Two Weeks Down.....

Hey All!

Sorry, I know it's been awhile since the last post, but life has been super busy. I'm in my 3rd week of school now and time is flying! I'm taking 3 engineering classes and a language course this semester. Statistics and Kinetics are both in Norwegian, Separations is in English, and of course Norwegian is in Norwegian. Luckily, all the textbooks here are in English, so it hasn't been a problem to learn the material. Some of my homework assignments are in Norwegian, but I'm picking up the vocabulary pretty fast because many of the words are similar to the English words. The Norwegian lectures are getting easier to understand by the day, and luckily none of my teachers have a thick dialect.

The school system and philosophy is very different here. Lectures are optional. Only some of the short homework assignments are obligatory, and none of them count towards the final grade. In most cases, you have to turn in so much homework 'to be allowed to' take the final exam. Then the final exam is worth 75-100% of your final grade. The homework assignments are very short and simple compared to the ones back home. For most of my engineering courses at CU, we were assigned a problem set a week that normally took 6-15 hours to complete. These assignments also made up 30-40 % of your final grade. Here, we get one assignment a week, but they only take 1-2 hours. I have a lab course this semester that is shared by both the Kinetics and Separations classes. The projects are rather open ended and the lab reports will definitely take some time.

Now for the fun stuff! Two weekends ago I drove down to Geiranger fjord with some friends and camped right along the water. It's a 8 hour drive from Trondheim, so we left at noon on Friday. Along the way we drove over Trollstigen (troll path), which is this a really steep mountain pass. The road going up has tons of hairpin (pinpoint jk) turns and a waterfall. At the fjord we went for a hike up into the mountains and swam in the fjord a bunch. On the way back, we took a little bit longer route so that we could enjoy some ferry rides. FYI: ferries and tunnels are an integral part of the transportation system here. You usually can't get from one place to another with out them. There are simply no roads that go around.

Anyways, last weekend I rented a koie with some friends. A koie is a small hut in the middle of nowhere that has bunks, some cooking equipment, and a wood burning stove. It's like one step up from step camping. The sports organization here owns several of these, which can be rented for very cheap. This one was about a 30 minute walk from our car, was along a lake, and had a row boat. We saw a phenomenal rainbow the first afternoon (look closely at the picture to the left). Saturday was spent hiking and of course eating blueberries. A group of us came back on Saturday night, because we all had school work to do on Sunday.

Hope all is Well!
Julie