The end of August

Well I have now spent 2 full weeks here in Hamar and I'm feeling pretty situated and settled in. I'm excited to see what the next 3.5 months bring but so far it has really been amazing.
Wednesday we had our second Norwegian class and I remembered why I'm so bad at languages, I can never remember what I've already done!! Hopefully I'll do alright and I'll pass the test at the end of September but even right after class I can't remember how to pronounce certain words and then I hate practicing them wrong. its a vicious cycle, we'll see how our next class goes though. For our Thursday class we went to Edisvoll. Edisvoll is the city that all of their major political developments occurred in when Norway was vying for their Independence in 1814. We walked around the house that became the central meeting place for all of the elected officials from around Norway. We stood in the garden room that was transformed into a meeting room when several people discussed their desire to ignore the treaty of Kiel (this treaty gave Norway from Denmark to Sweden after the Neopolean wars, it was recognized by every other govenment in the world) and make Norway and independent entitiy. Each county of Norway (except for the 3 northern most counties) sent an official to the house in Edisvoll to help form a new state. The youngest member was 17 at the time the constitution was written. Obviously the world was not going to accept whatever came of the meetings since the treaty of Kiel was recognized as fair and therefore Norway belonged to Sweden. However all of their efforts at Edisvoll were not completely useless Sweden decided to recognize Norway as internally sovergein. Sweden would deal with international affairs and the Swedish King would be head of state however the constitution that was drafted and signed by the members at Edisvoll would remain in effect making it the second oldest enforced constitution in the world. The first being the US constitution. The interesting part about their pursuit of independence was not fully finalized (meaning Norway handled their own international affairs) until the union with Sweden was dissolved in 1905 and Norway was fully independent.
Since we only have class 4 days a week yesterday and today have been devoted to unwinding and homework. Our first paper is due in less than a week now and I have a book that I have to have read and discussed in groups by next thrusday, "Work, Oil and Welfare: the Norwegian Welfare State", its interesting but a textbook and assigned reading none the less. We have one more week before we head our on our excursion to view first hand how many of the aspects of the welfare state works, such as social security and unemployment benefits. Our excursion northward will definitly give better focus to how the welfare state works.

One other note, if you are reading this on a regular basis could you leave me a note? I like to know who is interested in what I'm experincing over here. Thanks!