Lisa in Norway

I’m leaving Oslo tomorrow morning early. I’m very very sad to go and it was so sad saying goodbye to my friends. I’ve had a great semester and really loved all of the opportunities and experiences I’ve had here this semester. I’ve met so many people from all over the world and learned more about myself as well. 

I loved most: the cabin trip, movie nights with roommates, thanksgiving, field trip to western Norway, buddy group week, going to Rondane, waffle fridays, sunny days, snowy nights, going to Drøbak, potluck dinners, and many many more.

I’m very excited to go to England and then to go home for Christmas, but right now I’m mostly sad to be leaving. 

Farvel, Norge.

On Thursday I decided to go to the last places I wanted to go in Oslo before leaving. First, I went to the Cultural History museum run by UiO. It was free entrance and there was barely anyone there. There were exhibits on indigenous people all over the world, emphasizing the Sami in Norway and the Greenland Inuits who came in contact with Fridjof Nansen during his Arctic explorations. There was also one room about glaciers melting and global warming that had contours on the floor which was so cool:

After that I went down by the harbor to the Nobel Peace Museum. It is free admission from after the award is given (December 10th) until the end of the year. It was a really great museum with each exhibit having a different format. Some of them were cool and technology-filled as well! Here is the exhibit about this year’s winners, “Sheroes”:

After that I took the T to Tøyen and went to the Zoologic and Geologic museums! The zoologic museum was basically a lot of stuffed things in displays, and the geologic museum was a lot of minerals and rocks in cases, so clearly I loved it!

It was my last time walking around the city, so I lingered a bit at the harbor during sunset:

Last Saturday morning, right after getting back late from Stockholm, I went with Tata and Basia to a small fishing town south of Oslo, right on the Oslofjord, called Drøbak. We took a bus from Oslo center to Drøbak, which took about an hour. It was a beautiful sunny day, the only problem being that the streets are completely covered in ice because Norway doesn’t salt or sand anything in the winter, they just put down pebbles for traction instead. The second we got off the bus in the center of town, a guy from the Lions booth at the Christmas market handed us some pepperkaker (gingerbread cookies)! A good start to a great day! The Christmas market there was really cute, with old people selling things:

We went into a few cute little Christmas shops where they had a lot of ornaments and Christmasy knick-knacks. Then we walked down a very icy street to the harbor. I guess Drøbak is on the thinnest part of the Oslofjord and is fairly close to the sea:

Then we walked along the water a bit and to a church that many people were coming out of. There was actually a Christmas concert going on with a young boy’s choir singing. We stopped in and listened for a few songs, but didn’t recognize them. It was a cute little church with a cemetery next to it, called Drøbak kirke:

There was a park on the other side of the park where we hung out for a while talking and sliding on the ice:

Then Basia and I ended up having the First Annual Drøbak Ice Games, competing between Team Poland and Team USA, with a Georgian commentator. Team Poland won the Speed Skating competition, but Team USA won the Ice Sliding competition:

After defying death in the name of fun, it was starting to get dark (at 3pm) and we caught the next bus back to Oslo. Once back, we decided to walk around the center for a while and went to some tourist shops, walked through the Christmas market, and saw the ice skaters in what used to be a fountain before heading back home for a couple hours. 

Funnily enough, this summer when I was at camp, my dad had talked to a collegue who had lived in Norway for a few years and he told me to go to Drøbak because it was a really beautiful town. I’m really glad I went there and it was absolutely gorgeous in the snow:

Last Thursday morning, the 8th, I set out on a trip to Stockholm for two days. I went with three others from my buddy group: Rianne, Grant, and Gesa. We started off our adventure in the cold, icy dark of a 4:56am bus to the airport. After a bus, flight, and another bus, we reached Stockholm city center! We were immediately shocked at how inexpensive everything was compared to Oslo. The Swedish Kroner (SEK) is worth less than the Norwegian Kroner and things are less expensive in general. For example, a sandwich at the airport cost only 25 SEK, whereas in Oslo the same sandwich would have been more like 50 NOK.

It was a beautiful day in Stockholm, but chilly. We were all super tired and stopped at MAX Bugers for some morning coffee and burned our tongues. Then we checked into our hostel, called the City Backpacker’s hotel:

Then we went off to explore the town and first went to Gamla Stan, the Old Town. There, we walked all around the heavily cobblestoned streets between the old architecture which was very cool:

There we saw the royal palace, went into some tourist shops, and explored a couple of the Christmas markets there. Later, we went back to the main island (since Stockholm is on a series of 17+ islands) and walked along the main shopping street, stopping at more Christmas markets. Then we got some lunch at a cafe. The best part of the journey came next when we went to a great Christmas market where there was a tent selling big muffins and gløgg, the Scandinavian Christmas drink, which ended up being very good:

We walked around a bit longer then went back to the hostel. 

At 7, we had the “Swedish Meatball Experience” in which a group of hostel-stayers, including us, made our own Swedish meatballs and listened to ABBA music. Can’t get much more Swedish than Abba:

It was a delicious traditional Swedish/Scandinavian dinner with meatballs, brown sauce, potatoes, and elderberry jam. Gesa had to go back to Oslo because she had a final on Friday morning, so took an overnight bus back. It was my first hostel experience and overall it was very good. We stayed in a room with 12 bunks and got fairly good sleep.

On Friday we got up, checked out, went to Subway for breakfast, then went back to Gamla Stan to buy some last-minute souvenirs. Then, we went to City Hall, which is where they award all of the Nobel Prizes (except the Peace Prize, which is awarded in Oslo). It was a really nice building with a large courtyard and is right on the ocean, which made the windiness, coldness, and wetness even more obvious:

Since it was so cold and I ended up having a bit of a cold (I could not stop sneezing), we went to sit down in a coffee shop for a while. Then, we did a bit of shopping, but me and Rianne split off from Grant and lost him for a while. We ended up all meeting back at the hostel where we chilled for a couple hours. Then we caught a bus to the airport to wait for our flight. Unfortunately, our flight was delayed for 1.5 hours, supposedly because of heavy snow in Oslo, so we didn’t take off until 8pm when we were supposed to be in Oslo at 7:30. So we got back to Oslo late, then went right to bed. 

It was nice to be able to hit another Scandinavian capital before leaving Europe. Stockholm is definitely bigger than Oslo and feels more like a real city.

So as of December 5th, I finished all of my exams and was done with school! Here’s a summary:

Environmental Anthropology:

It was a take home exam back in mid-November. We had a week to write about 4,000 words and a choice of 3 questions. I wrote about the challenges and obstacles faced by the interaction of environmental rights campaigns and indigenous peoples mainly focusing on human rights. I thought it was a pretty good paper over all. This class was interesting to take, but was not well-run. The topics could have been stronger and the classes could have been more interactive and interesting if the teaching was better. Also, I still think putting 100% of the weight on the exam is wrong. How can you improve if you do that? Best thing about this class was reading “Marine Mammals and Northern Cultures”.

Norwegian Life and Society:

December 2nd was this 3-hour exam. It was also worth 100% of my grade so I was pretty nervous about it. There were 2 parts each worth 50%. The first part was answering 4/6 ‘short’ answer questions, each of which I wrote about a page on. These were more specific questions, so I thought they were easier to answer. The second part was a longer essay and we could pick one of two questions. I wrote about Norwegian ‘solidarity’, and decided to write about it in the contexts of the events in 1814, 1905, Nazi occupation, and the 2011 massacre. I thought overall it went pretty well, but then again I have no idea because it was the only assignment in the semester and I have no idea how it will be graded. This class was very interesting, nevertheless. Our textbook was a good survey of many topics and was easy to read. I also enjoyed having multiple lecturers from different departments and schools come in. I do wish the course coordinator actually sat in on every class, though, to make sure things ran smoothly and so that we knew we actually had a teacher.

Structural Geology:

My last exam, which was on the 5th of December was Structure. It was only worth 40% of my grade, which is much fairer. It was in 3 questions, each worth 33% of the grade, but of course each question had multiple parts and each part had multiple questions. The first and second questions were fairly good because they were the same as had been on the previous exams he had posted online to study from. I think I did fairly well on those. The third was a bit different and I think I messed up on part A, which may have messed up my other answers. He gives partial credit though, so I tried to show that I knew how to answer the later questions, even if the answers were wrong. I was pretty happy with how this class was run. I wish there could have been more class time, though, and possibly more time to actually understand concepts. I feel like he just introduced them, but did not actually go into them at all. It was a good class though. Not my favorite type of geology, just because physics isn’t my favorite. I think I’ll stick to geochemistry in the future, but I know I’ll use the concepts of structure, so a very necessary class to have.

Now that exams are over, I feel like I’m free to do what I want. If someone asks “do you want to…?” I have no reason to say no, so I don’t! I also have a short list of things I still want to do before leaving Norway, so I am working my way through that list before leaving on the 18th for England.