My New Norwegian Home

A friend of mine recently sent me the site below which has the world's most endangered languages.  Endangered Languages   Norwegian isn't one of them as there are 5 million speakers of the language, but Norwegian sign language is. So are Sami languages. Sami are more of an indigenous group of people in Norway, but they of course live and work more modern now.  Sami People Traditional clothing for Sami people.  Displays of Sami clothing at the Norsk Folk Museum. Oslo, Norway has the most Sami people, but originally they inhabited the Artic Circle - where you can see reindeer (unlike here in Skien!)  More Sami clothing.  This link here I've found helpful as it can take you to different places which can help you find Norwegian to listen to, give you lists of verbs, adjectives, prepositions, or just help with other grammar or sentence structures in learning the language. This site also lists recommended books. 3 of w...

Any immigrant coming to Norway will certainly be aware of the three letters UDI and all that it means. UDI is the directory which all our documents and applications for residency or work permits are sent to. I'm sure in times to come I'll be posting a lot about this. Arild and I thought we'd have no problems and sail through the application process quickly as we meet all the criteria and we were told we should be approved in a fairly short amount of time.  Our first problem arose just the other day when we received a letter in the mail stating our marriage  license and my birth certificate both need an Apostille stamp on them to ensure they're both authentic. The raised seal on both documents isn't enough proof, so both documents need to go through the state Apostille departments in America.  No problem for our marriage license. I called about my birth certificate and was told my birth certificate is out of date. I almost laughed when I was told that...

I love it when my husband comes home from work and says, "Hey you wanna go for a drive and see where we end up?" My response is always an enthusiastic, "YEAH! Let's go!!!" I love finding new places and seeing new things and he enjoys showing me around. However, I don't love carsickness. I've experienced a lot of firsts since being in Norway and carsickness is one of them. I'm almost 100% sure whomever designed these roads followed a snake. If anyone were to tell me otherwise I'd probably tell them they were lying to me. There are hills, slopes, hairpin turns, curve after curve after curve. The back roads like I'm accustomed to in Kentucky can be full of hills and curves, but nothing like any road in Norway. The interstates in America are designed to have several miles of straight roads before the road turns to curves and hills and what have you. This is strictly military business because in case of emergency and a military aircraft needs to...

I've never quite realized how diverse and especially unique America really is until I met Arild and started talking to him about ancestry. I've always been so used to hearing people say something like, "Oh I'm 1/4 German, 1/16 African- American, 1/8 Native American, 1/8 Latino decent and 1/32 Irish. As for the rest I'm not so sure, but I am 100% American." My closest ancestry is Swiss (my great-great-great grandparents came to America and were orchard farmers) and French (from my understanding this individual and his brother were adopted by an American couple as children). Even further back, there is Native American ancestry on both my parents sides (Cherokee on my father's and Blackfoot on my mother's), German and Dutch and English on my mother's, Irish and English on my father's side. If there's any other mixture of nationalities in there, which I'm sure there is, I really have no idea what or who they were. I've once traced s...

Summer is the time for weddings in Norway. No worries about snow and the weather isn't frigid, which makes it the perfect and popular time to have a wedding. Arild and I had the honor of being invited to a friend of his wedding. It was amazingly Norwegian and a great dose of culture and history for me as we were there to celebrate the couple's big day! There was a stave church, bunads, fiddles, a horse carriage, kransekake, moose, strawberries -you name it! All things Norwegian were present! :-) It was very interesting talking to some of the guests there. It seemed almost everyone there had some sort of connection to America, whether they studied in Texas or they have relatives in Minnesota or they just came back from vacation in Florida. The stave church the wedding was held!  Our tables at the wedding reception.  I even tried some moose for the first time! I was told it tastes like beef and if I didn't know any different, I would have thought it was ...

Norwegian groceries are extremely similar to American ones, but just a few minor differences. For example, there are recycling bins in the entrance of the grocery. This is where you can drop off your cans, plastic bottles, or glass bottles. You can press a button to donate the recycling money to charity or you can get the recycling money back. When you purchase cans, or anything bottled you're charged a fee for it, but once you recycle you get that fee back, so all in all you're just getting money back. However, the other things you recycle go into color coded bags into the garbage bins outside. Food goes into a green bag, plastic goes into a blue bag, garbage and unrecyclable materials goes into another bag. Cardboard and paper goes in its own separate bin. This is the machine you put your recycling into. Another thing I've noticed is how rare it is to find sliced bread. In America we usually have an entire bread aisle of sliced bread. Most of the bread in Norway ...

I am having the hardest time understanding spoken Norwegian. Written Norwegian - fine. Reading Norwegian - fine. Pronunciation - fine. Spoken - HÆ!?!?!? (Hæ? is the equivalent of Huh? and in my opinion isn't the most pleasant sounding words in the Norwegian vocabulary) I have been studying quite a bit on my own and I'm listening to a lot of Norwegian and when I'm studying alone it's fine. In fact, I'm almost finished with everything Live Mocha  has to offer. I think the reason is because everything is spoken slower. Once finished with Live Mocha, I'm moving onto a book Arild got me a while back.  Beginner's Norwegian  is the book and I posted a link with it, so if anyone is interested can check it out. I'm quite sure he didn't pay that much for it as it's listed on Amazon. I'll be picking this book up soon again. If I'm out somewhere and hear people talk I can catch a couple of spoken words if I'm lucky. What I almost never have a...

When comparing countries as a whole, I can say language is the single biggest difference in comparing America and Norway. (If you were to ask Arild what he thought the biggest difference was, he'd say the water level in American and European toilets! HAHA) When comparing Kentucky and Norway, I think weather is first and language is second. Other than that, the differences are minor. Kentucky summers are too hot. Norwegian summers (in my 3 week experience of living here) are too cold! I've never paid too much attention to weather or really cared too much about it until recently. I'm checking up on how things are in Kentucky and of course I still have no idea how to dress here. In my mind I'm screaming, "SUMMER!!!" but the way it feels outside here in Norway is more like March in Kentucky. I knew one of my biggest problems would be the weather. Especially summer. Having spent every summer of my life in Kentucky I've been so adapted to very hot (TOO h...

Strange how people can have so much love for a little ball of fur!  I've written about my cat and the difficulties of getting her from Kentucky to Norway. I've been asked many many questions about doing this, so I'll just write an entire blog post on importing cats to Norway since I feel I may be an expert at this now. Just kidding, of course! :-) I will say importing a pet from America to Norway is tedious and expensive. I think Stella had a total of 4 vet visits for vaccines and check ups prior to departure. Each of them costing me around $200. The vaccines must be given to the pet at certain times, so there's only a certain time span some vaccines can be given to the pet. Microchipping and a check-up was the first thing we had to do and that had to be done a few months before leaving. In between 5-10 days of departure we had to have her last check up. To make sure things were done right and instead of waiting on the USDA seal of approval from Frankfort, KY to ...

                            In Other Recent Events.... while I'm trying to stay out of trouble! ;-) I received some disappointing news on the phone the other day. I was supposed to take my social studies classes this month, but after receiving a call from the language class office, I was informed the classes are already full. So, that leaves me having to wait until the next time these classes are given in English which could be next summer. I am breath taken by how scenic Norway is. I think this place is absolutely beautiful and I'm beginning to think the cold weather is in Norway's favor because I'm pretty sure if it were much warmer here this place would be a major tourist attraction. In which case, I wouldn't want to live here, but it's cold and to my knowledge there aren't many tourists in Skien unless you're a die-hard Henrik Ibsen enthusiast. He's known as the 2nd greatest playwright - the 1st bein...