Fun with Statistics

Kevin and I flew to Iowa City yesterday for my college homecoming. It has been fun being back in my home town, but I can't shut up about how much everything has changed since I was in college. A lot of my favorite haunts have been replaced with new businesses but some things have stayed the same, like a plethora of Mexican restaurants in the area--yum! We were in the mood for some Mexican food, and we passed a restaurant with a big sign advertising $1.99 margaritas. The last margarita I had was in Oslo and it cost $20. That is 1000% more expensive! Being an avid bargain hunter, I of course needed to drink up some of that sweet, lime flavored savings! The margarita was big, strong and delicious...I decided to save more money and order another one. That was also big, strong and delicious, and I felt even giddier about all the money I had saved. I considered saving even more by going for a third margarita, but unfortunately, that kind of logic buys nothing but a headache the next morning--ow! Anyway, we're meeting friends shortly and we can't wait to keep bar hopping and "bargain hunting."

Why Am I Still Awake?

My bags are packed, the dogs are at the kennel, and I should be in bed, gettting a good night's sleep before my flight tomorrow, but I'm too jittery. I'm not a big fan of flying (even though I have logged thousands of frequent flier miles this past year) and I'm off to the U.S. again in the morning. I'm flying alone this time, and as anyone who is nervous about flying can attest, it is infinitely preferable to be seated by a loved one and be able to grab his hand during take-off than to be seated by a stranger who will neither let you grip his hand nor rest your head on his shoulder once the Dramamine kicks in!

Kevin leaves Shanghai tomorrow, and after spending a couple of days in Norway, he will join me in New York on Wednesday. On Thursday, we will fly together to Iowa for the University of Iowa's homecoming weekend. It's hard to believe, but it has been 10 years since I graduated with my B.A. so it seemed like a good year to go back and reminisce with friends. (Of course, had I known last spring that we would be in the craze-inducing process of trying to relocate from Norway to New York, I probably wouldn't have booked the tickets...oh well, we're going to have so much fun, and really, spending a weekend enjoying parades, football and a trip down memory lane might be exactly what my addled brain needs!)

Oh, the pictures above are of Randsfjorden. The dogs' kennel is located on the shores of that gorgeous lake--kind of like a canine 4 star resort!

Where in the World is Kevin?

To find out, click this link!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20829511/
Yep, that's right, he's in the middle of all that craziness. I just talked to him and he's fine. He said the storm didn't live up to all the hype, and I think I might have detected a bit of disappointment in his voice! Anyway, he's warm and dry and kicking back a beer with a few of his coworkers right now.

My New Favorite Word

My favorite word in the Norwegian language has always been pengepung. It means coin purse, and it is just so much fun to say! Everything changed a couple of nights ago, when I learned a new word that made me laugh out loud: smilehull! It means dimple, but literally translated, it means "smile hole." How cute is that!?! Unfortunately, like pengepung, smilehull is a tough word to fit into everyday conversation...

Fun with Beer and Music

Last night, Kevin and I went with Anders and Nina to an Irish music festival in Dokka. The concert was held in a huge tent furnished with long wooden picnic tables and benches, a booth serving up Irish stew and not so Irish pølser (hot dogs), and lots of beer, wine and Irish coffee. The first act was "Lassie and the Lads", a Norwegian group that performs traditional Irish music. They were fantastic, and I never would have known that they weren't Irish until they started chatting with the audience in fluent Norwegian. I must say, it's pretty easy to make me happy--a nice glass of wine and a rousing rendition of "Whiskey in the Jar" put a smile on my face all evening long!

Next up was a dance troupe doing Riverdance-esque footwork--very impressive! Some of the drunker audience members were standing up on the picnic tables and benches, trying to dance along--not as impressive, but really funny! The last performer of the night was Johnny Logan, a three time Eurovision winner. Before I moved to Norway I had never heard of the Eurovision contest, but it is a 50 year old continent-wide talent contest in the E.U. Each country presents a singer or a musical group (complete with crazy dancing and costumes that put ice dancers to shame). After watching all the different acts on T.V., everyone in the E.U. can vote for their favorite act. Last year's winner was a group from Finland called Lordi who dressed up like some kind of dinosaur/gladiator hybrids, and this year I believe the winner was a singer from Serbia.

Anyway, Johnny Logan has won this contest in the past and is hugely popular in Norway. I also liked his performance, but my enjoyment was tempered slightly due to a full glass of beer being chucked through the air and landing squarely on my head. I think it might have come from the drunk girls dancing on the table behind us, but I can't really say for sure. All I know is that I am very grateful that it was just Norwegian Ringnes beer--I think a glassful of thick, authentic Irish beer like Guinness running down my face would have been a little nastier! Oh well, even though I smelled like a brewery on the drive home, my hair is super soft and shiny today!

Two Things

Thing the first: I am OLD! Tomorrow night, we are going to an Irish music/dance festival in Dokka which begins at 8 PM and ends at 2 AM. I really want to go, but I keep thinking about how tired I am going to be, how I had better get to bed early tonight...when did sleep become such a high priority in my life?

Thing the second: Kermit the Dog has a hot spot which he refuses to leave alone. I took him to the vet today and got some cream for his poor leg. The vet recommended putting a sock over his leg to keep him from gnawing on it any more. The vet also said that if the sock doesn't discourage him and his leg doesn't heal, we will have to get him an Elizabethan collar. 99.9% of me really wants the pup to heal quickly, with just the trusty sock, but .1% of me thinks the Elizabethan collar would be awesome! You know, for all the photo ops!

Stress

Wow, things have been moving fast around here, my head is kind of spinning! We have already had movers to the house to look at all of our furniture and estimate how big our container will need to be. (Answer: very big. We need to get rid of a lot more than a box of rocks to be able to squash our stuff into a smaller container!) All the people from this particular moving company have been really nice and accomodating--I don't foresee any unsanctioned bonfires in our yard this time around! But really, I don't care that much about our belongings getting back safely--they're just things which can be replaced if necessary. I am freaking out about the animals, though! It's ridiculous, I know, they all made it to Norway safely, and they'll make it back to the U.S. safely. No one seemed to suffer any long term psychological issues from the first voyage--the cats haven't developed catnip dependency problems, their catnaps seem undisturbed by airplane nightmares, the dogs continue to chase sticks and woodland creatures, their appetites are insatiable as always. We are using Continental Airlines--their cargo area is kept at the same temperature and pressure as the passenger cabin, and they have a direct flight from Oslo to Newark. We are using a pet moving company to arrange all the details for us, and they will pick the animals up and get them through customs in Newark, and then drive them up to Syracuse. (The dogs' carriers are too big to fit onto the small jets which fly up to Syracuse, and also, I just feel better knowing that there will be no issues with them trying to make a connecting flight.) It was insanely hard to get the animals into Norway (a non-rabies country), but it should be much easier to get them back to the U.S. All they need is proof of a current rabies vaccine, a letter from our Norwegian vet stating that they have resided in Norway for at least 6 months, and a health certificate issued by our Norwegian vet within 10 days of their flight. Importing animals into the U.S. is only slightly overwhelming, versus the mind-melting difficulty of getting them to Norway. I can handle this, right? I keep reminding myself that at least for the animals, there is only one terrifying day of travel that they must get through. They don't have to go through all the anxiety and worry in the weeks leading up to the move--that mental distress is all mine!

Gjøvik Pictures

I'm not a huge fan of modern Norwegian architecture, but I think some of the older buildings are really beautiful. Above are a few of my favorites in Gjøvik: the first is a very old restaurant, Spiseri. We always take visitors who wish to sample moose or whale or reindeer, as traditional Norwegian cuisine is on the menu. I guess the union used to meet on the top floor and at one time people who worked at Kevin's company weren't welcome to eat in the restaurant, but luckily for us, the old tensions have settled and we have never been driven out halfway through our meal! The second building is one of the many bakeries in our town. Seriously, for a town this small, Gjøvik is very rich in pastries. I think Norway in general is not for the glucose-intolerant or Atkins Diet devotees! The third photo is of a church in the center of town, built in 1882. I don't know much else about it (but I have a hunch the denomination is Lutheran!) The last photo is of our train station. Norway is full of lovely old train stations, but I think this is one of the prettiest that I have seen. Anyway, that's our town (at least for another 2 months!)...I realized that the majority of my photos are from other bigger, more well known cities, but since most of my time in Norway has been spent in Gjøvik, I figured I should devote at least one blog entry to the little town best known for all its white houses along the lake.

A Trifecta of Rarities

This past weekend was a strange one...first, Gjøvik was pelted by pea sized hail for a couple of minutes on Saturday. Our Norwegian friends said that they had never seen such big hail before--I guess the mountains generally protect this area of Norway from any kind of extreme weather. It wasn't big enough to damage the car, but the poor flowers took a beating!

The second unusual happening of the weekend made us dusty, gritty and a little sore. We got in touch with our inner stone masons and helped our friends build a wall. I'm talking mixing our own concrete in a big mixer (I was in charge of shoveling gravel into buckets to be added to mixing concrete), building up an iron framwork, and creating a stone facade for the outside of the wall . Kevin and I used to be DIY pros--we gutted our beautiful 1880 Victorian and spent the next 3 years restoring it. We (and when I say we, I mean Kevin) wired, plumbed, installed dry wall, swirled plaster ceilings and refinished hardwood floors. In my defense, I did most of the painting--that counts for something, right? Anyway, we did all that work, finally finished the house, and then promptly sold it and moved to Norway. Since moving here, other than refinishing the floors and painting the master bedroom and guest room last August, we haven't done one bit of DIY. It has been nice to relax on weekends (and I love the fact that my hands are super soft and uncalloused again!) but every once in a while, when we hear that someone else is tackling a home improvement project, we get a little nostalgic for back-breaking labor, and foolishly volunteer ourselves for the task. It was actually a lot of fun (I think a mid-afternoon waffle break is a tradition which we will have to bring back to the U.S. with us) and in the end, the project helped us to lighten our load of stuff to haul back to America.

Which brings me to rarity number three. Kevin and I have very different ideas of what should be thrown away and what should be moved from state to state, country to country. I am a minimalist at heart--I feel like if we haven't used something in the last 6 months, we should either give it away, recycle it or toss it. Kevin has been accumulating things for 35 years and believes that nothing should ever be thrown away, EVER, because what if one day you need it? Seriously, early in our marriage, I threw out a bunch of old, ratty, holey socks and T shirts...big mistake! "I could have used them for rags, how could you have gotten rid of them!" he complained. Occasionally, if I really believe that we are holding on to something completely worthless, something that he doesn't even remember having, I will sneak it out to the trash, but generally, I just watch the piles o'crap amass in the garage, the basement, the attic. Kevin has a big box of rocks which he collected during childhood, which has moved with him from Poughkeepsie, New York to Potsdam, New York to Iowa City, Iowa to Chicago, Illinois to Oriskany Falls, New York to Gjøvik, Norway. I have asked him several times, while packing for various moves, if he was planning to take the big box of rocks along again...the answer was always a resolute yes. But, now that our friends are building a stone wall, he has donated his box of rocks to them! And as he was explaining that he collected the rocks, many of which contain fossils, with his deceased grandfather, I felt like the biggest ass in the world for ever asking him to get rid of them! Anyway, our friends were touched that he would give them these interesting rocks that obviously meant so much to him, and they plan to use them at the top of the wall where they can be easily seen. And we don't have to haul the big box of rocks back with us! Everybody wins!!! Woohoo, what a weekend!

The International Language of Fat Cats

So the furnace guy (not the twirly mustache guy, someone else) came a couple of days ago. He spent two hours working on the furnace, but between my crappy Norwegian and his rusty English, he really couldn't explain to me what was wrong, or how to avoid the problem in the future. In fact, the only successful communication that we had occurred when he saw Toonces. He exclaimed how big and fat the cat is (in Norwegian, which I actually understood). Then he peppered me with questions about how much the cat weighs (20 pounds), how old is the cat (6 years), how did the cat get to be so fat (I don't know, he doesn't eat that much, he has tons of toys to play with and kitty condos to climb on, he wrestles and plays chase with Honey the dog, there is nothing physically wrong with him according to the vet, he is just, um, big boned).

(This conversation took place while I was in my pajamas. Kevin called me from work very early in the morning to let me know the furnace guy was on the way...as the doorbell was ringing. So I was wearing green flannel pajamas and my bright red rubber rain boots, because inexplicably, they were the only shoes I could find in my rush to get to the door. Yep, Toonces and I are all kinds of awesome, real American ambassadors!)

What Makes A "Good" Expat?

Last week while in the U.S., I talked with a woman who had spent 7 months with her military husband in Germany several years ago. She said she hated every minute of it, and that looking back, she still feels like she lost 7 months of her life. I also have met several Americans who moved to Norway years and years ago, who now consider Norway their true home. We have Norwegian friends who have lived in Brazil and Singapore--they absolutely loved Brazil and would move back there in a heartbeat, but they were so miserable in Singapore that they left a year earlier than intended. What ingredients are key to a successful expat experience? In the case of our Norwegian friends, in Brazil, they didn't speak Portuguese when they first moved, their apartment wasn't finished so they ended up living in a hotel for the first 6 months there, but because they were welcomed so warmly by the Brazilian people, they had a wonderful experience. In Singapore, they had no problem communicating in English, they had a brand new, huge apartment and a housekeeper, but because they found the people to be less friendly, their expat experience was ultimately unhappy.

I have been thinking about being an expat a lot lately, probably because my experience is drawing to a close. I don't know why I never got over my homesickness, why I had such a hard time adjusting to life in Norway. I think part of it might be the that the town we live in is small, in a rural setting. Because so many of the people who live here have always lived here and there are very few transplants, perhaps it's a more insular society than say, Oslo or other larger Norwegian cities. I suspect, though, that my dissatisfaction has more to do with my personality than with any demographics of the area in which we live. I don't like change, and although we have moved frequently, each move has been hard for me. I love the idea of growing roots in an area, of being able to give crazy, random directions like, "You take a right by where the Jenkins' barn burned down 5 years ago, drive 2 houses past the yellow house with the 3 legged dog in the yard, and you're there. Can't miss it!" Our stay in Norway was originally supposed to be 3 years, but after a year, I felt so sad. Our life in New York was still recent enough that we could have it back, friends and all, our life in Norway still felt very empty compared to the life we left behind, and even if we met more friends and began to feel more at home here, we would just be leaving it behind in a couple of short years. I guess it stopped seeming novel and interesting and started seeming a little pointless to me.

I think that the language barrier was also a huge difficulty for me. I tried really hard to learn Norwegian, but after studying intensively for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week for 5 months, I realized that I was nowhere near fluency. I was at the top of my class, my teachers were so impressed with my pronounciation and grammatical ability, but in every social situation I was in, the conversation flew past me. I have never felt so frustrated with myself as I did at those parties where everyone was laughing and joking and having a great time while I sat there in a fog of incomprehension. That being said, would I have been happier in England or Australia, where I could speak my native language? I don't know, I still might have been homesick, and again, I'm not overly adventurous...but maybe I could have been involved in enough interesting, stimulating, funny conversations which would have energized me and helped me through the harder times.

Oh well, I guess it's a little late for me to learn the secret of being a successful expat as we're moving back the second week of November. (The photo above is of our new backyard overlooking Oneida Lake in New York.) But I really am interested in how some people are able to start over completely in a brand new place and create something wonderful for themselves. I know that some expats read my little blog, so please comment freely if you know some things (or lots of things) that I don't!

Foliage, Fall, Furnaces and Facial Hair

It was a gorgeous, crisp day today. The sun was shining and Lake Mjøsa was a brilliant blue, but wow, was it ever cold! The thermometer didn't reach 55 and the wind was whipping up on top of the hill at Eiktunet where I stopped to take some pictures. I have been in denial all summer long, believing that the weather would eventually warm up, but I think it's time to admit defeat and pack the short sleeves and sandals away. The newspapers have announced that fall is officially here in eastern Norway, and this blustery day, in addition to the already harvested fields and the red and yellow foliage forced me to face the truth...sigh. I do love autumn, I just wasn't quite ready for it yet.

It's definitely time to crank up the furnace, but unfortunately nothing happened when we turned it on tonight. It gave a couple of encouraging sputters, and then silence. Kevin sent an email to the landlord, so perhaps he will quickly contact the furnace repairman, and by tomorrow evening I will be able to feel my fingers and toes again. I'm not looking forward to the furnace guy's visit...he has a crazy, twirly mustache reminiscent of a 1920's movie villain, and while I know that the polite thing to do is look him in the eye when he talks to me, I can't help but stare at that odd, waxed and curled mustache, bobbing and weaving as his mouth moves. Hmm, maybe I should wear sunglasses tomorrow, so he can't see my eyes fixated on his facial hair. I'll be wearing several layers of clothes, plus big fuzzy slippers, a hat and mittens, so amongst all that wardrobe insanity, maybe he won't even notice the shades? Or maybe he'll just chalk it up to hypothermia!

Warning!!! Extreme Cuteness Ahead!!!

We're safely back in Norway now, and after a long evening nap, I'm wide awake at 12:30 at night...cursed jet lag! I downloaded my pictures from our trip to the U.S. and couldn't resist sharing these little bundles of joy with you. A couple of my friends are fostering litters of kittens for the local animal shelter until the babies are old enough to be spayed/neutered and adopted out. I was so happy to get the chance to snuggle with these little guys, and I can't wait to get back to the U.S. and start volunteering at an animal shelter again.

Progress

Kevin and I have accomplished a lot this week! We bought a house, we bought 2 cars (I am now the proud owner of a red VW Beetle--meep, meep!), we measured our new yard and ordered fencing so that the crazy dogs can be contained, we measured our new house and picked out tiles for the floors, and best of all, we got to spend lots of time with our friends. This past week has really reinforced our decision to relocate back to the U.S.--we have missed our friends so much and can't wait to live so close again. Tomorrow, we fly back to Norway. I need to come up with a plan to see some more of the country in the 2 months we have left. I hope we can still fit in a trip to the southern coast and I would love to do some hiking in the mountains this fall. Also, I don't think the "Norwegian Experience" is complete without a trek across the Swedish border to buy cheap groceries and liquor...maybe that should be next on our agenda!