Cheers.
Sorry about the wait, but it took me a while to set up the net connection. I also haven't had all that much time to tool around with it.
So, I'm in Skiringssal Folkehøyskole. I think I've only been here three days, not counting the first day when people were just getting their rooms and such.
Heh... My Norwegian isn't particularly good, and there aren't as many people here who speak English as I thought there would be. It seems like more people spoke English in India than they do here, but that's probably just because I keep insisting that everyone speak Norwegian around me (can't get better at Norwegian by speaking English...).
My short time here has been rather... Well, unusual.
For the first two days (particularly the first), I was nervous enough that I felt physically ill. Now I've settled in a bit more, and shifted over from massively stressed to mildly stressed and moderately girl-crazy.
My roommate is a stereotypically tall blonde blue-eyed Norwegian, who is midly scatterbrained and babbles when he's nervous. He also happens to come from the area of Norway known for having the weirdest dialects and speech patterns, so his babbling is of a particularly difficult to understand variety.
I'm in the Film and TV class. When I signed up, I received an email from the school saying how glad they were to have a guy sign up for Film and TV, since it's usually just girls.
Out of the ten people who signed up this year, ten of them are male.
But stifle those laughs, as there's a slight twist. I am one of only two guys in my housing section, the other being my roommate. So it's not all bad.
I haven't really met that many people here, but there are a few faces I can remember between sightings. There's a pirate enthusiast/mild goth down the hall who is enrolled in the music class (she sings. And with quite a nice voice, I might add). There's a guy from Film and TV in the section downstairs who was kind enough to invite me over last night to watch some Led Zeppelin concert clips.
There's actually another native English-speaker here, a metalhead who spends most of his free time on the drumset in the music room. There's an explosion of sound every time someone opens the door, most of it caused by him. He'll probably be quite deaf by the end of the school year, but he's enjoying every second of it.
Speaking of music, my new cell phone, which does not have a SIM card, is utterly incapable of making or taking calls. It is, essentially, a portable music player/alarm clock. What kind of music? Well, I've got Folk Songs from Trio Mediævel, Aerial Boundaries from Michael Hedges (I'd never heasrd of him before. My dad found the album on his computer and decided to upload it to my phone), Wolfmother by Wolfmother, and three Pink Floyd albums.
You'd be surprised how many Pink Floyd fans there are in Norway.
That's actually how I added another person to my list of remembered faces. I can't recall what class he's in, but he had attempted to make contact a couple times before. He's a nice guy, but he looks so damned mournful it's funny.
Anyways, I'm sitting at a table in the rec room and playing cards with a few people. My phone is on the table, providing music for the assembled gathering after someone overheard the ticking clock at the beginning of the song "Time", and said "Oy! Pink Floyd!". It is currently playing "Money".
I see him walking over, same expression as the last few times he's tried talking to me. Then, with perfect timing only a practiced listener can achieve, he mime-yells the titular lyric as it comes up in the song. Good enough for me.
This is a rather strange place. The school is apparently Christian, but the students most certainly are not. There was a survey done a couple days ago where we had to fill out a bunch of questions about what made us choose the school and preferred major, and what kind of things we would expect from them. There was a discussion I overheard later on in the evening, where a group of students (most of whom I am at least mildly acquainted with now) were talking about how they answered one question that asked whether or not the school's Christianity was an important factor for choosing the school. The answers ranged from "absolutely not" to "I don't know" (the closest they could get to "What?").
Heh, it's kinda funny. In Film and TV, a lot of the students wear hats (including one guy who has a very distinctive style, and enjoys wearing either his charcoal beret or his brown fedora). The people in music tend to wear a lot of bracelets, bangles, and wrist-ties.
I'm in Film and looking at music. I'm wearing a navy blue fedora and a wristband. Whoops.
This kind of school prides itself on getting everyong to know each other. It's actually been pretty good so far as cliques and such are concerned, with not too many distinct or exclusive groups in the dining area. What's really funny is that the ones who seem to be flocking the most are the black sheep, who probably just don't think they'd fit in with anyone else.
At the moment, my primary concern is getting a girl. I'd rather not go into specifics, but suffice to say it's been a long time since I last had a girlfriend.
But, hey. It's been three days out of nine months. I've got good time.
On the brighter side, I had to pick up a brand new computer for school. This thing is a 17" widescreen monster, and it also happens to be the only laptop I've seen so far that has a numpad.
It also has a Norwegian keyset. So although I have to retrain the locations of the various keys into my fingers (for instance, the brackets used for UBB code? Those are now "å" and "¨"), I do get lots of fun keys to mess around with. Just see for yourself:
§ | ¤ £ ø æ å € µ
Now I don't have to go to the character set page on the wiki whenever I want to express a crown or a rope reed. Which happens pretty often, as you may well know.
Anyways, time to get out there and do nothing socialize.
My phone just informed me that the lunatics are in the hall. I better go before the paper boy brings more.
See y'all on the dark side of the moon.
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Topic: Sandy Fjord (Read 96271 times)