Norwegian Groceries

I got all excited today when I found chicken curry salad in the grocery store here in Bergen. I hoped it would be like the yummy coronation chicken stuff in Scotland. No such luck - it's close, but too mayonnaisey. Way too mayonnaisey. I don't even like mayo. :)

But, I will probably eat it anyway. Norway is cementing the lessons I've been learning over the years about not wasting food, eating healthy, and doing so on a budget.

I've basically come to the conclusion that, if you eat modestly but still treat yourself to the things you want, like ice cream and chocolate and even meat a few times a week, and only cook at home, from scratch or whatever's cheapest, everything store-brand, you can manage here on $10 a day - $70 a week. Funny, that's about what I spend at home, but that's eating tons of ready made stuff, buying exotic stuff half for fun, and eating out essentially whenever.

That's not how it works here. I can't waste anything. I plan my meals and if I know that bit of cheese is going to go bad, I make a plan to get it in my stomach first. And things seem to go bad faster here, as well - is it lack of preservatives, or just my paranoia?

Anyway, it more or less works out that I get to make two-three 'big meals' a week. This means something with meat in it and maybe special ingredients. Something I will eat of of for two or three days. My favourites are different varieties of baked salmon (pesto that I can eat with spaghetti, or teriyaki with jasmine rice and vegetables), and the ever-good thai red curry with chicken, carrots, and bamboo shoots. This week I'm thinking of trying a Moo Kure. Looks like the cheapest meat here is ground chicken, and I could use that for Moo Kure or Larb. Definitely a consideration.

For breakfast I usually eat kefir with corn flakes and musli. I fill in gap and lazy meals with spaghetti and garlic bread, or fish sticks and potatoes, or shrimp sandwiches. Snacks are popcorn, peanuts, chocolate, a milkshake, and occasionally something Norwegian like waffles, lefser, or gingerbread cookies.

Photo Rant

Insanely easy things you can do so that you go from a completely miserable, incompetent photographer, to someone who can take pictures that don't make me and others cringe and weep:

1 - Set the time and date (but at least the date, and at least the year!!!) on your camera. It takes like 10 seconds to do and if you ever decide to organize your pictures, or you want to look back at them later to remember what day you did what, you will be so glad you did. When my friends and I swap photos at the end of the trip, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT their photos are dated from 2005 or 2006 or some such, and really mess up my automatic photo organization.

2 - Either include someone's whole body, or cut them off at the waist, or do a close-up of face and shoulders. DO NOT just cut off hands, feet, or legs below the knee. It looks awful every time.

3 - Don't be a slave to centering the subject. Real photographers almost never center the subject. I'm not telling you not to do it at all - it's easier to just center and it looks pretty decent. But let's say you're taking a picture of someone standing in front of a church. I've had people tell me they couldn't fit the whole church in the picture, even though I checked before I handed them the camera and I knew it was possible. The problem? They wanted to center me in the frame completely, meaning half of the church was cut off to make room for tons of empty floor/ground below my feet.

4 - Consider setting the camera down on something or just trying to hold it steady when the light calls for borderline flash. Depending on the situation, sometimes flash is unavoidable and the only way to capture the memory. But pictures with on-camera flash (which is what you have if you are reading this guide) NEVER look good. Flash eliminates shadows making faces look flat, kills the mood, causes red-eye and darkens the background. If there is some way you can take the picture without flash, it will be better every time. 

5 - It's okay if the person looks small in the frame. Pretty much all cameras nowadays have enough megapixels that I can zoom in and crop later on my computer and get as close as I want. If you zoom in too much, you lose quality if it's a digital zoom, and even on an optical zoom you lose a lot of information and picture that you could otherwise have worked with when cropping. For example, if you zoom and get a picture of someone without any extra space, you won't have enough room to rotate the picture to make the horizon straight later without cutting off their head and feet.

Distraction

Tonight, I'm staying home to get caught up on all my homework, do several blog posts for MU Study Abroad and Footprint, tidy my room, do laundry, cook some food that needs to be used up, get started on my INFOMEVI project, start thinking about packing, sort some photos, make sure my camera batteries are charged and memory sticks are clear...

Yeah, let's see if I get even 1/3 of this done. :)

Meanwhile, welcome to another round of 'weird things people search to get to the MU Study Abroad blog"!

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Status Update

Liisa visited last week, and we had a good time. :D Had great weather her first day and her last, we climbed Ulriken and wandered around Svartediket then (until we almost missed the bus to the airport), I sent her on the Norway in a Nutshell tour tuesday, and otherwise checked out Bryggen and Fantoft Stavkirke and Gamle Haugen in miserable cold rain, and bummed out at the free University museums. As I told her, I'd miss her so much if I had ever been able to take her for granted... but this is the way it is for us, long distance Skype and emails has ever been the norm - we were close before we got into this two year period of seeing each other every 3-6 months, and I'm more confident than I can be with many of my friends, that we'll stay close afterwards as well. But still it's a bit sad to see this era of geographical proximity coming to an end. ;_;

Ingibjorg has been sick the last few days, so I haven't had Norwegian class and my existence here has been even more lazy than usual. I literally have nothing to justify the last two days of freedom. :) It's raining cold and nasty, can't see the city out my window, even Fløyen is getting stripped of it's snow cover as I watch, and the only redeeming feature in the landscape is Starefossen, roaring at the moment, so there's no impulse to explore the great outdoors, not this time. But this weekend is fun, at least - Thursday night was the BSI Friluft party where I ran into some friends from Hallingskeid and met some new ones as well. Yesterday night was Club Alrek, a very small group turned up for Karaoke night but as a result we all got to know each other, again I came up with a bunch of new friends who Em and I have invited to a Full English Breakfast/Brunch on Sunday. :) And tonight it looks like I'm going to meet my third group of friends, Charlotte and the guys from Fantoft, at Kvarteret. Too bad Erin and Alyssa from Australia, and Arnaud from Reunion had to go back home. :( Oh, and tomorrow night Monica (my Bergen Buddy) has invited me to another potluck. So this weekend is far from pointless - it's rather a weekend of touching bases, new faces, and the renewal of social ties. :P /why-anthropologists-have-no-friends

I'm so glad I'm living in Alrek. There's a really cozy community feeling here. There are three English girls, two Irish, me, two Germans (+?), a Pole, a Swede, a guy from the Isle of Man, and a Dutch girl here... and as far as I'm aware, the remainder of the residents are Norwegian. Which is great for me and my language and cultural knowledge acquisition. :)

Lindsey Stirling

Holy cow.

How did I not know about this?
How is she so cute and good at playing the fiddle while dancing around and smiling?
Where did she get such awesome costumes?
Who is doing her professional looking cinematography?
And where is she going to get these amazing landscapes?

These are so, so awesome.

Menus, Calendars, Plans

Trying something new - expanding my culinary horizons and learning to use the oven for more than frozen food and cookies. My dinner plan is baked salmon in garlic/pesto/olive oil, served with spaghetti and broccoli. :)

Tonight I'm going to start using my calendar and making meal plans so that I can make my grocery store trips more productive and regular....

Also start keeping a good ordinary calendar. :)

Tomorrow I guess I'm going to go to the climbing club and give that a try. Other than that, this week is fairly relaxing, until...

Liisa arrives this weekend! :D :D

Bad Weather Day

I have a sort of sickness that prohibits me from staying in when the weather is good.

And I've always been very generous with my definition of 'good weather', as Allan, Amy, Zahra, Esther, and many others can attest to.

Bergen has only made me more forgiving. Hail? No problem. Rain? No problem. Snow? No problem. Clouds? Oh, I thought that was just how the sky looked!

I've started to believe the saying here, that there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

But then there are some days... when it's -5 or -6 celsius, and there's enough snow coming down to block out the view of the mountain and the city from my window, and in the strong winds it's almost looks like as much snow is going back up again.

On days like today, I can finally give myself permission to stay in. Make gingerbread cookies (the dough needed to be used), do a bit of tidying (I was pretty much completely out of socks), and do some relaxing, quiet activities (I haven't opened a book since I arrived, and I'm behind on all my blogs).

Thank god for February...

Food Problems

I have one meals worth of Spaghetti sauce, lots pf spaghetti, some garlic bread, some fish sticks, lots of rice, lots of eggs, some teriyaki sauce, some pesto, popcorn, lots of carrots, waffle mix, gingerbread cookie dough, strawberry and raspberry jam, a frozen vegetable mix, little breads, butter, 1/5 of a lemon, ketchup, ssamjang and gochujang, hapaa, coconut milk, peanuts, and chocolate.

Yesterday despite my phobia of Sunday grocery store closures, I managed to convince myself that I could, indeed, last a day on these ingredients. I'm sure I was right, however, I failed to factor in the fact that I have a potluck dinner to go to tonight. Fail. XD

Things I can make:

1.) Boring Japanese, Korean, or Thai fried rice with only vegetables.
2.) Thai red curry carrots with jasmine rice
3.) Spaghetti with pesto butter sauce and garlic bread
4.) Gingerbread Cookies

Pretty pathetic haha. I wish I could get just ONE thing... like some salmon, a pie crust, some chicken, blah blah blah.

Starting to get Cozy

I went out to Club Fantoft last night, spent the night with Lillie, ate breakfast with Arnaud and Becky and then came back to Alrek. I'm going to shower, nap, buy groceries, do laundry, maybe do something fun in the evening. It's a grey day but it doesn't feel too dark, because there's snow on the ground and in the mountains. And I'm tired and can use a dull day anyway.

Arnaud and the Australians are leaving soon. It makes me pretty sad. Because, as for myself, I'm just starting to feel properly at home here. I've seen the northern lights a bit, have an upcoming trip to Tromso that I'm looking forward to, Liisa's visit in just over a week, I'm getting used to the way my classes are going to go, the mountains and the snow and the ice are becoming normal and good, I've made several different friends from several different groups.

Things are starting to get cozy and homey. :)

Same Same, but Different

Trees. Voices. Clouds. Packaging. Birds. Conversational Hum.

Very much the same, but subtly different as you change latitude, hemispheres, nations, regions.

In the photos, the Missouri ski looks so lofty, the Japanese trees grow differently in a way I can barely name. And seagulls still make my heart leap. And I swear the snow feels different here.

I wonder whether there's a nearly perfect match, stereotype by stereotype, subtlety by subtlety, to let me understand like a native various accents and tones, or if that final room, that Sancta Sanctorum, is reserved for those who absorb the language silently through tiny ears like soft seashells.

And then I miss my own childhood... the metallic taste of Hawaiian punch straight out of the can, the hot-wet-blanket heat of a Missouri summer, the heavy sound of the cicadas in the trees, the long lazy nights under stars and mosquito candles, the taste of the muddy river, the pathetic pinch of a crawdad, grey sweatshirts that smelled like smoke and ear-bands that always made my head itch.