Educated by my fellow Edinburgh bloggers (Fraser indicates that it's possible to post photographs, which never occurred to me but will doubtlessly make anything I write a bit more interesting) I settle down once again and frantically try and recall the past week (or at least marvel at how quickly it has escaped me).
Administration wise, Norway is horribly efficient, and I can’t even pretend to know what I should and shouldn’t have done by this point. I have announced myself to the police (disappointingly not as dramatic or exciting as it sounds) and collected my residence permit. I still have a list of things as long as my arm to do, but I have decided to worry adversely about them another day. My pile of various forms and methods of identification grows silently in the corner, sucking the life out of the surrounding air. Charming.
Rather significantly, I have come to grow much fonder of my rather dreich concrete “student village,” largely due to the forest and lake, Sognsvann, literally minutes from my doorstep, giving my rather built-up area a feeling of freedom:
I have taken to 3.5km runs around the lake in the mornings, where I am frequently overtaken by great numbers of middle aged men and women, whose fitness levels put me to shame (it’s not just young fit blondes that one needs to look out for in Scandinavia, but old fit blondes too, apparently). I’ve also spent some slightly more relaxing evenings with friends up in the forest, even being joined by a visiting friend from home: bonfires on the beach (though admittedly other peoples; we were too dim to think about doing that until it was too dark to properly see anything, never mind set light to it with any degree of success) and barbeques by the lakeside:
(These are the fine “pølser” that I spoke about before, which we smothered in mustard, ketchup and roasted onions before entirely, and very unhealthily devouring. With cider. My nutrition levels have hit rock bottom and I’ve never felt better, I think I blame the pure, unpolluted Norwegian air?)
On a more mundane note, language issues are becoming easier to navigate, and I attribute this mostly to the help of the man in the post office. Whenever I enter his face looks very amused, no doubt due to the fact that I always have some sort of problem to attempt to wriggle my way out of. The latest example of this stems from the fact that I have a parcel stuck at customs (DVDs, from what my parents have vaguely led me to believe, and quite possibly my forlorn teddy bear too, who must have been looking like a furry bomb to warrant so much attention), and have made numerous mistakes in trying to claim it. This man always has a little chuckle at me, and whilst I sincerely hope he’s not chuckling at my complete inability to correctly form a functioning sentence (or the fact that a 20-year-old is attempting to claim a teddy bear from the customs office), I am forced to believe otherwise. Norwegians are so jolly, it’s almost impossible to feel victimized by them. I would rhetorically ask what they have to be so happy about, but, after more than a month here, and now in my capacity as an official resident of the country, I have to admit that I think I’m beginning to see just what it is that makes them all so content.
