i spent this past weekend at my friends cabin up in the mountains. there is a one hour hike to get to the cabin and there is no electricity which means you have to carry everything up and cook everything on a gas burner or fire. we shot a rifle, made bon fires, axed some logs, went for a hike, saunaed and jumped in the stream, cooked meat on an open fire, skipped rocks... lots of manly stuff.
this cabin has been in my friend´s family for over 3 generations now and the nearest neighbour is his uncles cabin which is 2km away. that´s a little far to go and borrow a cup of sugar. while i was up there i realized that there are only a few places in the world that aren´t habitated where you can really escape to. i think that this is one of the things that i love the most about norway!
forget about taking photography lessons (although it would probably be way cheaper), if you want to take good photos just move to norway. with nature like this it's pretty hard to take bad pictures.
good thing that there is a picture on the juice containers because most english speakers would probably pick up the appelsinjuice thinking that it's apple juice but get surprised to find out that it's orange juice.
april 30th was the last day that you were able to use the 50 øre coin. the 50 øre was always this coin which you collect a bunch of in your pocket and then eventually dumped them into your coin jar. this is really similar to the canadian penny. canada is also trying to eliminate the penny because they cost more to manufacture then what they are actually worth and no one really ever uses them either... the only difference that i see is that many canadians have an emotional attachment to the penny whereas most norwegians that i've talked to found the 50 øre to be more of an annoyance than anything.
there really wasn't much that you could buy with a 50 øre. on the last day that you could spend them before having to bring them to the bank we accumulated 38 coins from our coin jar which is 19kr. to give you an idea what you can buy with that 19kr will buy you an ice cream cone, a chocolate bar, a liter of milk but you can't even buy a beer unless you go for one of the really cheap brands... the girl at the counter definitely wasn't impressed when we dropped off all the coins.
last night i managed to make it through a norwegian movie with norwegian subtitles all by myself and was able to follow along and understand most of everything!
up to now i´ve seen 3 norwegian movies and must say that they have all been pretty good. i´ll give you a quick rundown and critique. one thing that you should know about norway is that they rate everything out of 6 and use a dice. sometimes i wonder if it all started when a critique was either lazy or didn´t know what to rate something so he just let the die do the rating for him...
here are my top 3...
#3 Mannen some elsket yngve
it translates to the man that loved yngve. yngve is a boy´s name for you that were wondering. it´s all based in stavanger so was all in the local dialect. i´m still not really good with the local dialect since in norwegian class they teach us bokmål. here is one example...
at one point in the movie they write kug on his forehead when he´s passed out. kug is dialect for kuk (i´ll let you google translate it yourself).
i give this one a 3/6.
#2 Nokas
Nokas is the true story of a bank robery that happened in stavanger. it´s a really cool movie about scandinavia´s biggest robbery. the movie really portrays how peaceful and safe a country norway is. for example the police don´t cary guns and during the robbery, normal people walked between the cops and robbers thinking it was just a training session.
here´s the trailer which pretty much gives away the whole story (hate it when trailers do more than just being a teaser,,,)
this movie gets 5/6
#1 hodejegerne
there has been a lot of talk about a hollywood version of this movie including rumours that mark wahlberg wanting to do the remake. i watched it without subtitles and a little help of some friends but definitely recommend that you check out the version with subtitles if you can,
for anyone that is interested in learning norwegian i came across a website offered by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. i remember paying about 4000 kr plus the costs of textbooks which were approximately 700 kr so the fact that this is free is pretty awesome!
this past winter i've started playing pick-up hockey which in norway is called kølle og puck (stick and puck). for 85kr you can play pick up for 1 to 2 hours every monday to thursday. all you need is a stick, a helmet and some skates to play. the last time i played organized hockey was in university and before that was when i was about 12 or 13. this is my last jersey that i wore and still fits (without the equipment) i must admit that i didn't wear it for the first couple of weeks until i got warmed up because i didn't want them to know that i was a canadian and get stereotyped while i was trying to remember how to skate and stop properly...
my last year of hockey was when i hit my growth spurt and outgrown all my old gear. i basically had to get all new equipment and since we couldn't afford it at the time my dad jokingly told me that i wasn't good enough to make it to the NHL so I should take an early retirement...
the caliber of hockey has been quite good and you get players from all levels. a lot of the guys have NHL jerseys but i did notice that there was a large amount of New York Rangers jersey's. i quickly realized that it was because of Mats Zuccarello (http://rangers.nhl.com/club/player.htm?id=8475692) who is the only norwegian player in the NHL right now...
the language barrier was never too big of a problem since everyone can speak english and i can now pick up a bit of norwegian but now i can just imagine what its like to be a foreign speaker coming to north america to play hockey.
unfortunately the pick-up season is coming to an end this week and it's going to be time to hang up the skates once again. they are flooding the ice to make way for a We love the 90's concert which is full of what I will refer to as 90's "euro trash" music. damn you scooter!!!
while up north we signed up for a dog sledding expedition. even though it was snowing which meant no northern lights this was still a fantastic experience! i even got to "drive" the sled!
known as the Paris of the north, Tromsø is almost as far north as you can get in Norway. my 5 year old nephew noted it's pretty close to santa but unfortunately i didn't have any sightings of the big guy in red...
tromsø is up in the article circle and it has turned into a pretty popular tourist spot for hunting the northern lights. we took a 5 hour guided tour and this is what we were looking for...
but unfortunately due to poor weather conditions, overcast skies and snow, this is what we saw... they really are hit or miss. the one guy that i was talking to on the trip does an anual trip and said that he's seen the northern lights about 3 out of the 6 trips that he's done.
the next day we had planned a day of cross country skiing up along the mountain tops which offered fantastic views of the city. unfortunately once we got to the top the weather had changed and there were some pretty big winds.
i've learned my lesson and we decided to take the gondola back down and go a different route. tromsø has some fantastic cross country tracks pretty much right inside the city which offer some pretty spectacular views.
there was even a ski jump where i finally learned that they don't start learning straight from the top of the big one but they have some smaller ramps to start from...
all in all i thought that tromsø was a great city. it actually reminded me of thunder bay, ontario. since it's about the same size (pop. 80,000) and both cities are kind of isolated since there aren't really any other big cities nearby. both have great outdoor life and a good mix of culture.
