Høst i Hamar

Hi everyone!
So life has started to settle down a bit in good Ol' Norway, now that we've been here for about 6 weeks. We've had the post-entry euphoria, an exciting week of adventure in the arctic, and now we are back "home" in Hamar...for a little while. On October 5, our week-long mid-semester break will begin, and that will be another adventure in itself.
I use the term adventure loosely, as there has been very little planning as of right now as to where we will be traveling and what exactly we will be doing...adventures await.

After our break, we've got 8 intense weeks of classes, internships, and life ahead of us. I'm starting the first introductions to my field study at the Namibia Association on Tuesday. I'm very excited and little bit nervous. Overall I am anticipating a very positive and exciting experience--I think there is a lot waiting for me to discover at this one!

In the academic arena, we have finished our first module, the Introduction to Norway,and have moved on to Module 2: Democracy and Development. We will be doing some case studies in this module that we get to choose and personalize to our own academic interests, which will be really nice. We met with the president of the regional government (like the mayor of the county of Hedmark) and learned a bit about their regional government. Apparently, the regional level of government receives money to spend on development projects abroad, so I am thinking of doing my case study on that, because it sounds incredibly interesting (to me anyway!).
Today we met with a judge in the regional appeals courts, and that was very interesting as well. Some interesting points about the courts in Norway:
-There is no death or life sentences in Norway. The maximum sentence is 21 years.
-There are no juvenile detention centers. After the age of 15 you can be imprisoned, but that is rare.
-There are no separate courts--all civil cases, criminal cases, family cases, etc. are heard by the same judges.

Those were some of the more interesting things we learned. We also learned that our Professor, Inger, was convicted for a crime while demonstrating against the building of a hydroelectric plant and roads in a nature reserve in the North. What a bad apple.

In the mean time, fall has really started to set in here in Hamar. The colors here are beyond amazing. I could just drink them in. I know I posted a few pictures from Abby's and my bike ride last week, but I was feeling very inspired by my roommate, who has a knack for taking breath-taking pictures, to go out into our neighborhood and photograph some of the beauty surrounding us.
I'm starting to feel that my creative photographical eye is improving ;)

En Høst dag i Hamar

A fall day in Hamar...

Yesterday my good pal Abby Ferjak, with whom I worked at OLBC this summer, came up to Hamar from Olso for the day, and we experienced a BEAUTIFUL fall day.
We took a bike ride along the lake, through the country-side and back into town and saw some beautiful fall colors. Just thought I'd post some pictures from our day, because it was just so gorgeous...

mmmm REKER

*SEE PREVIOUS POST*
This is me playing with dead shrimp in Bodø...

Utflukt: Arktisk Skjønnhet

So...this is where we left off...

Packing up the luggage and heading up North by night train for the Arctic...
The night train; in other wordes, 10 hours of extremely uncomfortable sleep. I spent a good 2 hours talking to my Friend Henny using a mixture of 3 different languages: English, German and Norwegian. I thought it was pretty cool. Anyway...
7:00 AM Inger came around and woke us all up because we were passing the Arctic Circle.
We were in the middle of Nowhere and the arctic circle didn't look like much. So that was that.
2 hours and several hundred kilometers later we arrived at Fauske, where we jumped on a bus to Arran, the location of the Lule-Saami center.
We were all tired and smelly and not ready for a day of learning..but that's life, I guess.
We all ate lunch together when we arrived, then we had a tour of the center and the museum with the most informed woman I've ever met. I think she could have talked for 3 hours about every single thing in that museum, she would have, too, if Inger hadn't pressed her onward. It was very interesting, in any case.
So to inform those of you who have no idea who the Saami people are: They are the indigenous people of Norway/Sweden/Finland, found predominantly in the Arctic regions. The different tribes or groups of Saami are separated by the language/dialects they speak. (This happened to be the group that spoke Lule-Saami.) The Saami people traditionally do a lot of reindeer herding and fishing; they have their own cultural identity, but I would say that they are quite integrated as part of Norway's soceity. They have their own parliament at the capital (which in itself is a controversial issue, that I won't go into detail about now) and they have schools and kindergartens for Saami children where they speak primarily Saami. In fact, there was a Lule-saami kingergarten right across the street from the center we were at.
So...some pictures from the Museum:

clothes made of reindeer skins

Our guide and the map of where we were

A display at the museum


There was a guy who played some traditional Saami music called "yoiking" for us. Its music that basically has interpretive/emotional sounds rather than words...he did a really cool one about the wind that had some cool whistling techniques in it...it was neat..
After the tour of the museum, we had a lecture with the President of the Saami parliament. It was very interesting; there we learned about the problems facing the Arctic today and some of the social and political situations of the Saami people as minorities. It was very interesting.

After we finished at the museum, we were left for about 2 days of fun in the arctic. We went to our campsite in Hamarøy, where we spent the evening fixing dinner, relaxing, and taking freezing cold showers.

Here are some pictures from our campsite:










I'm not a skilled photographer--you should know that by now--but I think the beauty of the arctic is clear. Seriously, it was breath-taking. I never wanted to leave.

This feeling was only intensified after spending Thursday in the arctic landscape. The first place we went was an old light house. It was amazing.






This is a picture of the glacial water..its so fresh and clear, you can see the bottom of the fjord through a good 10 feet of water.


From the light house, we went out to a field you can walk through along the coast. (There was supposed to be an art exibit along the walk, but for some reason we didn't find any art...must have been eaten by a reindeer...)






Our group in the Arctic


This was seriously the best day ever. When we returned to the campsite we went canoeing in the fjord. It was SO FUN and beautiful!!




All of us on the canoes



Our professor, Inger, was enjoying herself as well...


After canoeing some of us went over to the waterfall across from our campsite...and some of us decided to climb it...
The waterfall...

The group at the top of the waterfall...

Britt Inga, Kristin, and I at the waterfall...


It was all in all a fabulous day. Friday we headed down torwads Bodø and went to a museum at an island called Kjerringøy. There ferry ride over was AMAZING. The water was PRETTY choppy...we got a some air going over those waves. Good times. Half the group didn't think it was as fun though, specifically the half that were hung over from the previous nights activities. Needless to say there was a good amount of vomiting that day.

Saturday we went to Bodø, and walked around town before getting on our plane back south. While walking downtown we stopped and got fresh shrimp (reker) from a boat that had caught them fresh that morning.
*see the next post/video for some shrimp cracking/peeling/eating action*

Some pictures from Bodø:




So...we landed safely in Oslo exactly one week ago. Sorry that took so long to post.
I wish I could share the real essense of the arctic...because it was AMAZING.

I could have stayed forever...