Classes

Thursday we had our first day of our Norwegian class. Our teacher is very into the whole verbal thing so we pretty much just talked for the 3 hours of class, in Norwegian of course. It was quite interesting considering there are 7 Americans, 2 Hungarians, 1 Czech, and 5 Tanzanians in our class and English is the only language understood by all. I think it would be extremely difficult to learn a language that was not translated directly back into your mother language, but goes through your second possibly even your third language like half of the class has to do.
Anyway I have found Norwegian to be both easy and difficult at the same time. The way sentences are structured are fairly easy for me to learn, most of the words you can make out what it is or at least related to and the pronunciation is not as hard as I imagined except for the r which requires much more throat usage than I am able to do. The hard part is not only trying to remember what all the words mean (which has always been the most difficult part for me, they don't seem to stick) but that there is not as stable a system for conjugating verbs. Granted its simpler than in Spanish given there aren't as many possibilities but its also more difficult in that the conjugation is not consistent, I'm hoping the few more classes ahead will clarify that.

Friday night we had some friends over for dinner which was fun, Makara and I are going to try to do that with other international students so that we are better able to get to know them. The most fascinating part of my trip thus far has been hearing about peoples countries and lives. The other day we were talking with a student who is from Kosovo, and as most of the time when I'm in the conversation it happens to steer its way towards politics, anyway he was giving us a very brief version of his countries history (as you know it has just recently declared its self independent of Serbia) anyway he was telling us about growing up during Milosevic and the instability. At the end of the discussion he expressed his gratitude toward the United States not only in 1999 when Clinton sent in troops but also for recently recognizing it as a legitimate state. I was so pleased to hear something positive about the US from a different perspective. The media has always seemed to me to imply that to most of the world the US can do nothing right, and I have always felt that because of that we are in a no win situation, but here is this man telling me face to face that without the help of the US his country would not be independent and how great full he is to the US for that.
Ok so back to Friday night, it was very enjoyable to have that time with our friends however at the end of the evening I started to become sick :(. I was sick most Saturday, I have a feeling that I was just overly tired and need to rest since by the end of the day with some more sleep and good food I was feeling much better and my little fever was gone.
Today Makara and I also mostly hung out around our apartment but we did for a while go out to the lake and enjoy one of those elusive sunny and warm Norwegian days. We had some reading to get done before our class tomorrow about the Norwegian welfare state which was very interesting and I'm excited to get started tomorrow. I think the classes will be my second favorite part about this whole trip, which is probably good considering thats why I'm here!!