Norsk Folkemuseum and BI-nner (27.02.)

Ok, so I guess I should publish this article in the month to which it belongs, which ends today unfortunately. :D

Yesterday, the Norwegian Culture and History course for exchange students did a field trip to the Norsk Folkemuseum. I'm not really in that course, and I haven't been attending the sessions in the last few weeks anymore. (The teacher didn't seem particularly excited about teaching and therefore had the students hold presentations instead. I decided there's not much of a point in preparing presentations for a course I won't even get credits for, and I'd just consult books, the internet or Norwegians if I felt the need to find out something about Norway.) Still, the opportunity of visiting a museum and having BI pay for it was one I just couldn't miss. A friend who's officially in this course - but not attending the sessions anymore either - was so nice to share the details with me so we could go there together.

It turned out the Norsk Folkemuseum is mainly an outdoor museum. There are some indoor exhibitions which we had a brief look at before the tour started, but the heart of the museum are 160 buildings from different eras and regions of Norway that were brought to or reconstructed at the Norsk Folkemuseum, trying to show how people lived in Norway.

During the tour, we entered exemplary buildings from different centuries and social classes. I didn't take a lot of photos inside though, since I was busy warming up again. This week just happened to be one of the colder ones in Oslo. On one morning, it was close to -20° (nope, I didn't leave the house early in the morning). During the tour, it was "just" something around -10°. Which is still a bit too cold for an outdoor tour. I didn't see the teacher of the course anywhere before, during or after the tour, by the way...!

Anyway, here are a few pictures I managed to take during the tour:

The highlight of the tour came at the end, when we were slightly frozen already: the Gol Stave Church! Stave churches are medieval churches made out of wood and represent Norway's contribution to architectural history.

The stave church and our tour guide

Looks a bit like an element from the Viking ships.

The painting is the Last Supper.

After the tour, we were given the option to spend some more time in the museum, but my friend was frozen and I had to head directly to BI because I had an actual class afterwards. So we just took the bus back from Bygdøy peninsula to Oslo city.
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Speaking of stuff that BI pays for: once per month, there's an event at BI that's called BI-nner. Yes, that's a linguistic hybrid of "BI" and "dinner" - and I'm still not sure how to pronounce it correctly. But never mind. It's a free dinner organised by BI's studentprest, the chaplain, that also took place yesterday.

I've been bothering them to offer a vegan option for the BI-nner since January, and I might continue doing so for the rest of the semester. But unlike in January, I didn't refuse to go there this time. I realised nobody would join me for the quiz at Kroa student bar at the same time, as all potential candidates for my team went to BI-nner. So I figured I might as well go there, too, which led to the same result for me: no food, but a social life and a fun evening.

For some reason, they had named the event "Cupid's revenge"; however, the decoration was more like "Cupid's late by two weeks". Heart-shaped balloons, chocolate and what not everywhere. Plus a playlist with I Will Always Love You and the like.

At the entrance, we were given envelopes with numbers telling us which table we should join. Since that was not what we had signed up for, we ended up being rebels getting our own table. In the end, the envelopes were just for the Valentine's cards we were supposed to write for random people anyway.

My table turned out to be rather creative when it came to this assignment. :D

ESN "hiking and grilling" at Sognsvann (25.02.)

If you're wondering by now, "Hiking? Again?", then, yes, this is part of what Norway is all about! But don't worry, one of my fellow students here showed a quite similar reaction when I was talking about my plans for the weekend.

But yeah, ESN organised another event for international students on Sunday. We met at Sognsvann T-bane station, the final destination of the metro line 5.

If "Sognsvann" rings a bit of a bell: yup, that's where I went on my very first day in Oslo to experience my first adventure. However, this time, we did not just pass the lake and then walk up to the Vettakollen viewpoint. Instead, we walked around the lake. And as it was a really nice winter's day, have some photos here:

Not much of a lake to see, to be honest. :D

We didn't make a full round around the lake though (another one of these "hikes"). Instead, we stopped somewhere on the other side to start with the grilling part of "hiking and grilling". Which turned out to be not as easy as expected. I mean, there were a lot of people and a lot of snow:

The attempt to create a flat area, so that you wouldn't sink knee- or even thigh-deep into snow when you made just one wrong step, was semi-successful, I'd say. We ended up having sort of a safe space, but it was not really big, so we were having a fun time making our ways from A to B and back.

I didn't participate in the grilling, I have to mention. I had actually brought some eggplant slices, as ESN only provided sausages, but really didn't feel like fighting for a bit of space at the fire. But yeah, still, I was kind of impressed that they managed to get a fire up and burning in the snow. Although I came to the conclusion that I definitely prefer barbecuing in summer...

Anyway, for the way back, we (not the whole group of internationals, just some of us) decided to not walk around the lake - but on the lake. At the moment, the layer of ice on Sognsvann is so solid that you can actually walk or ski across the whole lake without being afraid of falling through the ice. That's how cold it is, or rather has been for quite a while!

People just ski everywhere.

And lastly, I guess it's time for a photo of proof that I've actually walked on Sognsvann:

Well, and I also made it back to solid ground - which was a bit of a challenge in the end, because the snow on the ice was rather deep and there was not as much of an established path anymore. But we left the lake and found the way back to the metro station to catch a metro back to Oslo city. (Fortunately, since I was kind of freezing at that point!)

Island-hopping in the Oslofjord

You might remember that I already took the ferry - the one line that's currently running - for a round-trip in the Oslofjord this month. However, you might also remember that it was the coldest week of my time in Oslo, and we did not get off the ferry. (Yes, there might have been a bit of a causal relationship.)

So, today, we used the good weather, i.e. around 0° Celsius and no snow storm or anything the like, for a small excursion in the Oslofjord. Since I didn't include a map in the ferry-cruising post, I'm gonna make up for that now:

I even added the names of the islands which are so tiny that Google Maps refuses to show their names. :P

I already mentioned it in the last ferry post, but the route of the B1 ferry line looks like this:
Aker Brygge > Hovedøya > Bleikøya > Gressholmen > Lindøya øst > Lindøya vest > Nak(k)holmen (both spellings are fine) > Hovedøya > Aker Brygge

Fun fact: the name of the B1 ferry line is "Øyene", which literally and accurately means: "the islands"!

Hi seagull! :D

So we got on the ferry just to get off again at the first possible instance: Hovedøya!

Hovedøya

We felt Hovedøya was one of the bigger islands in the Oslofjord; however, when I googled it for this article, I found out its total area is just 0.4 square kilometres. There might be a reason why some of the islands in the Oslofjord end with "holmen", which is Norwegian for "the small island".

The reason for going to the islands in the first place was that somebody had seen a fox there. (One of my fellow students had even gotten close enough to take a photo of/with it.) Well, we saw traces on several occasions - although I definitely suck too much in biology to tell with  certainty they were fox traces...

The other pieces of evidence, however, were more concrete. Like this sign...

... or the mentioning of the fox in the Wikipedia article about Hovedøya. :P

Anyway, although we spent an hour on the island (the ferry only leaves once an hour, remember?), we didn't see anything fox-like. But still, the island is definitely worth a visit not only in spring/summer, but also in winter.

"bathing beach" - a bit of a hint to return in summer?

A hint that people are barbecuing too much in summer? :D

The ruins of Hovedøya Abbey, a Cistercian monastery.

After an hour, we got on the ferry (as in: the very same ferry, including the very same staff) again and made our way to our next destination: Lindøya!

Lindøya

From the map of the Oslofjord as well as the fact that the ferry stops there twice (øst and vest), we concluded that Lindøya was big enough to spend an hour there. Which turned out to be a bit too true...

Anyway, so we skipped two islands in between and got off at Lindøya øst. Lindøya is one of the islands that basically consists of cabins. If I got it right, kind of all Norwegians have a weekend/vacation cabin somewhere in the nature of Norway. ESN once tried to explain the Norwegians' obsession with cabins to us by means of this video:

So I assume all the wealthy Oslo people have a cabin somewhere in the Oslofjord:

I mean, I can totally understand why you would want a cabin on Lindøya. It's really nice there.

There was just problem: on the way back to the ferry, we got lost a bit. But seriously, if you're standing amidst dozens of colourful cabins, basically everything looks the same! That's why we just missed the ferry (it also left one or two minutes early, I dare say!) and therefore got to spend two hours on Lindøya in total...

One of the highlights of the day, as you might imagine, was the next ferry approaching the island an hour later:

Survival!

Fun fact: it was the same ferry again. I think it just makes the Øyene round trip all day long at this time of the year. The ferry personnel probably knew us by that time...

After this adventure, we didn't get off at any other islands (the others didn't seem too big, and we were kind of frozen, too), but just finished the round trip and returned to civilization. :D

Everyday adventures: school, public transport, the attic, ...

Although I'm trying to keep everybody who's interested up to date on my life in Oslo, I naturally still have people contacting me individually. When one of my friends was like, "How are your classes? That's something you don't write about a lot on your blog. :P", I realised that I'm mainly blogging about the excursions we're doing, but barely covering my daily life. (Except for the weather, of course - that's always worth a comment!)

To be honest, I don't want to bore the shit out of people by writing about e.g. my Strategic Management class. That's my Thursday afternoon class, i.e. the last class before the weekend, and it's not exactly of the exciting sort so far (I'm still hoping it'll get better eventually), so I'm having a hard time not falling asleep every now and then. Well, and having spent a Saturday afternoon in the Master Area with my term paper group until the security guy told us to leave because they were about to close the building - that's not really something to brag about, I'm afraid.

However, I'd like to share one of the highlights of my academic week with you. In this week's Change Management session, the guest lecturer did a group activity with us. Group activities are nothing surprising in themselves, I have to mention - Change Management is a quite interactive class. A few weeks ago, we already had a "planning and implementing"-activity in which we were supposed to puzzle a bunch of geometrical shapes into a hollow square. (And my implementing team miserably failed, but I'd still like to blame the planning team who named something a trapeze that absolutely wasn't...)

Anyway, so this week, we were supposed to represent a paper rose producing company. So the activity started with everybody learning a bit of origami. :D Fortunately, I was appointed as manager, so I didn't have to make a bunch of paper roses (and later paper turtles, because it was the session about adaptive performance). I just got to assess the quality of my group members' roses...

Luckily, I didn't need my computer during the activity...

... and the performance of my team members, allocating rewards for it. The rewards turned out to be skittles, by the way. xD

All in all, it was quite funny - just way too much paper waste. Anyway, I took some of the roses with me and handed them out to my team members at the quiz night or kept them as a souvenir.

Speaking of paper waste: the system the gym has in place for group training sessions isn't very sustainable either. Every time you sign up for a course (online or directly at the gym), you later need to check in at one of the gym computers up to 3 hours before the course starts. You then get a paper receipt that you have to give to the instructor. I guess this way they want to make sure only people who booked the course actually participate - but seriously, the amount of paper waste...

But yeah, I signed up for one the group training sessions for the first time this week. If you're wondering: nope, Yoga Flow was not my idea... And I realised that in order to properly do this course, you need background knowledge in a) Yoga or b) Norwegian.

I also went to a gym other than Nydalen for the first time. Athletica is actually a chain of five gyms in Oslo, and by getting a membership, you're entitled to work out in any of them. So yeah, I went to the one on Blindern campus this week. The motivational blah blah is sort of similar though:

Anyway, at least I made it to Blindern gym and back (twice, actually!) without any public transport issues. Remember when I was acknowledging how Oslo's metro is basically indestructible? Well, this week, they were experiencing problems twice. At least on one of the days, there must have been a major snow storm somewhere in the Oslo area which kind of killed the metro transport for several hours.

So yeah, even Oslo's modern public transport system is not unstoppable. (If you want to question the "modern" part upon first glance at the metro vehicles, let me tell you: there's USB chargers in all metros as well as busses! Maybe even in the trams, forgot to check that...)

Another highlight of my week, but completely unrelated to school: (Vegan) Waffle Wednesday on my student village corridor! I hope this newly introduced weekly event will last for the rest of the semester. (:

In the meantime, I made good use of some of the chocolate imported from Germany and two bananas that needed to be eaten:

Healthy vegan chocolate cookies!

(There might be some more food pictures coming up next week, just saying...)

Oh, and after just six weeks in Oslo, I was told our house has an attic. And it's not empty! Lots of people seem to have left stuff there when moving out.

Seriously, that was nowhere on the website of the student villages in Oslo. Officially, there's locker rooms somewhere in the village if you own too much stuff to fit it in your room. And officially, there's Facebook "students market" groups to buy and sell things. And I really do not think any of the experience reports of my university ever said anything about checking out the attic before heading to IKEA! They were all consumerism-like saying, "At the beginning of the semester, you will have to make a trip to IKEA." So I guess I have something to clarify in my experience report when this semester is over...