the abyss means...

First day of classes!

Got up early (and sleepy) to go to first class of the day, which was Norwegian language. Teacher looked exactly like the main character frm the film Leon. He refused to speak english and indicated that we should not either. After a while he explained that he could only speak german, and some french apart from his norwegian. He seemed to recognise the name of my home town however. He also distinguished between American english and British english. We decided that he was probably lying, although he did indicate he lived at a small town on the west coast, so it was feasible that he did not know english.

Second class was art history, with a teacher who sounds exactly like the teacher from South Park. He asked a whole series of rhetorical questions which he answered himself in a long winded way, through all of this was interspersed the word OK (said Okaaaaaayy). Seemed a bit grim, I kept almost falling asleep.

I then went to the bookshop and discovered the price of books in norway. £30 for a little text book and £35 for a Norwegian/Engliah dictionary.

After talking to other people at lunch time I realised that I was glad I swapped from the intensive language. It appears to be quite demanding.

After lunch we (Brittney, Cibal, Pam, Sussie, and a couple of spanish people) went up to Sognsvann - which is a beautiful lake surrounded by woodland in the hills above Oslo. I got to go swimming, and aggravated my already bad sunburn.

I had to rush back to receive instructions on how to use a washing machine and tumble dryer.

After this I spent a while talking to Todd (American) who is studying germanic languages for his degree. He told me that his Nynorsk teacher was from england. After some discussion we established that his teacher was my teacher, and that he was actually english. I found that terribly amusing.

This was the day I ran out of tobacco.

I decided not to go to the evening lecture because it was quite quite boring looking.

See Classes at the ISS and Sognsvann for photos

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