Olivia Takes on Norway: Halloween

Sorry, I haven't written in awhile! I haven't been particularly swamped here either, I am just a huge procrastinator, haha. Before I begin with my post, for those of you that haven't already, on the right side of my page there is a box that says "Follow Me For Updates!", if you put your email in there then you will automatically get updates every time I make a blog post! You can also write comments at the bottom of the posts, I would love to hear what you think or any post ideas you have for me.

Last weekend was Halloween here in Norway. I was surprised at how many parties and how many people dressed up. In the past, I have always viewed it as an American holiday and even then I never do anything back home for it.

The night before Halloween I invited some of the girls in my class over to carve pumpkins! Two of them have never carved pumpkins before because it only got popular in Norway within the past view years. I think southern Norway underestimated how many people were going to carve pumpkins because by 4:00 pm there no pumpkins within a one-hour radius of where I live. My host parents and some siblings went to Kristiansand to pick up someone at the bus station there and they couldn't find a single pumpkin. Two of the girls in my class managed to find the last pumpkins in our city and I had one we bought earlier in the week. The other two girls actually used honey melons. We had a lot of fun and the melons turned out really cool as well! I realized how lucky I am to be in a class with these girls because, while they were shy at first (and so was I), they have really accepted me into their group and I'm going to miss them terribly when I go home.

On Saturday, I went to a Halloween party that a guy in my class was having. The invite he sent me was in Norwegian so I attempted to translate the directions but it was on a private road so it didn't show up on Google Maps, it took Ida and me about 40 minutes to get there. I was there for about half an hour until one of my friends showed up and invited me to another one of our friends house where they were just watching some TV relaxing. Oh! I went as Rosie the Riveter. Mostly because I had all the items in my closet. A lot of people went as scary things with white or red contacts and scars on their faces.

Sunday was spent relaxing because the past two nights I had been up really late. Monday we were back at school. Same old, same old, I just sit there and do absolutely nothing. On Tuesday, I only had math class because my English teacher was sick. I also went to the police station and officially applied for my visa! Wednesday we had Norwegian all day but my teacher didn't have anything planned for me because all the other kids were taking a test all day. I just went home. It was a bit upsetting because I was at school for less than an hour and I would have much rather been sleeping. Thursday was normal and Linn Victoria and I went to the grocery store at night. This was the largest grocery store I've seen here in Norway, but it still had about as many products as Giant Eagle. The store also sold random, miscellaneous things like skis. That brings us to today. My Norwegian teacher again told me that since they were doing New Norwegian I could just go out in the hall in work. Since I don't have a language I don't have anything to do until 12, oh well it's some nice down time.

Well, that's been my week! I am officially supposed to come home January 16th. I can't believe that's only 70 days away! I'm still working on planning out my Thanksgiving for my friends so I will let you all know how that goes. Keep your fingers crossed for me, okay? The most I've ever done for Thanksgiving is cut celery, but I'm pretty fantastic at that.