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...