to know how? Well, one drives on someone lawn or through someones driveway to get past. The street lights warn you with a yellow light not only when the light is turning form green to red, but also from red to green. Norway's largest highway is a whopping 4 lanes across (2 on each side at the widest part)!!

Today I got to go sailing in the Sandefjord Fjord with my host dad and Nezzoz, the dog. It was fun and the fjord was gorgeous. There were even small cottages on little islands in the fjord. My host dad also told me who lived where and what they did to make all the money in order to buy the house fjord-side. 

This is me steering the boat (don't worry I didn't crash...) 

A picture of the fjord. 

Me and Nezzoz 

Nezzoz in his cute life vest!

Yesterday I got to go on a walk in the woods with my host mom and Nezzoz. That was beautiful. Being a girl from Southern California it isn't everyday that you walk into a forest. It was weird because the forest was right next to the road, which was right next to houses, and a block away from the water. Usually when I think of the forest it is a deserted area with only trees and elves.

The view from atop a mountain. 

My host mom and Nezzoz. 

TREES!!

Learning Norwegian is a pain and not being bale to understand anything anyone says is even worse. Hopefully by Christmas I will be knowing at least some of the language. I had English class today and I thought I was in heaven... the teacher spoke English!! She explained everything we were doing in English and only spoke Norwegian when the other students did not understand. What we were going over was how to analyze a novel, which was what we learned in th or 7th grade, so I felt pretty accomplished.

Well I survived my first week and lets hope I can survive the next 10 months!