First Week

Room is 90% clean and 50% decorated. Whew, was that exhausting! The books and tissues and cloudberry drinks and gingerbread cookies and little Estonian viking are on the shelves. 65 photos are up decorating the back wall and the cupboard, and when I recover my energy (tomorrow?) I'll put about as many up on the front wall.

I think all I really need from IKEA tomorrow is a set of sheets. I've got a ton of guests coming in but I have this funny idea that I might be able to make do with what I have for them. Stupid? Probably. But I was thinking I could camp on the floor (with sleeping bag, sleeping pad, and improvised pillow in the extra pillowcase) and give them the bed with the normal pillow, the silk sleep sack, and the free blanket I got, maybe the thermal sleep sack as well. Or they could switch with me if they preferred. My room is surprisingly warm given the poor insulation (am I missing something here?) so even though that doesn't sound like much, it could be enough. :S Just trying to avoid buying a blanket or a pillow that I'll just throw away at the end of the semester.

The first week is all about getting the basic stuff done, and I'm almost a week in. I have all the small things done now but the three big things - Class Registration, Police Registration, and things-I-need-to-do-to-get-a-part-time-job-maybe - are not. Today I FINALLY got my Norwegian phone working by going back to the store that sold me the SIM and asking them to fax my registration again. Then I went to the library and figured out printing so I could print the cover letter to meet the police and the MU Study Abroad blog agreement letter. I also tried and failed to pay my first month's rent. Well, I'll get there, a little at a time! :)

Funny/Weird Stuff:

- I've been trying to figure out when I'll get my language test results. First response: "You'll get them before the language classes start." Gee, thanks. Second response: "You'll get the test results once the test is graded." Seriously? Okay then. If this messes me up with my class registration I'll consider that I have full rights to bitch, moan, and complain. Even if it doesn't matter all that much in my case.

- Lots of weird results to my speaking Norwegian. Surprisingly I'm having better luck with it this time than I did in 2008, but I still occasionally get the "I speak in Norwegian, they reply in English" phenomenon. Another time, at a cafe, the guy asked me if I wanted any cream, and I said yes... as I bent in to take it, he whispered, as if it were a secret, "So, you understand Norwegian?" But by and large, the most popular response is, "Så flink du er å snakke norsk!" For similar linguistic reasons as with the Spanish construction "Saber + Infinitive = to know (how) to," this sounds subtly but definitively off to me. "How clever you are to speak Norwegian!" As if I cleverly figured out that they were Norwegian and that the correct approach was speaking their language to them, the answer to some tricky puzzle.