Trolls in the lakes of Landås

Yesterday I went into the city to teach my writing workshop. As I bounced around the whiteboard, watching the students carefully scribe “Purdue OWL” and “no subject headers” in their notebooks, I felt as though every batch of kids that sits in there is one more buttress against the grammatically inventive, meandering, plagiarism-pocked papers bound to turn up in a month.

I was meant to check out a class on Norwegian literature, but I couldn’t face it. Instead I went up Landåsfjell, to gain some perspective and a view of the western edge of Bergen’s fjord. I climbed up and sat by one of the frozen lakes, dusted with snow, until a terrifying burbling noise startled me down the mountain like a jackrabbit. In afterthought, it must have been the ice settling. At the time I thought there was surely something under there trying to get out.

Wednesday evenings there is an organ concert at Storetveit kirk near Fantoft. I’ve only been once before, but the swell of solemn sound in that great stone kirk floods my imagination with Viking triumphs and troll invasions and faery dances. The solemnity with which everyone sits, head tilted, in their pews, bowed or uplifted beneath the weight of the music, gives a social quality to what is yet solitude. Walking home after through crisp frozen air, the bell tolling the hour behind me, I once more breathed the mixture of contentment and heroism that steals through life.

Today Anita brought marmite in for the class to eat, as a taste of Britain. She also brought me a Daim Freia bar. Now that is love.

We didn’t teach our adult class today—there was a presentation on students’ mental health that we had to attend, instead. I understood about forti prosent of the lecture, and just about all of the slide show (luckily, I’ve been reading a Norwegian book about a depressed writer this past week and had the vocabulary). It didn’t help that of the two psychologists presenting, one spoke a rapidfire Norwegian that bubbled out of him with little pause for breath or moments of clearsighted translation. And the other was Swedish. Still, I got the gist: fifty percent of Norwegian high school girls are dissatisfied with their bodies (so, glass half full or empty), tips on identifying depressed students, and there will be a special meeting for teachers of Uttøya survivors after. Tusen takk, UiB Norskkurs.

Movie recommendation: Upperdog. Intense, honest look at Norwegian life.

Låndasfjell

Weekend of Peace

This weekend I went to Oslo as a chaperone for a Bnei Akiva shabbaton, a gathering of Jewish youth from across Scandinavia (Bnei Akiva is a worldwide Zionist youth organization that I grew up in, and the way that kids across Europe learn about and connect to their roots). Friday morning, I was out the door at 6 am, and after one step promptly landed on my tush. Bergen is slippery this time of year.

I met Ziv, the fifteen year-old who was my excuse for a free ticket, at the airport. We made it to the Oslo shul at the same time as the Dansk contingent, made up of ten or so kids from Copenhagen, who’d come over on the boat with the Danish shlichim (shlichim literally means messengers, and in this case was informal ambassadors from Israel made up of dad, mom, and gurgly baby Aviah who was surprisingly verbal for a 15 month-old and knew who I was after about two tries of “zot Hannah” by her ima). The Danish kids spoke Danish, and Ziv had some trouble understanding them. It seems the lingua franca of this weekend is to be English, and myself the only American in the room.

Friday night was your average shabbaton. Lots of singing, coercive good cheer, power-hungry teenagers windmilling everyone into participation. God, I used to hate these things. I saw my favorite Oslo kid, a curly-headed big-eyed lanky little guy whose every movement is either understated chillness or exaggerated humor (think Clint Eastwood meets a Marx brother). I taught him the Ohio sign, just for the heck of it, and he spent the whole weekend “O-H!”ing me.

Friday night, after activities were over, I went back to the shlichot’s apartment with Racheli and Inbar (the Oslo shlichot), the Copenhagen shlichim, and Yonatan, the guy in charge of Bnei Akiva shlichim in Scandanavia (he’s based in Stockholm). There they hashed out the situation of world Bnei Akiva today, how to deal with the communities they’re working in, why the rabbis of these tiny European communities stay and don’t go back to Israel (as Yonatan said, here they can be certain that they’re doing something important, and almost nothing tops that), and how to handle the culture clashes they face. How to both influence and respect the traditions of the communities they’re plopped into. Honestly, listening to them speak, I kept thinking that Americans would make much better shlichim than Israelis, because they can understand secular Jews better. Obviously, the whole point is bridging that culture gap, so my idea is ridiculous, and yet an Israeli who has lived their whole life in a Jewish bubble can understand so little of what’s happening in these Norwegian kids’ lives, that in some ways I think it makes sense.

Shabbat morning I met Amanda (the Ås ETA, went to Dublin together) outside the shul. She’d been curious and wanted to see services. We went in together, and I had that weird mind twist one gets when seeing one’s own world through another’s eyes. I noticed the beauty of the congregation singing together, and the adorable children trooping up to the bimah to sing adon olam, and the intensity of the story of Dina’s rape, as though I was seeing it all for the first time.

At kiddush, people kept assuming Amanda was Jewish, which was fine except when the husband of the American attache here in Oslo said something about so many of the Fulbrighters being Jewish and how we’re always being brilliant disproportionate to our numbers. Awkward dose of Jewish exceptionalism—I half expected him to pull out that list that shows how many Nobel Prizes we’ve got and match it to our .03% of world population, but he blessedly didn’t.

The kids in the shabbaton had a discussion with the chazzan of the community, an Israeli who’s lived in Oslo for a year. They asked great questions, about free will and God’s omniscience, Christians not keeping the rules of the Old Testament, and the reasons for kashrut. I cringed and cringed again as he explained things from his religious Israeli perspective, as he placed ultra-orthodoxy top on a scale of righteousness, gave an answer about the new testament that began with his never having read it, and explained that he keeps kosher because it’s his blueprint for life. It was when he was making a hash of free will that I jumped in and gave the kid the obvious philosophical answer about God being outside time in the simplest English I could drum up. They kept looking at me after that, expecting me to give a real answer after the frum Israeli equivocation, but I kept quiet, just thinking that it’s no wonder Scandinavians don’t want to be frum, their only model for it is the obnoxious Israeli presumption of having all the answers. Americans would definitely make better shlichim.

Shabbat lunch was a hilarious round of all the camp lore I know and love. We stood up on our chairs singing “I’m gonna be a pizza man,” did rounds of “ivdu et Hashem,” and the gang of little siblings at the end of the table led us in “Yibaneh Hamikdash.” Bnei Akiva lives!

Karl Johan in December

Shabbat ends so early here that we had a half hour break, and then it was time for seudah shlishit. The singing was all on a very high key, but then we had havdalah. That was, truly, beautiful. Incredibly sonorous and sway-y and just gorgeous ritual.

Walking down to Domkirken with Amanda, we talked over the day and religion in general. She’s got a thoughtful perspective on everything. She’s never read Anne of Green Gables, but is a kindred spirit nonetheless. At the Domkirk, we met up with other Fulbrighters—Sean and his wife and daughter from down in Kristiansand, Andrea, Ted from Trondheim, Sarah Anderson (the roving scholar who’s come to Bergen twice and possibly changed my life as much as anything else this year through conversations about education), and her daughter Kaila, who is the most thoroughly with-it ten-year-old I’ve ever met. Some of them I remembered from orientation, some of them I really thought I had never seen before, but all of them were interesting and, in that indefinable way, “good people” people.

In Youngstorget we amassed behind banners that read, “More Women, More Peace.” People up on the balcony were speechifying, but we didn’t listen much until one woman shouted into the microphone: “Black! Gifted! Not weak! Not afraid!” It was both incredibly awesome and kind of as though she was thumbing her nose at the western crowd who had deigned to bestow a peace prize on such talent. While we’re on the topic, how wonderful that this was the year that women’s rights activists were recognized? Though cramming them all in together like that, as though we want to get all the women out of the way before we can get back to men, kind of ticked me off.

 

The people on the podium stopped speaking, cuing the end of our chatting. Slowly, the crowd began to move forward. As we crossed the road back towards Karl Johan, people in vests at either side of the avenue held torches up, and the crowd slowly lit their candles at the torches and then passed on beneath the ribbons of Christmas lights and the night’s stars. It was an incredible, glowing flow of be-mittened humanity. I bet Ted five kroner that someone’s hair would catch fire by the end of the night—all that enthusiastic flame in the crowd.

We neared the Stortinget and gazed expectantly up to the balcony of the Grand Hotel. The doors opened to give the crowd the impression of action, and after a few false starts, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkol Karman came out to the sound of roars from the crowd. We shouted, and they waved. Then the noise died down, and they waved again, and once again we screamed our approval at them, at the world, our endorsement of peace. I snuffled up tears as we watched them bow to the crowd. Mostly, when you get this many people clapping, it’s at a basketball game or when a Republican says something really stupid. But this was cheering for peace. A massive celebration for peace. You can see the video here.

Gbowee, Karman, and Sirleaf, from left to right

Check out the dynamic between Sirleaf and Karman; always fun to watch the dignified fight with the crowd-pleaser.

The one thing that bothered me a bit was that, after all, this was in Norway. And Norwegians just don’t whoop and holler  all that well. These women have accomplished incredible things, the least we can do is yell for them a bit. I grabbed Kaila and together we war-whooped and aiaiaiaiaied and cat whistled into the candle-lit night, giving the women the ovation they deserved. The truth is, Norway is… too peaceful. The last war they had was when the Germans invaded them a little bit seventy years ago. So perhaps they can be excused from lacking enthusiasm—without seeing war, how can you appreciate peace?

Afterwards, we met more Fulbrighters back at Sarah’s for a party. Her husband had cooked up a storm of traditional Norwegian Christmas food, including lefsa, apple cake, and something that looked like butter soup called rommegrøt. He’s playing househusband for the year and definitely exhibiting some Friedan-like symptoms: perhaps it’s not the feminine mystique so much as the staying-at-home-without-a-career mystique.

I got back to Bergen with no voice, and a cheider class to teach in an hour. So I cleverly jotted down some of the main points of chanukkah, stuck some knickknacks in a bag, and told the kids that they had to find a way to perform the story of chanukkah using all the stuff in the bag. That kept them busy the whole time, and then we all enjoyed a chanukkah play, traditional-style. Two of the dads were there, too, and I found it touching how one told me that both his sons say Kiddush every Friday night, no matter what. He really wanted me to know they had some connection to their roots.

Gløgg

I taught my last class of the year this morning. Anita brought in Christmas treats: pepperkaker (christmas cookies), clementines, and gløgg (A Norwegian holiday drink much like mulled wine with raisins, nuts, and spices) to start off the class, and explained that we were having Christmas early because this was my last class before I left. Anna raised her hand in quick panic—“wait, are you… are you coming back in January?”

“Yep, I’ll be here until the summer. You guys are stuck with me until June.” Then, they surprised me. They started to clap. There was a fierce burst of applause for about five seconds. I was startled, and rather emotional. I’m not sure how it feels to be a nobel peace laureate with all of Oslo applauding you, but standing at the front of that classroom with my students clapping to hear I’d be back gave me a warm yummy feeling that had nothing to do with the smell of gløgg.

Happy holidays and happy New Year, everyone. 

The First Snow

Ruth and I made Thanksgiving dinner for a bunch of our European buddies at Fantoft. We made it a week late, since I didn’t have any time to spare last week, and as we’d guessed, none of our European friends actually knew when Thanksgiving was anyways. It was the first Thanksgiving many of them had ever had, and we made a nice spread, albeit turkeyless: stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, cranberry sauce, and apple pie. Of course someone asked, “what does this celebrate?” prompting confusion. Ruth answered, “The pilgrims survived their first winter in America” at the same time as I tossed off, “we killed the Indians.” Then we settled down for a long history lesson.

The thing is, sitting around that huge table with a kooky Frenchwoman, blunt Australian, reserved yet polymathic Mexican, rarely sober Russian, gorgeous German, quiet German, evasive Norwegian, perky Russian, and my American friend who keeps me grounded, it really felt like Thanksgiving. All together, they created a nutty, warm atmosphere that flooded through the homesickness I’d felt since seeing everyone’s fb statuses about heading home for Thanksgiving. 

Afterwards, people peeled off to finish studying for exams, and we were left with a core group discussing contemporary American politics. I felt guilty for not finishing my grading instead (I set myself the same deadline I give my kids—by the time they’ve turned in their next assignment, I have to have handed back the first), but realized this: Fulbright is paying me just as much to cook a Thanksgiving dinner and sit around with my European friends talking about American politics as it is to correct English essays. Wheee!

We started reading Of Mice and Men with my high schoolers. It’s not my favorite book, or rather, Steinbeck isn’t my favorite writer, but I dislike this one less than all his others. I noticed one of the brightest girls in the class seemed rather unenthusiastic, and cornered her after class.

“Did you like it?”

“Not so much.”

“Okay. What do you like to read?”

She gave an impish smile. “Harry Potter.”

“Yeah, well, me too, but Of Mice and Men has its points.”

“I’d rather read a classic.”

“This is a classic. It occupies a pretty important spot in American literature.”

“No, I mean…” She looked at me a moment, and then I got it.

“You mean, a British book?”

“Yes.”

 Ooooh! That’s a challenge if ever I heard one. When Anita and I got back to the staffroom, I told her, “Listen, I’m going to do something very un-Norwegian, and I know Fulbright doesn’t want me to, but you have to let me.” The teacher who’d been about to leave the room came back in and waited at the door to hear, making me laugh.

Holiday cheer in the Torgalmenningen

“I’m going to come in for an extra day next week, and I want you to book me an empty classroom. I’m going to kidnap the most intelligent kids in the class for a session. The rest of those kids are using the book to learn English, but these guys can use it to learn how to do literary analysis. They may not like Of Mice and Men, but goddamnit, by the end they’re going to be able to explain why in literary terminology.” Anita laughed, and said something about Fulbright forbidding overworking (you know, I need plenty of free time to cook Thanksgiving for the descendants of European imperialists), but finally told me it was okay, and actually got enthusiastic about it. I hadn’t been sure how much the Norwegian instinct to level the playing field would make her uncomfortable with pulling out a group for advanced study. But, it’s all engines go, and now I'm rereading Of Mice and Men and foraging through JSTOR and my college AmLit notes, and writing down everything relative to the latest article I've read on education, as I try to figure out exactly how I’m going to plan this lesson. You'd think teaching would get easier with practice, but actually it just gets more complicated, as I'm aware of more and more factors. 

I’ve learned a new phrase in Norwegian: “Jeg gidd ikke.” I can’t find a perfect colloquial equivalent in English, the closest I get is “can’t be bothered,” but the Hebrew “lo bah li” seems to cover it better. I’m also most of the way through Pike med perle ørdebobb, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and my ability to read the language is growing in leaps and bounds. Just wish I could understand it spoken, but Norwegians talk too fast and with too many different dialects. 

View from my apt window

First snowfall in Bergen! Every morning for the past week I’ve woken up without turning on a light, and tiptoed to my window to peer out at the day, because sometimes, just sometimes, it’s a fresh sunny blue-skied one and then I rush to get dressed and out walking before the hail comes. Friday morning, I woke up late, and gave a satisfied stretch because it’s a day off, and went to peek through my curtains. Snow! Snowy heaps with spikes of hunter green on the grass in front of Fantoft, and white roofs on the little red wooden houses, and Løvstakken not just snow-capped, but snow-sloped, each tree along the mountain delicately etched out in the thinnest of frosted lines. And the sun was shining! I can’t begin to explain the feeling of wellbeing that subsumed me as I ate breakfast.

Shabbat starts early in Bergen now, so I had a lot to cram into my day. I started a load of laundry, began to cook for shabbat, and then, halfway through both, cut out joyously into the snow. I wanted a view of Bergen in the white. And so I headed up Fløyen, and paused at every turn of the switchback trail to gaze in awe at the landscape. The haze lifted over the fjord, and I could see sunlight flooding over the water as it stretched towards the Atlantic. The skeletal rawness of trees against snowy skies always sends me into agonies of pleasure. At the top, I looked around me quickly, stood a moment, and turned down again.

As I swept and cooked and folded laundry and generally readied my apartment for shabbat, I hummed to myself the joy of this season. Now, I’m not crazy. I know I’m supposed to be depressed now. Like all the other Fulbrighters, I got the pamphlet on SADD and almost daily I hear Norwegians kvetch about the rain. But something about this climate makes me happy, deeply, ridiculously soul-happy. I’ve heard that moods are dependent on weather, and it’s true, only mine seems backwards—I love this winter. I can’t get enough of the snow and the rain and the winter night. And when the sun peeks through, everything glitters, sleek with the latest hailstones. And said sun doesn’t burn, or beat down, or invade your clothes with sticky sweat, but provides only a clean, clear light. The whole land here is clean, constantly bathed in rain and washed fresh each day. Well. Enough panegyrics about the rain. I’m going to go out walking in it.

How can Norwegian kids not be your favorite?
Look how cute they are in their little snow outfits!

View of the fjord from the top of Fløyen

Stockholm: The Saga

I flew to Stockholm for Sukkot. By now I have the airport regimen down so well, I show up a bare fifteen minutes before my flight. The Bergen airport isn’t big enough to require more.

I spent the flight sandwiched between two ENORMOUS men. The first, who sat in the aisle, was simply tall and muscular. Then the window seat occupant arrived. It was Fezzik. He was so big, so enormously tall and with arms thicker than my legs, that I wondered how on earth he was going to fit into one seat. As he turned from side to side to buckle his seatbelt, his shoulders bulged up to fill the space. Then he subsided into his seat, arms folded, muscles sunk into themselves, and looked up, waiting for me to sit. Which I did, gingerly. And woke up half an hour later, even more gingerly removing my head from his elbow (that’s what it reached).

Upon walking into the Stockholm airport,  you walk straight through customs. The wall is covered in an enormous photo of Ingrid Bergman. “Welcome to my hometown,” she proclaims. What a welcome. Ingrid Bergman’s city: elegance and sexy mystique and that purring Swedish accent. Slowly, my ideals and ambitions trembled, shook, and fell with a crash. Now all I want is that the Columbus airport one day sport a picture of my face, saying “Welcome to my hometown.” With any luck, Montreal and DC will argue over the rights.

As the bus from the airport pulled into town, I saw Ryan Gosling on the sidewalk. Then I saw another one. And another. Wait, look, Brad Pitt! Not that I found him particularly exciting, compared to the Jude Laws moving purposefully over the Stockholm sidewalks. You see, all Swedes look like movie stars. They’re blond and chiseled and move with grace. That’s why sightseeing in Scandinavia is so much fun.

Stockholm is utterly beautiful. It’s the sort of noble-arabesqued-buildings-flanking-wide-boulevards-on-the-dark-busy-water city that some old European poet must have described better than

Monday as Monday should be

Today was absolutely lovely. Monday as Monday should be. I walked to the Rema at Wergeland to buy groceries. I spent a while in the store, memorizing the kosher list a bit more. Exciting discoveries: I found a brand of canned kidney beans that are okay; that bread that I’ve been eating regularly actually has some chemical that’s not (oops); there are three different kosher kinds of butter for my consumer pleasure. I bought rømme for the first time. I don’t know what it is, or what to eat it with, but am sure I will figure it out. It was pleasant to pass the lakes both ways, the ruffly black water cold and sharp in the wind while I trudged past with groceries on my back.

A friend and I met at the Israeli-owned coffee shop near the Bergen Museum for hot chocolate in the afternoon. We sat on stools looking out the window, and every so often someone came in and a cold gust of air blew over our hot chocolate, making the candle flames waver. We talked about where we want to travel to, and our classes, and nationality stereotypes, and Bergen culture. She’s a very restful person, smart and excited about life but not gushing.

Back home, I finished grading my high schoolers’ journals. By the twentieth repetition of the same thing, I was clenching my teeth trying to remain as objectively interested as I was for the first. However did my teachers manage it? Still, the second-to-last, one of the Saras (is it bad that I’m still not sure which?), managed to delight me by picturing dramatic situations in which a lack of English would prove utterly disastrous. Perhaps that is how my teachers did it: by waiting for the gem in the pile of dross.

 Now the homey smell of frying onions has filled my apartment. Onion soup for dinner. With rømme? We’ll see. 

Hiking in the Rain

On top of Ulriken: sopping wet

Sunday some friends and I, buoyed by the favorable weather report, decided to try to hike Ulriken, Bergen’s tallest mountain. We planned to hike up Ulriken, around to Rundemanen, and down Fløyen. It’s a hike that has been described to us as taking variously 3 hours, 5 hours, or 8 hours, so we packed lunches and a little extra food, and set off. Of course, as we began the ascent, the drizzle turned into an all-out downpour. It turns out that when there’s only a 30% chance of rain in Bergen, the weather website calls that merely “cloudy,” because without shifting the values somewhat it would probably never get to use the sunny icon.

Mimi, who’s done Ulriken before, led us up the steep path. We clambered over the rocks that made the path, between which ran the rivulets of a steadily growing stream. Towards the top, the path became sheer rock, decorated by a slippery railing that had broken free of the ground in some places to sway dangerously when grabbed. Below us spread the valley, with Gamlehausen and Fantoft, and beyond the mountain across the way, Løvstakken, we could see the fjord spreading between islands and fingers of land.

The top of the mountain felt possessed. Rain gusted in my face so strongly it felt like pebbles blowing against my cheeks. The wind pushed against us as though it had some personal investment in our loss of balance. Yet even so, Bergen shimmered beautifully through the rain beneath us as though the weather was merely an accessory.

We ran to the café at the peak, gratefully shedding our sopping gear and warming hands around hot chocolate and stomachs with real chocolate. I have a sneaking suspicion that as the dark rises (we’re losing 20 minutes of sunlight a week, now), Norwegian diets will incline steadily more and more to the chocolate variety. I’m a fan. After waiting for the rain to die down, we conferred and decided to descend Ulriken by a different path, leaving the hike to Fløyen for another day.

Happy even in the rain

As we skipped from rock to rock, those in hiking boots quickly outstripping the poor souls slogging down in sneakers, we passed quaint red huts, and mountain lakes that were filled to over-brimming with rain runoff. We speculated about our friends back home. It is properly characteristic of each country that on a rainy Sunday, Americans will hole up on the sofa watching sports with snacks in front of them, while Norwegians all bundle up and march up mountains. It exemplifies the poverty gap in American: the poor eat fatty food and watch the wealthy stay fit, while in Norway everyone’s pretty equal and hikes regardless of class. There is an upside to the American propensity to huddle warmly indoors like cattle. One of the reasons I love hiking in the States is the solitude that it brings. When I trudge up a mountain, I don’t want to see anyone, not even adorable Norwegian babies staring solemnly down at me as they bounce in their father’s backpacks, nor hot French guys that attach themselves to our group for the hike down. But Norway is nowhere near as spacious as the US, and trails are crowded.

Making lunch today, I realized that my diet has adapted itself completely to Norwegian food. For breakfast, I eat muesli and yogurt (much of the Norwegian diet is hiking food). My matpakke at lunch usually consists of sandwiches with Norwegian salmon and Norwegian cucumber inside. Dinner, for the past fortnight, has generally meant soup. Usually lentil, for its protein and heartiness, or leek-carrot-potato, for yumminess and the cheaper Norwegian-grown vegetables. I’m going through tea at such an alarming rate that, at this pace, I’ll have to start placing bulk orders with Twinings. 

Even with the Norwegian food, my body has declared war on Norway. In much the same way that I, when entering a new country, like to sample the local cuisine, upon realizing it was in Norway my immune system hit the floor to allow my body a chance to sample the local germs. Translation: miserably sniffly, a headache to beat Virginia Woolf’s, and throat so scratchy that I sound like a bad joke of someone imitating a sexy voice. Worst of all, I have to teach Emily Dickinson tomorrow. Hermit ladies who wrote riddle-poetry deserve no place in the let’s-make-America-interesting-to-foreigners curriculum. I think I will go drown my sorrows in more tea.  

Norwenglish

Norwegian flags at the harbor near Bergenhus

My high schoolers finished writing the poems they’d started on the theme of carpe diem, and read them to the class, while standing on the teacher’s desk (they’d just watched Dead Poets Society, how could I not?). Only one kid hit his head on the light. Only one kid dropped the f-bomb in his poem. Overall, a successful educational endeavor. Especially for A, who hadn’t been in class when we started the poems because she’d been helping with the current elections. She’s the girl who lost two close friends in Utøya, and when I explained to her what the students were doing, she started to write her own poem. And wrote, and wrote… I couldn’t stop her. She crafted stanza after stanza about the difficulty of escape, and the importance of looking forward. The furiousness of her writing was interrupted only by periodic questions about whether something made sense, or wanting to show me what she had so far. I let her keep pumping out the poetry; why not use writing as therapy? I think the intensity of being part of this girl’s healing may be the highlight of my teaching here in Norway.

Graffiti at the bybanen station at Fantoft

All of the students were given laptops by the school, which they’re meant to use in class as well as at home. I find this ridiculous. Anita may not notice the facebook tabs hidden on the screen when she walks around, but I’m too young not to be clued into their clever evasive tactics. These kids are in high school: many of them are not yet old enough to embrace learning on their own. They still need external discipline. Also, facebook is my generation’s addictive drug. Allowing them to use it in school just exacerbates the problem. This is probably the gist of the campaign I’m about to begin to get the rector’s permission to block access to facebook on the school network. Any suggestions on additional points I should make?

A group of my adult students discussed 9/11 conspiracy theories on Thursday. They talked about the metal girders not being hot enough to burn, or bend that much, and how strange it was that the buildings went straight down, and that planes can’t knock down buildings… listening to them clogged my mind. What were they suggesting? That Bush killed all those people because he wanted to invade Iraq? That martians really orchestrated the whole thing? As much confusion as there may be about events and reactions afterward, so many people were killed on that day—how can you react in any way but sorrow? To be fair, I’ve been surprised by the sympathy of most Norwegians’ to the 9/11 anniversary. Many of them remember exactly where they were when they heard, and how visceral their reactions were. I hadn’t realized it resounded across the world to that extent.

We did a unit on baseball in my adult class. At one point, the students turned to me for clarity about the rules of the game. I had no clue. Bad American!

The fish market

As I was walking around explaining points in the baseball story, one of my students lured me into an argument about the superiority of rationality. Having just finished Coetzee’s Lives of the Animals, I was reluctant to grant too much credibility to my student’s insistence that everything comes down to rationality. The idea that of course rationality determines that rationality is paramount, it’s acting in its own interests, tickled my postmodern-sensitive brain that cannot help but politicize everything, and gave me just enough pause to argue with this guy.

I’m beginning to rephrase simple statements into Norwegian. My vocabulary and comfort with the syntax is growing in leaps and bounds, but I still can’t speak it. It’s the pronunciation. Anita started laughing when I asked, “hvordan går du?” –how do you walk? Instead of “hvordan går det?” –how’s it going? And I can’t even hear the difference between the numbers 7 and 20; both sound like “shoe” to my American ear. 27 sounds like “shoeshoe.” My Slovenian neighbor in the class tried to explain that one is more of a “ch” sound, but I simply cannot hear it, and wonder if I’m doomed to forever make mathematical mistakes.

Chilling at Fantoft: there are lots of nationalities in that room!

Learning Norwegian names for other language mostly involves adding “esk” onto the end: Engelsk, Dansk, Hebresk. The colonization of language involved in renaming countries in one’s own tongue still bothers me in Norwegian as much as it did in Hebrew or English: why don’t we call each country what they call themselves? United States of America, Norge, and Eretz Yisrael. Then we’d also become accustomed to some of the sounds in foreign languages, and hearing Mandarin for the first time wouldn’t be such a shock. Just a thought.

I bought lefse for the first time, and man, is it disgusting. The blandest thing I’ve ever tasted. It’s a Norwegian flatbread made from potatoes, and meant to be eaten with something tasty rolled up inside of it. Of course, I bought a package on the run and munched it while walking, which doesn’t do it full justice, so I’m going to try it again with butter and cinnamon handy. On the scale of Norwegian foods, it falls waaaay below fresh salmon and brunøst. Hmm. I think that may be it for Norwegian cuisine. Because no way am I trying lutefisk: not even the Norwegians like it.