Home in Hegra: My Year in Norway: May 2012

The weekend after my amazing Up With People experience I went with my family to a city about an hour or two over the border in Sweden called Östersund.
When I say my family, I mean my whole family: Mamma, Pappa, Kristian, Christine and their two kids, Thea, Reidar, Johan, Maren, Ragnhild and I.
10 of us left pretty early (Maren and Johan drove over later) and stopped at some stores before we got to the city. Ragnhild and I bought Cheez ballz, which are the BEST snack food in the history of the world.

We agreed that later on we would have a cheez ballz party in our room.

After driving for a long time we finally got to Östersund!

We unpacked the cars at the hotel and the 10 of us all rolled into the lobby with all of our bags.
It was the wrong hotel.
We loaded back up and drove to the correct hotel.

In the hotel and already having a blast :)

Once we were there Mamma and Christine went off to the spa for the day. The rest of us went shopping for a little bit. It was a lot of fun to just wander around with the kids. We ate a little and then found a fun street to wait for Mamma and Christine.

When Mamma and Christine were back everyone was pretty tired so we went back to the hotel to rest for a while. Ragnhild and I were hungry so we went to the store and got some Ben and Jerry's ice cream. We ate the whole pint together and we were stuffed. Only a few minutes after we were finished somebody came and called us to dinner.
We went to a really cool Chinese restaurant but I was so full that I didn't actually order any food. Ragnhild got some chicken but didn't eat all of it, so I had a bit of that.

After dinner Mamma and Pappa took the kids. Christine went to bed and the rest of us had a party in Ragnhild and my's room. After a while there we decided to go across the street to a bar. There were two rooms in back each with a different DJ and different type of music to dance to. Nobody really wanted to go dance with me so I made friends with a couple of Swedish girls and went back with them. We had a blast and eventually Johan and Maren joined us.
The next day we went to a really big swimming pool! It was so cool. There were so many water slides and caves and hot tubs and diving boards. There was even part of the pool that had a rock wall coming out of it so you could climb up and if you fell, you would just go into the water. There was even a tunnel that took you to an outside pool. It was so cool (and cold).
There were these giant floating pieces of foam that you could lay on, so when I was outside in the cold, I lay on top of one and reenacted a scene from Titanic with one of the others.
"I'll never let you go, Jack"
We had a very good time.
For part of the drive home Kristoffer sat in the car between Ragnhild and I. I was absolutely exhausted so I fell asleep very quickly. Krostoffer, however, was not tired at all. Every time there was a little hill in the road he would shout (in Norwegian, obviously) "Is everybody ready for the hill??"
The other three would shout "Yeah!" but I was alseep. Every time he would try to get my attention.
He would tap my shoulder and say "Arry! Arry?" If I didn't wake up right away he would tap my face and say my name again.
I would wake up, confused. After a moment I would understand what was happening and say "Yeah!" and pass out again. Just about the time I would be asleep we would come to another hill.
This went on for quite a while. I felt a little bad but I was just so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open.
We stopped for coffee with the others and Kristoffer moved to the car with his parents and sister. I slept the rest of the way home.

So much has happened in my life here since that family weekend.

I have gone on a couple of hikes up to a little lean-to type thing near by my house.
The first time I hiked up with Mamma and Pappa we figured it would be dry and nice because all the snow has been gone from our house for a very long time.
I wore my sneakers.

Near the bottom of the trail there were tons of pretty flowers

This is where I live. My house is the one farthest away and all the way to the right. The white one to the left is
where my aunt and uncle live. They own the sheep that live in the big red barn. The two white ones in the
middle are Ragnhild's house (front) and my grandparents house (back).

Bonnie and Clyde picked their way over a bridge
that had been covered by a little rock slide.

Mamma and Pappa "Ut på tur"

There the higher we got the more we saw little patches of snow. Eventually we were walking up to our shins in cold, wet snow. I was less than thrilled.
Now, Norwegians have this really nice habit of leaving guest books all over the place and always signing them when they visit that spot. Cabins, lean-tos, camp sites, trails; you can find boxes in special places all over. Inside the box, wrapped in a plastic bag, you will find a small worn out, written in journal where you can sign your name and put the date.
Every time we do the hike we sign the book in the lean-to.
The next time I hiked up there I wore my rubber boots. We hiked a different way through the woods instead of along the path and up the road. At the bottom of a little cliff we found the remains of a moose. We think it must have fallen last fall or in the early winter. By the looks of the remains, its back got broken.
We kept on walking and wound up really deep in the woods, then in a really marshy area.
I'm pretty sure there are only four types of land in Norway: fjell, fjord, skog og myr.
Mountains, fjords, forests and marshes.
By the time we got up to the lean-to I had managed to get a hole in one of my boots and as a result of that the tramping through snow, marsh and puddles caused me to have one foot that was wet.
Now there is a Norwegian saying that I learned very early in my year here. It is "ut på tur, aldri sur" which means if you're out on a trip, you are never grumpy.
This time I wrote in the book: "Den person som sa 'ut på tur aldri sur' va sikkert itj på tur med blaute fota" Which translates to "The person that said 'out on a trip, never grumpy' was surely not on a hike with wet feet"

I went up there on another trip with Thea and Ragnhild.

Another thing that happened in the past few weeks was an international night hosted by my local AFS chapter. We all met at a school and gave presentations, did sketches, dances and looked at pictures, sharing our cultures, traditions and lives with each other and everyone's host family.

Parodying how they get ready for Christmas in Norway

America, Japan, France

We're all different
but
We're all the same

America and Germany

France and America

The weather in Hegra is getting better and better as every day goes by. I see signs of summer everywhere I look. Leaves are bursting out, grass is green, the sheep out in the fields and the sun is up before me each morning. Things that normally make me happy now have the opposite effect because they remind me every day of what is just around the bend...

But I won't think about that now.

There are a few very important things I left out of this blog post:

Russetid.

17th of May.

Trondheim with Jessica.

and Ellen's confirmation.