Celebrating Norwegian Equality!

This week was a TOUGH week...I had 2 presentations on Thursday morning... Which doesn't sound that hard, but since I have no idea what FDI (foreign direct investments) are, their importance on China, or anything about the textile feud between China and the EU; I knew it was going to be a long week- and that was just for one class: International Business: Context and Development.

In my other class- Global Politics, I had to give a presentation on the "persistence of American post-war order". Overwhelming to say the least! I need to say one thing about this - I know LESS about American politics than anyone else in this class! Seriously! Of course most of them are political science majors, but it’s depressing to think that I know SO little about the government in my own country! And the thing that is even sadder, compared to my American friends, I actually thought I knew something! Oh well...

It was a week of meetings; Monday I met with both my teams, Tuesday I met with both my teams, and Wednesday (after 6 hours of class), I met with both my teams. Each presentation consisted of reading a 50-page article and developing a 20-minute power point presentation. Again, being the only native English speaker in the bunch, I had A LOT of writing, formatting, and grammar checking to do!

But soon enough I was done and it was time for the weekend! All week I had been looking forward to going to bed early on Thursday night (since we were off to Bergen early Friday morning). But when one of my Norwegian friends, Stine, told me about the Autumnal Equinox celebration- I had to go! I had NEVER heard of *celebrating* this type of event!

But first, my friend Nina really wanted to go to a Norwegian cafe and order something - Norwegian class homework. Since Karin, Christoffer, Nina and I all were done with school by 14:00, we headed down to the Nobel Peace Center (Nina had read that they have very good cakes and desserts). We ordered our cakes and sat outside, although windy, it was very enjoyable. Then Karin had to go home, so Nina, Christoffer and I wandered around the city center. I REALLY wanted to have a scarf for our Bergen trip since I remembered it was so COLD last year when I went... After a few H&M stores, I found one I liked and we came home to get ready for our evening walk.

We made plans to meet at Christoffer's beforehand to do some pre-partying :-) The Norwegians call pre-partying "vor-spiel", which to my German friends means, and directly translates to English as, "fore-play"! We're all quite amused by this! So after some *light* cider and wine drinking, we bundled up and were off! At 20:00 (or 8:00 pm) the path along Akerselva (the river just below BI- the school), all the streetlights were turned off and several thousand *torches* (candles) were lit to light the way. Additionally there was several *cultural happenings along the way*- including music, dance, flame blowers, acrobats and much more... all to celebrate the date when the day is just as long as the night.

Although tiring, It was a fun walk... it was pretty far and there were many displays - choirs, accordion players, arrangements of candles along the river banks, a "ghost-man" something-or-another, picture slideshows on the side of a building, free hot chocolate, and all sorts of stuff to see along the walk. We got to the end right around the time the festivities were coming to an end (23:00) so we found a street-tram and called it a night...after all, I still had to pack for Bergen!