So Guess what? I booked my plane tickets! Yayayayayay!!!! Yeah it was kinda annoying because my travel agent sent me an email with the first idea of itinerary and she was like "fax me back with your signature by monday" and that was friday. I left for Denver to go to a hotel by the airport saturday and I spent all sunday in an airplane flying to Norway and I got to Norway and was totally jet lagged on Monday. And did I mention that at my grandparents house in Norway there is no printer or fax machine? Yeah big problems I have! But we worked it all out. My mom asked my travel agent to look up an itinerary on a different airline because the first one was on American and I wouldn't get frequent flyer miles for that, so then we got one more day. I am very glad that my mom asked for that because she came up with a much better itinerary that I liked a lot more (and I don't have to get up super early!) And we got one more day to figure it all out. So eventually we found a printer at my aunt's house and printed out the itinerary, signed it, and scan emailed it to my travel agent. Yay! So here it is:
August 6th 6:05 pm Denver, Colorado - Frankfurt, Germany (arrive 11:35 am on August 7th)
August 7th 2:25 pm Frankfurt, Germany - Helsinki, Finland (arrive 6:45 pm on August 7th)
I really love this schedule because I leave Denver so late, which means I can sleep in on the 6th, and I don't have to leave Summit County until like 1 pm. So maybe I can say goodbye to some of my friends that before I leave that day :) but it will be sad :( And I don't know how bad my jet lag will be because I can sleep the entire flight to Germany :) Yay! Sleeping is good! And it is one of my priorities!
So anyways.....I am in Norway! It's not every day that I get to say that! Since I'm not very far into my trip (day 5) then I am not going to go into much detail about Norway itself, I will be posting about Norway later into my trip or after I get back, but I am going to talk about how useful this trip to a country so similar to Finland is literally a month and a half before I leave for a year :)
Finland and Norway are very similar! Why? Because, if you know geography, you know that Finland and Norway are so close that they even share a border. The two countries have so much in common, that I, with a norwegian passport, did not need a visa to spend a length of time in Finland! When I found that out you could say that I was relieved!
But don't get me wrong, there are plenty of differences! But the similarities help me prepare for a year abroad, just being in a foreign country helps me prepare. I am constantly doing math. The metric system is not my strongest point, but my grasp of the metric system will get better as time goes on. I am always converting prices to dollars. I really wish that whoever is in charge of the value of the dollar would make the euro and the kroner number that are very easy to calculate, but no, the norwegian kroner to dollar is 5.5!
I spend a lot of my time when I go shopping over here watching people and observing their styles. It helps to know what the style is like over here because it is so expensive to buy clothes over here and the style is so similar to Finland that I know what to buy when I get back to the US. Because it is so much cheaper in some store like forever 21.
When I am not loving Norway and I'm just hanging out in my house over here, I am getting more norwegian/finnish music. When I first started to look for finnish music, when I first started learning finnish, I had nowhere to start looking since I had no idea how to change the country in itunes or anything, so I picked up a couple of songs on wikipedia, believe me I have no idea how I managed to find songs in an encyclopedia (they are not very good songs)! But now I figured out how to change country of the itunes store, so I am actually getting songs that are popular in Finland. Plus many of the English songs that are popular in Finland are also popular in Norway so they are all over the radio here :) My new favorite songs are Mr. Saxobeat (which is on constantly over here in Norway) and Poika (saunoo) (which is number one in Finland right now)
Mr. Saxobeat - In the top three in both Finland and Norway
Anyways, that's about all I really know what to say. Sorry for this post being kinda long :) I'll have more on Norway soon. But in the meantime I will focusing all of my energy on finding out how to change the language on my mac so everything that I spell isn't underlined in red.
Nakemiin! Or har-det in Norwegian
"I really wish that whoever is in charge of the value of the dollar would make the euro and the kroner number that are very easy to calculate"
ReplyDeleteYou should talk to Adam Smith about his unseen extremities.