Colds and Cakes

This week has been quite a positive-leading-coefficient parabola, if I've got any other math nerds out there:) If you're not a math nerd and don't appreciate my math humor, I suppose I'll explain it in a less-technical way. Basically, the week started out pretty good; I'd give it a pretty high y-value on my coordinate plane. I had a nice Sunday and Monday, but Monday night my throat started to hurt a little. Tuesday I only made it through one class before going home with what was becoming a nice (well, not really that nice) cold. Wednesday was the worst of it and I was out of school again (this is the vertex of the parabola, the farthest down on the coordinate plane I got this week). Thursday I probably should have stayed home again but a geography test was calling my name, so I pushed through and was able to make it through the day. Friday I was feeling much better, but still not 100%, we're about halfway back to where we started on this parabola, even though technically it extends infinitely in both directions (I'm enjoying this math explanation WAY too much). Friday afternoon I went to see a movie with a friend and Saturday I celebrated the 16th birthday of another friend, bringing me back up to where I had been last Sunday on the happiness coordinate plane. Now that I've successfully bored half of my readers to death, I'll return to your regularly scheduled programming. Hm. This cold is doing weird things to me.

Anywho, I guess I'll start with being sick. I've decided that it is no more fun to be sick in Norway than it is the US. You're welcome for me doing that experiment for you, I know you were considering testing the theory yourself, but there's really no reason to do that now. Thankfully, they do have cough drops in Norway, which I kind of rely on when I have a cold. I had also taken some of the cold medicine I use back home with me when I came, so I took that for a few days. Otherwise it was a lot of tea and honey and watching Modern Family :) I'm still not feeling great, after a few active days the cold has caught back up to me, but I'm hoping this is the last of it so I can be ready for the busy week ahead of me! Just a little side note- no need to tell me that this does not work well with my mathematical model. I'm aware;)

As I mentioned earlier, I went to see a movie on Friday. It was my first time in a Norwegian movie theater, which seems a little weird since I've been here for over two months... I went with my friend Sarah and we saw a Norwegian movie called Hva vil folk si (What Will People Say). It was about a Pakistani girl living a sort-of double life in Norway, with her Pakistani family at home and Norwegian friends and boyfriend at school. Her dad finds her and her boyfriend have snuck into her room, assumes the worst, and sends her off to Pakistan to live with her grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousins. We had read a review of it in Norwegian class on Monday and it looked really interesting, but the review left out how incredibly intense it was. I would still recommend it to anyone who gets the chance to see it, but don't expect a happy, light movie!! A few people have asked about languages in movies in Norway, and this particular one was largely in Urdu with some parts in Norwegian, but there were Norwegian subtitles throughout. I'm pretty sure that a lot of kids movies are dubbed so the kids can understand it, but a lot of English movies are left in English with Norwegian subtitles.

Saturday was such a great day. It was Robin's (my German exchange student friend's) 16th birthday and we were going to celebrate with a bunch of exchange students, some of which I hadn't seen since the orientation in August. I was still a little low on energy so I decided to stay home while Robin was giving a tour of Oslo to the ones who don't live here, but I baked a giant chocolate chip cookie to bring to the party, as I had been asked to bring something American. A giant chocolate chip cookie seemed to check the boxes:) I met the rest of the exchange students (there were 7 of us total) in the city on the way to Robin's house and we made our way over. We sat around the table and ate pumpkin soup and dessert as more people arrived, including a few former exchange students as well. We spoke in a mix of Norwegian and English over the course of the evening as we are all at different places with our Norwegian, but the language bit reached its high-point when we all sang the birthday song from our respective countries at the same time! The Norwegian birthday song is pretty long so when the rest of them were over, we all joined in for the end of the Norwegian version. It was such an exchange student moment. I love exchange students so much. It's not often you get a German, a Latvian, a Mexican, a Hungarian, an Austrian, a Slovak, and an American in the same room, plus Norwegians that spent exchange years in France, Romania, and the Netherlands. It was an international evening if I've ever seen one!!

Another magical thing about exchange students is that you don't need much time together to feel like you've known each other forever and are best friends. I talked about this a bunch with Klara from Austria because we had only met once before–at the orientation the first few days in Norway–but we already had this connection that made it so easy to consider these other kids our good friends. It doesn't hurt that we all have similar senses of humor and were laughing for hours about paying for things in pennies and biogas. Exchange students are my favorite type of people. Current, former, future, it doesn't matter! I want to live in a town full of exchange students some day. That would be fun.

Random fun fact to end this post: today was the end of Daylight Savings Time for us, so for the next week there will only be a 5 hour time difference between Oslo and Portsmouth! This also means that while the sun will come up earlier, around 7:30, it will also set earlier, around 4:30. It's beginning to feel a little like winter! I even saw snow on the forecast for next week, but it's turned to rain now so that's a little less fun...

Happy (almost) Halloween! More on that coming next week:)

Word of the Post:

sommertid = Daylight Savings Time (beginning in spring and ending in fall)

I only have two pictures from this week... I promise lots next week!!!

American food culture in one picture;)

I managed to capture the snow icon!!! It went away pretty fast though:( and yes, I am aware that the Fahrenheit scale makes no sense