A lot has happened over the last few weeks. I have been spending a lot of my time hanging out with all of the exchange students I have met here. Other than the four people I know from Minnesota who are here, I have only met three other people from the US. Otherwise in the groups I have been hanging out with there are people from at least 15 different countries from all over the world. I am pretty much the only person that doesn’t speak a second language, and only a couple other people speak English as their first language. We have been playing a lot of word games like Taboo or Charades. It makes it a lot more interesting because everyone might not always know the answer in English or haven’t heard a saying that I know. It has been a lot of fun to learn about everyone else and hear what it is like in their home countries.

The problem I ran into is that so many of the other exchange students here all live in a different student village than me. I was spending a lot of nights walking to Moholt to hang out with people and then had to walk back in the cold. Eventually I decided it would be worth it to just move to Moholt. This past weekend (2/2/14) I was able to completely move everything over to Moholt. The map below shows my new building. Luckily one of my room mates in Steinan was willing to drive me there so the move was pretty easy.

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I’m really liking my new apartment. It’s a much busier area so buses run every 10 minutes almost all day. There is a much bigger (and cheaper) grocery store across the street from me, and my new room mates are all great. I told my old room mates I would be back to visit, and because I forgot all of my frozen food in the freezer I came back the very next day! My new room is much smaller and no where near as nice as Steinan, but I still have more than enough room to fit everything in my room. I’m only here for a semester so I don’t need so much space.

A New Guitar

Also a few days before I started moving I decided I was going to go crazy if I didn’t have a guitar to play for the semester. I looked around online and eventually I found a used guitar that someone was selling near NTNU that looked pretty nice. I went and tried it out, and I actually really like it. I might even try to bring it home with me… Since I have a pretty light class load I have been spending A LOT of time practicing this last last week. I have a few songs that I have been working on learning so I will be posting some videos to YouTube once I finish them.

Pizza Buffet at Tyholt Tower

In several of the pictures I have posted previously you can see a large tower on one of the hills around Trondheim. There is actually a restaurant in the top of it that spins and has an amazing view of Trondheim. We decided to go there for one of my friend’s birthdays. They have a pizza buffet which surprisingly is one of the cheaper meals we have found anywhere (about $18…). It was my very first time going out to eat in Norway after almost a month. The pizza was really good! It was kind of difficult to take pictures through the glass without getting a bunch of nasty reflections, but in the gallery I posted some of my pictures from visiting there.

Classes

I also started my Norwegian class. The class itself is pretty easy, but Norwegian pronunciations are very difficult. We spend quite a bit of the time asking each other questions and answer in Norwegian. My professor’s accent is kind of difficult for me to understand, so on one of the first days of class he asked me in English: “Oh you’re from MInnesota. You have a lot of beers there right?”. I answered “… yeah?”. Turns out he actually meant “bears”. Turns out most the class heard “beers” as well!

Hiking in Heimdal

This past weekend a group of about 6 guys all caught a bus to Heimdal, a small town south of Trondheim. In Norway everyone is free to explore public land and there is a lot of it so there are really nice trails all over the place. We spent a large chunk of the day just wandering through the woods, checking the GPS every once in a while to make sure we were going the right direction. We went by the Granåsen skiing area and eventually caught a tram back to Trondheim. That group has been planning weekly hiking trips so I will be going with them again! The map below roughly shows our route. We spent a lot more time wandering around in the woods than it shows though!

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Other than that I’ve been spending a lot of time just wandering around Trondheim checking everything out and staying up way to late hanging out with everyone here. In the coming weeks I have a few cool trips planned. I am going to be visiting Røros, Åre Sweden, and most likely Tromsø. Røros is a small town south of Trondheim that apparently is the coldest city in Norway. I found out we get to try reindeer while we are there, but that’s about all I know so far! It’s a planned trip by the exchange student organization so I’m not exactly sure what we are doing yet. I am going to be going downhill skiing in Åre. It is one of the biggest hills in the area and there is a big group of exchange students all going. Tromsø is the second largest city north of the Arctic Circle in the world. A few of my friends here have visited there already and thought it was awesome! They have a lot of awesome pictures of the northern lights and the city looks beautiful. I’m still in the planning stages of figuring out this trip though, so hopefully I will get everything figured out soon!