I hope you all are preparing for hell-week and finals, I believe in you!
I am also taking final exams here, I had my Norwegian language final on Friday, my Norwegian Life and Society final is on May 4th, and I have a lengthy final paper due the week after that.
Side-note: The US really should adopt an exam schedule like they have here, everything nice and spread out, no need to cram. It really makes way more sense than what we've got.
ANYWAY, back to the main part, the sun is finally here.
When I first arrived here, the sun rose around 9:15 am and set around 3:30 pm 😕
Today the sun rose at 5:40 am and will set around 9:00 pm 😁
These are happy times.
Speaking of happy times, during Marietta's spring break, Amanda flew all the way to Oslo to visit 😍 We had tons of fun here shopping and going to museums and sneaking into a world-cup ski jumping competition (it's very very common for people to hang out in the woods outside the stadium to watch where they can light a fire and cook hot dogs). We also traveled to a small port-city in northern Norway named Bodø (supposedly pronounced Baah-doo but I also heard people from there say Boo-dah so I really don't know). While we were there we went to the beach (it was a little frozen) and saw the Northern Lights (!) which I was unable to get a picture of but it was cool.
Norway doesn't have a spring break like we do in the US educational system. Instead, everybody in the country decides to abandon modern society for a little bit, and from the Thursday before Easter through the entire week following Easter (11 days total) everybody leaves town and either goes to their cabins in the mountains, their cabins by the beach, or out of the country (usually to a beach). Everything closes and the city was basically empty. My contact person here in Norway actually warned us to stock up on food before this apocalypse happened because otherwise we'd have a few hungry nights waiting for the stores to re-open. I did not leave town during this time, I instead had a couple of really nice days in the sun hiking around the islands in the Oslo fjord and in the mountains to the north-west of town.
This is also the time of year where Norwegian teenagers experience a rite of passage into adulthood. This is a tradition known as 'russ'. Russ is a tradition among high school seniors which takes place for about a month between April 17th and May 17th (Norwegian Constitution day). This celebration might be the single most foreign thing I have heard about thus far in Norway.
Russ is basically the personification of 'senior-itis' that involves groups of friends, matching clothes, a little bit of competition, large quantities of alcohol, and a van or bus. For the last month of school, seniors drive around in custom decorated vans, usually with some theme, wearing bright overalls, usually red, blue, or black, which loosely represent their field of study. Each group spends most of high school preparing for russ and going through the process of buying and customizing a van or bus. Once russ actually begins, there are unique (party related) challenges for the russ-ers to complete, contests for best decorated van, wars waged with squirt guns, and pranks and other acts of adolescent mischief. Part of this celebration is due to the fact that most high school seniors have recently turned 18, which in Norway is the legal age for both having a drivers licence and legally drinking alcohol. This sounds like a recipe for disaster, but Norway has a zero-tolerance policy for drinking and driving, and every russ car is required by law to have a designated driver.
If you're as curious about this tradition as I am, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russefeiring for more info.
That's basically all I've been up to the last few months. I'm really looking forward to May and June though, I have several trips planned, including one to Sweden next weekend.
I wish everybody back in the US a happy finals week and I'm looking forward to seeing you again soon!
--Tom 🇳🇴
