"Chanzia" and the Most Expensive Choir Robes Ever

So I have not been too good at keeping this blog up for the past couple days, but hopefully now I will write a little more regularly. Honestly, Monday was not all that exciting aside from it being the first day. My daily schedule appears to be conforming to a mold like thus:

7:15- get up, whine to myself about how tired I am, realize it's my fault for keeping up with friends back home.

7:40- go down to lunch room to eat with my friend Gus who goes to St. Olaf and is also in my first class. Breakfast is usually this puffy rice cereal and some brunost and bringebær syltetøy (raspberry jam) on bread. The day I see cold waffles is the day I do a spastic joy dance.

8:15-10:00- First class, Norwegian literature. So far the class seems really interesting; I can't wait to read Ibsen, because I'm not at all familiar with him. But I trust the hubbub I've heard is not for naught.

10:02- feel intense hunger pang, scamper across the hall (literally, sort of; my classrooms are the in the same corridor) to my next class.

10:15-13:00- Norwegian I, the course I have dubbed "babynorsk." Three hours long, but I definitely enjoy it. My teacher is Margaret O'Leary, the same teacher Peder had last year. In fact, I'm taking both of Peder's classes from last year. You'd think it was planned or something.

13:01- Realize how hungry I am, go back to Blindernstudenthjem (BS from now on, not that I don't like spelling nineteen-letter words out or anything) in time for the post-class lunch rush. Lunch is whatever they have; whatever they have can be anywhere from haddock cakes to vegetarian curry to halal chicken hot dogs.

The past two afternoons have been spent going on shopping excursions, first to get a thirty day pass for all the public transportation (I got a nice discount for being under 20; apparently all teenagers are still considered "barn" in Norway), and then to get food. First expedition I got dried mango and Store Lomper (lefse's cheapskate half-sibling), both of which were gone by this morning, for different reasons. The dried mango was so good I ate it in one sitting. The store lomper apparently had to be refrigerated, and by the time I woke up this morning there were suspicious black spots all over them, and the bag was filled with condensation. Second expedition I got a kinder egg, to whose existence I am enslaved, and this nifty candy bar called "Smash."



Basically it's chocolate with Bugle- like corn things in them. I think it's delicious, and apparently they're super popular in Norway now.

However, the definite highlight of yesterday was going downtown to UiO's Faculty of Law for the Opening Ceremony of the summer school. We left campus at 18:15 with the expectation that we'd get there and be seated and continue with our lives. This did not happen, so that left us to sit around in front and take pictures of anything we felt compelling.
Finally, we were let inside. The ceremony was held in the hall where the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded until 1989. It had been newly restored, complete with some lovely murals by Edvard Munch himself.





The program itself included an amateur choir who sang traditional folk songs in their bunads. I have long parted with my fantasy of owning a bunad; they are about 3000 kroner each and take forever to make. However, since different bunads come from different parts of Norway, one could look at each singer and know from which city they came. I am not well-versed in my bunads, so all I could see were pretty frocks.



After the ceremony, we went to Oslo City Hall for a banquet (implied: FREE NOT BLINDERN FOOD) held by the deputy mayor of Oslo. City Hall was beautiful, again decorated with murals and the like.





We were served delicious finger food as well as champagne. The champagne, unfortunately, had quite a bite, and the bite tasted suspiciously like cardboard. From then on my friend Lauren, also a Linguistics major at UW Madison, and I dubbed it "Chanzia," a portmanteau of "champagne" and "Franzia."

All in all the night was very enjoyable, though I did have to do homework at the dorm afterwards until the wee hours of the morning.