Letter 6: language course/ district conference

It's only taken me two weeks to write this, but HERE WE GO!

A lot has happened in the past couple of weeks. In order to keep from boring you, I'll do my best to summarize everything, and use a bunch of photos.

1. Language camp:

On Sunday September 5, I traveled to Halden, for a language camp! There I met up with the 19 other exchange students who over the week became very close friends! It was so great to get away from school for a week and just hang out with some great people who were in the same situation as me. It also felt SO good to speak english nonstop!

(Fist day)

(Abby, Lauren and I....Flight buddies)

(This is majority of us. )

We stayed in a weird sort of hostel type thing I guess. It was right at the bottom of a giant old fortress. We took multiple night time trips up to the top. One night we had an impromtu dance party. I must say, it was preeettty legit!

(the view from the fortress)

(Giant Abby and little Devin gaurding the fortress)

(Posing on the cannon)

During the days, we had Norwegian lessons for 6 hours. It was pretty laid back, and the teacher got off subject alot. (Most of his subjects he went off on were about alcohol) Since most of us exchange students had already been in Norway for a month, most of what we covered, we had already learned by just being in Norway. We covered a good amout of grammar, and learned a lot of random words (example: ål-eel, and petroleumingeniør- petroleun engineer)

(Sitting in class)

(Watching Norwegian films...we did this a lot!)

(What Abby and I do during class)

(Me with Olav, Ingeborg, Daniel, and Sara, the Norweian family in our book that taught us everything)

After 4 we were free to do what ever we wanted to do. One day we took advantage of out free time, and took a trip to Sweeden! It was only a 15 minute trip by buss. We had the "okay" from our teacher of course! We went to a HUGE shopping center in a town right near the border. Our first stop was the giant candy store! I went around filling my bag with one piece of every kind of chocolate. Most of it ended up being disgusting, but it was really cheap candy so it's all good! We spent the rest of the time shopping,Ya know, the normal thing you do in a shopping center. When it was time to go back, we looked at the bus schedule and planned to go on the last bus back to Halden. We had a good chunk of time until the bus, so we chilled in McDonalds. When it was about time for the bus to come, we went out to the bus stop and waited, but the bus never came. Turns out we misread the schedule. We ended up having to get a taxi that could seat all 10 of us. It ended up being twice as much as the bus, but all in all, it was a good time!

(Abby and I with our chocolate dolphins!...they were GROSS!)

That's pretty much all of language camp. On friday we hopped on a train and traveled to Ski (pronounced She), for...

2. District Conference

We finally got to stay in a nice hotel, where there was actially a shower (not just a drain in the bathroom floor with a cirtain and a faucet, like the hostle) and rooms we could actually move around in! In Ski, us "newbies" met up with the Aussies, and Agosh the Argentinian, who have been in Norway since January. We had a grand ol' time. On saturday we had to present ourselves and the country we come from to all the rotarians. Canada and the U.S were grouped together for the presentation. We started out with singing our national anthems. Next we preformed a rap that we made up. It was preeetty awesome I must say. Then we ended our presentation with introducing the rotartians to "the Cha-Cha slide" you can't get any more american than that! Saturday night there was a fancy smancy dinner with all the rotarians. There we got to participate in every foriegn exchange students favorite activity...AWKWARD SMALL TALK!

Sunday we went on an outing to a 800 year old church and a 200 or something old farm town (I really dont know what it was) at the "farm town" we got to go on a steam boat ride.

...and that concludes District conference.

(Abby and I with our unplanned matching!)

(Abby, Artur, and I all dressed up for the fancy shmancy dinner)

(Steam boat rides)

(Monica, Alyssia, and I on the steam boat)