Mountains in the Mists

Dense mists on Ulriken

The past weekend has been one of long walks. Friday up Ulriken, where I stumbled around up top for awhile in the fog, finally conceding defeat to the mist and going back down the mountain the way I came up. Sunday was a beauty of a day, with thick plashes of hail covering the ground under a sunny haze, and hail showers pummeling us intermittently with blue sun-skinned sky winning out in glorious shadow-play. I went up Løvstakken, and spent a while sunning myself at the top. Tanning in short sleeves on a mountain top with patches of snow around you really brings out one’s sense of the absurd.

Another cheider today. Had the kids pick different positions and argue about what to do when the Crusaders come. I think the highlight of the debate was when one suggested picking up and moving to South Africa. Why South Africa, you ask? So did I. No good reason. They knew a surprising lot about the Black Death, and were interested in all the gory details I could give them about the Spanish Inquisition. Still, most interesting moment came when one kid looked up and asked, “but, why do Jews and Muslims hate each other?” We’d been talking about how they lived together in peace for awhile, while Europe was bloodily pushing Jews around. I gave him as much nuance as I could in my rejection of his premise, and was a little warmed by his saying, “well, yes, I know we don’t all hate each other, one of my best friends is Muslim,” even as the worn catchphrase made me smile sadly a bit. I’m thinking I’m going to cut out the Yeshiva session, and skip ahead to Israel as soon as possible. There’s too much to talk about there.

Across from Fantoft today

I walked back through temperamental hailstorms, most definitely muttering to myself like a madman about race and religion. I'm going to have to come to some sort of resolution eventually, some brilliant epiphany that can be applauded in the blog comments at the bottom here. 

Back at my apartment I made myself some hot apple cider, settled down in a deliciously well-worn man’s sweater I’d snagged from Fretex, and promptly stumbled across three of my favorite people on skype in succession. Nothing picks you up like an across-the-world chat with close friends. Especially when I’ve been out of touch for awhile, and beginning to feel itchy to return to my nearest and dearest.  As thunder clashed and hail pounded outside my window, cider, sweater, and skype smoothed my mood.

A friend of mine has started blogging and it’s such a delightful mix of literature and life I just have to share:  InJudith'sRoom

Tomorrow, my parents come to Bergen! I’m getting a whole week of hugs...

The house I want

Tried to capture the droplets on the branches

The stone wall halfway up Løvstakken

One of my favorite pine groves in Bergen

Mist rising off the fjord

Ulriken across the valley

The panoramic view from the ridge trail

Happiest Country in the World

Well, the 2011 UN Human Development Index is out, and surprise surprise, Norway is number 1 on the list. Happiest country in the world. Happiest country in my world.

Bergen in the snow

So, Norway is happy for a variety of reasons, but it also makes me, personally, happy in a satisfying-my-soul way that is different from Ohio’s nostalgic effect, or Maryland’s patriotic vibes, or the miserable climate of Israel. It’s the first place I’ve lived that I love because it matches me, not because I was raised with it or in it. It has my weather, my manners, my opinions. Not in everything, but in enough that I can nestle comfortably into the place and feel like I belong.

Over the past few months, I’ve struggled with prepositions. A third of the edits I make to my students’ papers, at all levels, is correcting “with” to “from” and “of” to “by.” My Norwegian prepositions have been equally confused—there seems no particular order to the way in which they decide what prepositions go where when, either. And yet, I’ve discovered something: never yet have I been unable to understand something because it had the wrong preposition in front of it. Sure, meaning becomes a bit vaguer when you’ve “decided to stay from the house,” but it’s nothing a clever reader can’t decipher. And so, I’ve decide we ought to abolish prepositions. Not all of them. Just most of them. We can pick the ones we like best, and use those in any manner of situations. After all, “by,” “at,” and “near” really needn’t be differentiated between—we could just use “with” for everything. And with now with, I will.

Wednesday I struggled up Løvstakken to go to a stitch n’ bitch in Bønes. Bergen was incredibly beautiful in the evening fall of snow. My shortcuts had all been covered in snow, and I either slid downhill on ice, landing on my tush time after time, or slipped backwards to face plant into fluffy snow in the struggle up a slope. Still, I got there okay, and when I pulled out the kippah I was working on everyone oohed and aahed over the delicate workmanship. “What a cute little hat!” only wanted an explanation to turn into “what a cute little Jew-hat!”

On the way back, I made it to the bus stop exactly as the bus pulled up. As I stepped towards the bus, I skidded and nearly fell, catching the door to pull myself back up. When I looked up, the bus driver was laughing and saying something that sounded like, “kjempegod.” Nothing like bonding with your bus driver over klutziness. 

This morning I woke up early, very, very early for a meeting with Anita. I’d asked her to give me feedback about my teaching, and wanted to spring a whole ton of ideas. We were going to talk for hours. But I arrived at Katten, and sat, and graded, and waited, and wondered. Usually she’s there by 6:30 am, so my 8:00 arrival ought to have been greeted with a cheery “god morgen, hvordan går det?” Instead of which I spent a while helping one of the other English teachers decide on a version of Hamlet (we went with Dame Judy Dench). Finally, the principal came rushing into the room.

“You! No, not you, you, Hannah!” I knew he meant me even as the other English teachers looked up. “Anita’s sick.”

“Okay, no problem, I can take the classes.”

“Can you do it? And we will pay you.”

“Er, you know the US government does that, right?”

“They pay you to teach with Anita, this is a different responsibility, now you’re officially a substitute. And after that first time, you'll make enough that now you need to get a tax card.” Erggg! More bureaucracy.

“Okay, I got it, the tax place by the main bus station, I’ll pay it a visit.”

“Will you be okay with the class?”

“Yep, no problem, I have a lesson plan” (four of them).

“You have a key, si?”

“Si.” His face shot up hopefully.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“No, only a tiny bit, why, is that teacher sick, too?” He nodded hopefully at me.

“Sorry, no, my Spanish is pidgin.” Reminds me of when I used to sub for my Jewish Studies teacher back in high school. The principal nodded glumly and tramped out, no doubt nervous that my kids would set the school on fire with only me to look after them. Which, considering it's covered in snow, would have been a considerable feat.

But instead, they had a really great discussion about George and Lennie’s relationship in Of Mice and Men, and then about the novel’s representation of the American Dream. I played lots of tricks on the kids, getting the quiet ones to speak up. It’s fun to play at so many different levels, honing the thinking of the kids who are already articulate and maneuvering the rest into speaking through a mixture of humor (“You guys aren’t allowed to even think the words Jante Law in here, I’m an American!”), comfort-zone creation (“Absolutely not what I was looking for and yet a brilliant answer, keep ‘em coming even if you’re not sure they’re right”), and force (“Ah, M had something to say about that when we spoke before, what was it, M?” –Cue doleful look from M, but then speech).

As S, my star pupil, trooped out, she stopped in front of me.

“This was really great. Thank you.” It’s funny, but I think she may be as eager to communicate approval as I am. It means a lot to me, coming from a bright student like that.

My adult students were more difficult. I hadn’t read the selection that I was supposed to teach, or known it was the topic until that morning. Luckily, they like to read things aloud in class, so we learned about the oppression of the Native Americans together. At the end, we segue-wayed into a discussion about what gives a person rights to a land, what makes them part of a country, and ourselves responsible to them. We ranged over the history of the Sami to current immigration. Finally, they decided that if someone pays taxes –puts something into the system—they deserve to get something out of it. I liked the answer, though I tend to think that if someone is a human being they have a claim on all the rest of us human beings.

As they shuffled out, the cheerfully tousled redhead who sits in the front row waved bye. “Hannah, du er flink.” Regardless of the fact that I’m supposed to be teaching her to say that in English, it felt good.

I’m given to understand, from my sister, that her friends back in CTA (our old high school) enjoyed my blog the other day. The exact quote on her fb wall says, “your sister Hannah became a decorated CTA veteran yesterday when we spent a whole AP Comp class reading her blog.” Now, I’m not sure whether they were reading it with the permission of the teacher or not, but I do know this: I started the war, kiddo. So stop handing out posthumous (err, post-graduate) medals. 

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

Bergen Night Life

This week has been halcyon in Bergen. The sun has risen about two feet above the horizon each morning without being obscured by the customary great clouds of misty rain. It’s just high enough to slant straight into our eyes (have you ever seen a toddler in a snowsuit wearing sunglasses?) and streak all the Norwegians’ hair blond-gold. Monday, driven outside to walk and walk, I came back to my apartment late at night, having traversed most of the city by foot, gloriously aware that I’d seen Bergen at its most beautiful and could sleep the sleep of the just. And woke up the next morning to find out that I’d missed the Northern Lights in Bergen—while I slept blissfully, the aurora borealis played out its drama over my dreams.

Tuesday I walked home from the university, because I couldn't waste the sun. And took the route through gorgeous Nygårdsparken, which normally I can't because there aren't enough people there to make me feel safe with all the drug addicts. But today, there were plenty of people out to enjoy the glorious sun.  

At midnight, several friends and I headed down to Gamlahaugen, the park around the king’s castle in Bergen, to see the lights that were supposed to return for an encore. We lay on the king’s lawn for two hours, drinking tea in thermoses and stargazing, but not a streak of viridian did we see. Still, it’s nice to cuddle up and stargaze with friends, especially on the edge of a fjord with a castle lit up behind you, so the wee hours of the morning were in no way ill-spent.

Wednesday night was fantastically educational. I was out for drinks with one of the guys from my Norwegian class (a German physics PhD student), his Russian friend, and an American-turned Norwegian woman who works, surprise surprise, with Statoil. We somehow launched into a comparison of our countries’ governments and election systems, and I listened, fascinated, to the foreign explanations, and their impressive (yet occasionally humorously incomplete) grasp of American politics. I feel as though I could spend my entire life just talking to Europeans about their political systems. Not gonna lie, this whole proportional representation thing sounds quite a good idea…

Thursday night a friend and I went to a performance that is the second weirdest I’ve ever seen in my life (Ima and Abba, remember that time you traumatized us as kids by taking us to see the steps of drug withdrawal and cure in dance?). In the first act, the actors molested a barbie and babbled at us in several languages. In the second, a live guinea pig provided most of the action. The third act had an awesome bit of art: a huge cluster of copper cords suspended from the ceiling held ice cubes that slowly dripped onto the floor, and periodically lost their grip on the copper and cracked down to interrupt the serene dripping with violence (to make it even more exciting, the actors all had bare feet). The play’s statement that human performance is somehow secondary to other things on a stage kept my brain happy while we watched bubbles build up in an eerie representation of the immaculate conception. The playwright came out to talk to Yael afterwards about connections in the theater world. He looked indescribably pleasant. Clean and bald and calmly friendly. I wondered how such a man could have written such a play (a smoke machine wafted vapor right into my face! Invasion of the audience’s space without prior notice bothers me).

Reading one of UiB Masters literature students’ theses today, I stumbled on an idea I adore –that home is not a place, but a series of habits. My home in Bergen is not my apartment, it's the pot of tea I put on every time I enter my apartment, and my routes around the city, and my weekly dips in at the Bergen library, and the angle at which I set my computer when I'm calling family and friends on skype. And tomorrow night will be home, in a deliciously clear-cut habit that rolls around once a week. These things have made Norway, and I suppose can make the world, thoroughly mine in a way that will only be equaled by learning the language.

Pictures from a friend of mine who actually saw the Northern lights on Monday night:

Rest in Peace, Robert Frost

 Well, it’s official. The world will end in ice. Great speculation here as on Friday the Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2012 will be announced. Other prizes are being declared, and the physics prize has ended Frost’s conundrum of decades.

"For almost a century the universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up the universe will end in ice."

Ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

But it left me highly confused, as well, with a question about speed and distance and expansion, and a regret that I never took physics in high school but instead spent my time creek-stomping with Sasha and Paul. Whoops. Better memories, though.

I stumbled on this during a ramble

This week has the speeded-up quality that October always takes on. I’m catching up on work missed during the holiday, trying to get ahead for the next one, planning my trip to Stockholm next week and have forty papers to grade for my Amlit course as well as my usual journals for the high schoolers and a project on the US elections underway, not to mention the wrapping-up of my Norwegian bank account process and an application for my renewed Canadian passport to navigate. As a highly efficient, super-busy woman, I’m of course expected to multi-task. And usually I do, without problems. But tonight it just didn’t work out. I was editing the questions for my Amlit course’s upcoming paper while sealing a leak in my rain boot and listening to a shiur on the aseret yemai hateshuva which I kept stopping to see if I could translate into Norwegian, and the dance music from Fantofthallen probably didn’t help either, and, er, well, things got mixed up, and I accidentally glued myself to my computer. So I think I’m done with multitasking for awhile. On the upside, my rain boot, finger, and computer are now all waterproof. 

Today, walking up the steep hill to work, immersed in my thoughts, I passed a man hopping up laboriously on crutches. It took me a few seconds to realize what I’d seen, stop, return, and hold my umbrella over him as he made the rest of his way up. Bergen is horrible on people with disabilities: all slippery cobblestones and slopes. Every time something like this happens, I file it in my brain to be addressed once I can speak Norwegian. As we made chitchat, the man asked where I’m from. “Ohio… America,” I told him. “Ah, that explains it,” he smiled at me. What a nice thing to say about Americans.

While hanging with the English masters students, one of them started talking about a book he’s reading on hiphop culture. Each time he said the word “nigga” I flinched. No matter that he’s using it academically, that it’s rebellious reclaiming of a label, like feminists and bitch, that he’s Norwegian and knows nothing of the kind of overcoming of racism that everyone in the US is still struggling with, it still freaked me out. It had no load of meaning for the Norwegians. My automatic sensitivity made me think about my relationship to race in American society; though I grew up in a neighborhood of mostly black and Jewish upper-middle class neighbors, with everyone pretty friendly, the history I’ve been taught and my gender studies classes have me owning a part in America’s history of racism almost viscerally.

We decided we’re going to throw a themed party: dress up like your thesis. I can’t wait to see my dorky Norwegian friend all blinged out (or is it blinged up?). I guess I get to choose between Captain Ahab and Edna Pontellier… what a difficult decision. Peg leg or floaty dress.

Much as my soul loves travel, my body hates it. I’m on round two of the Great Norwegian Cold. I was actually planning on going to a free concert tonight at the Grieghallen, but my sniffles during class were so excruciating I decided I’d probably be lynched if I stepped inside the concert hall, and came home for soup instead.

It was dark when I left school. Everyone has been warning me of the depressing effects of winter, yet I’m loving it. There's a fire to Fall, a blazing up of bush and hearth against the shrill and whispering dark, that lights my spirit too. Listening to the rain trickle gently down the window, inside a well-lit room that smells of hot apple cider while cuddled in an oversized hoodie, puts me in a mood that I want to call Autumn Cheer and bottle up to sell in a candle store. Then sends me out to wander the dark streets and brace myself against the rain, wet leaves painting themselves against my cheek with swipes of the rainbrush. The clean shine of rain across the land, and orderly rows of lights glowing through the evening black, hold my happiness. Happy Fall, all.

Lord, it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one
anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long
time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

Ohio Invades Norway

I returned from a ramble to see a mechanical bull set up in a tent outside my apartment. A Norwegian waited outside soliciting riders. 

“No thanks,” I told him, “I’m from Ohio.” Judging by his puzzled expression, I probably should have explained it better, something about coming from the land of mechanical bulls and wanting to escape that in Norway, but I’m not sure it would have made any sense to anyone who hasn’t firsthand experienced the pig races and fried cool-aid of the Ohio State Fair. (I just found out, it’s international week at Fantoft. Norway is celebrating with mechanical bulls).

Kitkat bars in Norway come with hiking directions and a
map. I  love this country.

Anita finally told the high schoolers off for playing on facebook during class. Utter relief. Though she says blocking facebook has been discussed, and the authorities have decided it’s more important that the children learn to discipline themselves than that they not lose time right now on facebook. Interesting, and I wonder if it works. Definitely not the way it’s done in the US educational system (by the way, Shifra Zack, if you’re reading this in class, turn it off NOW!).

I’ve formed a clique in my Norwegian course. All my life, I’ve worked against cliques, and steadily wandered from group to group. But just this once, I’ve actively worked to create a clique, and man, do I see why they do it. I’ve effectively picked out and bonded together the others in the class who are also teaching at the university, and who happen to have nationalities with which I jive well. There’s the German teaching atmospheric dynamics, the Brit finishing his PhD in physics, the Slovenian/maybe-he’s-Slovakian-I-really-can’t-tell-the-difference who finished medical school and practiced as a doctor for six years before coming to Bergen to get his PhD in biology, and a German guy who’s really Japanese by ethnicity and wormed his way into the group by virtue of being hilarious. The five of us have scared off all of the exchange students in the class, and so we’re free to be as silly as we want (only in incredibly intelligent ways, of course).

The truth is, after teaching all week, it’s a relief to enter my Norwegian class (Norskkors) and shrug back into a student. I needn’t worry about whether students are engaged, or scared to speak, or slowly chewing up pages of the textbooks and spitting them out at the ceiling. I’m free to sit back and enjoy the ride of learning. I think the other graduate students in my group feel much the same way, and so there’s a certain lightsome hilarity in our interactions and a sense of colleague-hood in the courtesy with which we engage wholeheartedly in our teacher’s activities. 

I’m reading an easy book in Norwegian, and have a fairly good idea of what it’s about; so far, a son has waxed poetic about reuniting with his musician father for a good fifty pages. I catch myself phrasing things in Norwegian as I walk, and soon hope to write a post in basic Norwegian. It’s so cool to watch my brain wrap itself around another language. I’m especially sensitive to it because of teaching English, and having spent the past half a year improving my Hebrew hasn’t hurt, either. Jeg kan prøver å skriver bare på norsk nå, men den er veldig vanskelig; jeg ikke vet mange ord (note: Norwegian readers, please don’t laugh at my grammar!).

Rainbow by Ulriken

Today was a beautiful sunny day in Bergen. It rained, of course. While I was walking to class, it even hailed. But that’s a typical sunny day in Bergen. And it means… RAINBOWS! A splendid, enormous spray of colors arched over Ulriken as I came home.

I started my high schoolers on journals today. They groaned at the workload, and five minutes later were intent on writing. There’s something so provocative about writing for one person, baring your soul to your teacher and getting a chance to tell your half of the story. Teaching can be very one-sided, with the instructor getting to share all of their self while the students dutifully lap it up. But journals bridge that gap and let the student make their case to the teacher, shout “here I am! Whole and quirky and alive!” I can’t wait to see what they’ve written, and establish a rapport of genuine conversation with my students. And hopefully some of them will find it addictive, and delicious, and not be able to stop, until six years later they find themselves journaling across blogspot for their entire acquaintance to see. If only.

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.  

Bergenhus

Sunday, Ruth (the other Fulbrighter at Fantoft) and I were planning to hike, but Bergen unleashed angry rain interspersed with sunny skies, so instead we decided to explore old Bergen.

A man was carving a giant fish

We walked down the Bryggen, bashing umbrellas against other passersby. On the wharf, tents were set up for the Bergen Food Festival. The smell of cider, waffles, and sausages wafted towards us on gusts of rain. Peddlers hawked jars of preserves and snips of lox on crackers. One stand selling lefse made me salivate. Enormous wheels of moldy-rinded cheese scared me off dairy for life.

As we walked towards the Bergenhus, an old fortress from the 13^th century, we bumped into children dressed as medieval Europeans. Little boys wore armor and stubbed swords into people’s backs, and little girls carefully picked up their velvet gowns, revealing suspiciously modern rubber rain boots beneath.

The Rosenkrantz Tower is named after governor Rosenkrantz, from the 1500’s. We started at the guard room, and wound our way up narrow stone staircases and through tiny passages. The dungeon was properly dungeon-like and sent me reeling out of it with claustrophobia clenching my body into panic. The governor had the nicest room, even nicer than the chapel or the king’s bedroom. Perhaps the builders figured that neither of the latter would sleep in the tower as often as Rosenkrantz. 

View from Rosenkrantz Tower

This week I taught Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” drawing links for my students with the current political situation in America. What would Thoreau have said about the US government today? The students’ responses saddened me. America has degenerated, and they know is. It’s not that I think we should all espouse Thoreau’s ideal –he seemed an unrealistic, uncompromising, ill-mannered sort of man—but America is so very far from the individualistic, non-materialistic  vision that he had. Still, I made excellent use of Thoreau’s “corporations have no conscience” quote to introduce Mitt Romney, and we spoke of the debt crisis in August with Thoreau’s ideas in mind.

The “rain warning” on the weather website has officially changed into a “flood warning.” Now I might have to row my way to school each day. I can picture everyone on the bybanen taking out their ski poles and helping prod us along.  

Went to the Bergen Art museum. It’s housed in three buildings: Modern, 19^th century Norwegian, and everything else. I dashed through the modern, imagining my grandparents’ comments (Kim really doesn’t like those arrangements of neon lines. And one can see his point). One diptych struck me as cool: a painting of a group of doctors standing together whose white coats merged into a blob, above which their faces still held personality, and a painting of a group of businessmen standing together whose black suits merged into a blob, above which their faces also remained distinct. It seems such a good way of representing both the individuality of the modern man as well as the way in which certain professions can blend you into anonymous authority.

The building with 19^th century Norwegian art was right up my alley. I fell in love with Dahl’s månescapes; he makes the moon glimmer behind the clouds as though they’re just haze on the canvas. Munch’s Evening on Karl Johan Street hit me with all the unpleasant anxiety that he’s so good at. Being able to see the original and compare it to Karl Johan when I was there two weeks ago was kind of stupendous. The “everything else” building was a mix of inspiring old Norwegian and nauseating modern.

This boat was ACTUALLY used on
Pirates of the Caribbean! And
parked at the wharf! How cool!

I realized that Thursdays I spend most of my day dashing from church to church. Exit Bergen Katedralskole, nod to the cathedral beside it, and set my sights to Johanneskirk, the big red spire obstructing my view of the Humanities Faculty building across town. I’m thinking of asking someone to hook up zip lines between the spires. It would cut my rainy-day commutes in half.

It really hit me I’m in Norway the other day. I went onto the nefesh b’nefesh site, but before I could enter it, a screen popped up saying, “NBN is not currently organizing flights from Norway at this time.” Firstly, how scary is it that the web knows where my computer is? (And yours, too—I can check what countries my blog viewers are in). Secondly, wow am I outside of the stream.

This weekend is supposed to be gloriously sunny. Expect pics of the Ulriken to Fløiyen trail. I’ll finally get a chance to hike it! 

My Life is Average

“Okay, let’s talk about bibliographies,” I told my writing workshop at UiB. “Are you guys used to MLA, or do you use something else?”

Mostly nods, some blank stares.
One guy raised his hand.

“Are you talking about My Life is Average?”

Facepalm.

Finally, Saturday night,  I began to regret my college sobriety. Oh, I drank a bit in college –the occasional classy glass of wine with a friend (Shoshi I miss you!), or half a cup of beer at a friend’s birthday, and of course that one time when Ellen borrowed OJ from our RA to celebrate after I’d defended my thesis, but for the most part I watched as my friends got drunk and toasted me. Yet Saturday night, as I nursed a bloody finger, I thought I’d have done better to have drank a little more and mocked a little less.

Connection between bloody fingers and beer? Well, after a few weeks of using orange juice for Kiddush, I’ve decided to branch out. I went for cider last week, but this week, having consumed considerably more beer in the past month than I’m used to (three whole glasses) and begun to like the taste, I decided to try beer. Probably even the hardiest drinker from the States would have also forgotten about Norway’s puritanical alcohol laws and attempted to buy their six-pack after 8. I returned for a morning alcohol purchase. Digressive question: does this lead to morning drunkenness among Norwegians? Anyhow, I bought my beers, but used the last of my cider for kiddush. Then, Saturday evening, after chilling at a friend’s apartment where everyone was pre-partying before a rave at the Bunker (also called the Cave, the local party spot in the forest seems to have many names), I came back to try a beer for havdalah. And realized I don’t possess a bottle opener.

Now, everywhere I go, I go fully equipped; with my swiss army knife I feel like a boy scout. But I checked, and it doesn’t have a beer opener. Maybe they figured boy scouts don’t need them. Anyhow, I remembered once seeing an enterprising friend open a beer with a piece of paper folded many times, and decided to try it. Which ended with my middle finger bleeding and bandaged (after all, I am prepared for all normal emergencies). I finally opened the beer, cleverly utilizing a wine opener to pry the lid off. And scared my sister on skype, when she saw me chugging the last of the bottle. Well.

I met the board of the Bergen Jewish community. They’re all Israeli, all working people who shake hands heavily and sound so… Israeli. The rabbi, Joav, flew in from Oslo to speak about the start of cheider. He advertised for a seminar in Oslo for their kids to come to, and interestingly, their first question was about security. And, also interestingly, he had a really good answer: nobody knows exactly when or where the seminar is except the people running it—the kids are taken out of Oslo to somewhere nearby for the weekend, with security. Wow. After having received such friendly responses from the people here who are slowly figuring out that I’m Jewish, it shocked me to remember that the number one concern for Jewish parents in Europe has to be their kids’ safety. 

The Bergen weather forecast site has a caution symbol on it for tomorrow, with something that seems to translate into “really heavy rain.” As Bergen always has really heavy rain, I’m not sure what to expect, but I’ve started to build an ark. And my neighbor wants me to get it out of his driveway.  

So far, September has held true to its promise

September has come, it is hers

Whose vitality leaps in the autumn

Whose nature prefers

Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace...