Blueberry pie for the Norwegian National Day!

It's time for the Norwegian National day, where we put on our bunads, go in parades and eat ice cream and hot dogs!

The title of this post had to be in Norwegian, since it rimes. (Google it if you have to). I've made my first Blueberry pie, it'll be tasted at the 17th of May breakfast we're having tomorrow morning.

The pie was super easy to make, and hopefully tasty! Thanks to my big sister for supplying me with the recipe!

Happy 17th of May to you all, hurra!

A relaxing day is soon over, it's has truly been a nice Sunday. The best part was the concert at Bybroen Antikvariat at Bakklandet. Eva and Kristina invited me and I had a fantastic time. I don't know who was playing (anyone?), but it was a great guitar playing! I really enjoyed it.

Bybroen Antikvariat is a little 2nd hand bookshop that closed around three months ago. Now it has reopened not far from it's previous , but has reopened not far from the old shop. Every Sunday at three o'clock there's a concert, if you're interested in watching (they serve coffee and waffles), you find the bookstore by entering "Rabarbra" café at Bakklandet.

If you're a student like me, you know Christmas spirit is hard to come by during December (specially here in Norway, where all the exams are before Christmas). I'm currently drowning in project work, spending nothing but 14-15 hour days at school.

Therefore, as my last post suggested, I'm really not in a Christmas mood. Luckily, I have some fantastic flatmates that help a lot on that front. Specially Ellen entrepeneur when it comes to finding Christmas spirit. (Andreas is like me, very busy at school, so he is benefitting from Ellen's "Christmas spirit project" as well).

Here's a list of Ellen's Christmas spirit strategies, I encourage everyone to try them out - it really works!

1. Christmas decorations! We don't have many of them, but they are good reminders that Christmas is just around the corner. I doubt that Andreas and I would have taken ourselves time to put them up.

2. Scented candles! Another simple, but really good idea. The smell that welcomes you after a long day at school really boosts my mood, almost inspiring.

3. Ginger-snap! Ellen and Andreas made ginger-snap yesterday! It's nothing more "Christmasy" than ginger-snap, and we had a great time decorating them while watching Love Actually (the elephant above is mine *proud*).

4. Christmas Calendar! Ellen suggested we should make our own calendar, so we did. Every day, one of us gets to an encouraging gift to open before school. This is also a tradition I've had throughout my childhood, so it truly makes Christmas spirit come around!

Those who know me know that I'm a bit pedantic when it comes to spelling and spelling errors. This morning, Aftenposten.no had an article about a common spelling error amongst Norwegians (article in Norwegian).

Molde FK, a Norwegian premier league team have made supporter scarfs for the upcoming Cup Final November 8th.
In Norwegian, as opposed to English, you should not have a space between Cup and Final. As the image shows, the scarf says "CUP FINALE", but what it should say is "CUPFINALE".

Molde used an external company, Scan Trade, to make the the scarfs. Scan Trade's representative, Geir Tønnesland has the following to say:

We should have found the error before shipping the design.

I agree completely. It's not very hard to proofread the text on a supporter scarf!

Further, Tønnesland says:

At the same time, we have short deadlines here.

Now that is no excuse. If print text on fabric for a living, you should know how to spell, besides - It's like 5 words!

You might call me pedantic, but this is unfortunately not a unique case. This kind of spelling error (no: særskrivingsfeil) is becoming very common in the Norwegian language. It is one of the most common mistakes among Norwegians.

Why one shouldn't split words

The main reason why two (or more) words should be concatenated in Norwegian is that splitting them completely changes the meaning.

An example is "Leie priser" that translates to "Fed up prizes" or "Not-so-good prices".
The correct spelling would be "Leiepriser" that simply means "Rental prices".

The organization Astronomer mot Orddeling (AMO) has many more fun examples of such errors.
They've also published a book, "Tunfisk biter i vann" (Tuna bites in water), with loads of examples.

Highly recommended Christmas gift!

Last weekend was a fun one. Firstly I finally got to see UKA-09's Skabaré, the show that I missed on my first attempt.

Skabaré was an impressive show and I had a great time. Unfortunately I found the script to be poor from time to time. Of course, some sketches were great, but too many of them were mediocre, mostly due to several bad punchlines.

Overall though, I'm very pleased. Skabaré is an impressive show. The overall quality was very good, the costumes, scenography to and the performers - it was all very professional!

Pancake art (Collage: Ellen)

Sunday was a relaxing day, and I spent most of the day in the sofa with Andreas and Ellen watching The Big Bang Theory before we made pancakes and went all "avantgarde" with the blueberry jam! I haven't had that much fun with food in many years!
Sunday evening a whole bunch of us (Andreas, Stig, Robert, Øystein, Sindre, Jon-Andre and more) attended the SIT/UKA-09 happening in Pirbadet. Pirbadet is an indoor pool with diving towers and a water slide. It was really fun to be back in Pirbadet, I haven't been there for over two years. I consider Pirbadet to be too expensive (115NOK/ticket), but this time only 50NOK!

We played around like kids, jumping and trying to go as fast as possible in the water slide (it's fitted with a stop watch).

Still great fun to be a kid!

Pirbadet in Trondheim - Photo: bjornarv (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Jay-Z at UKA (Photo: Fotogjengen ved Studentersamfundet i Trondhjem)

(eng: The Week) is the largest cultural festival in Norway and is hosted by Studentersamfundet, the student society in Trondheim every other year.

The money making back spine of the festival is it's traditional theatre/show, shown almost every day of the 25 day long festival is this year named "Skabaré".

The name resembles cabaret (the show type), the Norwegian expression "skabare" (eng: I'll just ...), scarab (the beautiful beetle) and "Skabb-Are" (mocking of a guy named Are). A lot of interpretations in other words.

Anyways. Yesterday, Synnøve, Andreas and I had managed to get some cheap tickets to this Must-See-Show. Unfortunately the show got cancelled due to to see this must see show. Excited! Unfortunately the show got cancelled and no other cheap tickets are available!

No show today ...

I'm determined to see the show, so I've bought myself an expensive ticket for Friday's show. This time I'm going with Jon, so let's hope we're in more luck than Andreas, Synnøve and I ...

PS. I couldn't find a picture of the show, so I had to go for Jay-Z who performed at UKA-09 a few weeks ago :)

17th of May parade in front of Capitole

A french man asked me on the street yesterday: "C'est quoi ça?" It's the celebration of the Norwegian national day!

This year I celebrated May 17th in the streets of Toulouse. In Norway, everyone dresses up in their finest outfit and celebrate the Norwegian constitution (of 1814). In Norway, there are flags everywhere, people are walking togehter in parades with marching bands and everyone's singing.

The Norwegian celebration of the national holiday is unique, and we're not stopped by being abroad. In Toulouse about 150 Norwegians gathered on Place Capitole at noon to have a parade to Université de Toulouse 1, where we later had cake, sandwiches, drinks and games!

Many Norwegians parading in Toulouse

It was during the parade a French man asked me the question above, a fair question - it's not often you see people in France going in parade without manifesting their discontent with the government (or something else). :)

On the evening 17th we had a superb dinner at Bistro Romain on Place Wilson. More than 90 Norwegians found their way to the restaurant to celebrate our day! Happy birthday, Norway!

Apart from the national day of Norway, the weekend has been filled with Beer World Cup, basically a second round of Beer Olympics, but with less concequences and more people! Tom and I were title defenders in Beer Pong but lost our first match and were out of the competition. On the other hand I won Dizzy bat and I had great team members in Flip Cup so we won that one too! 2 out of 3 possible!

It's a lot of school going on, so I have to stop this post here. Later!