"Tell the ones who need to know..."

"...we are headed North."

Or rather, I just returned from the North.  But it still seemed fitting (this post's title brought to you by The Avett Brothers).

This last weekend, I made a trip to Norway to visit Katie!  There were three main motivations for my visit.

1. To see Katie, who I missed (and miss again...already) immensely.

2. To see the place where Glenn studied abroad.

3. To hopefully visit a magical, snowy, winter wonderland.

I was not disappointed on a single front!

I started off my adventure with a bang.  European men are rather pushy and aggressive, and this one man would simply not leave me alone on the train.  I eventually got rid of him, but the funny part was that he initially told me he was from the Soviet Union.  The Soviet Union??  Instead of making fun of him or making some comment I might have made if I were not alone, I asked "Umm, where in the Soviet Union?"  He told me he was from Chechnya.  I guess they're a little behind the times in Chechnya and still think the Soviet Union exists...

I got in on Friday night and was met at the train station in Hamar by Katie and Noreen.  We had a joyous  little reunion and then walked to their apartment building.  It was pretty cold, but I packed a ton of warm things at Katie's suggestion, so I was good to go.  We dropped my stuff off and went grocery shopping.  I've decided that one of my favorite things to do in a foreign country is go grocery shopping because you see real people in their normal lives and what they actually eat.  In Norway, I was jealous of the Mexican food aisle and disgusted by the fish in a tube.  We then had family dinner, and played some Spanish drinking games.  After so many months of French, it was fun to hear Spanish spoken again.  The people we were playing with were from Spain, so the accent was different from what I'm accustomed to, but I could still understand enough to chuckle a little when one of the girls said something, paused, and then said that we couldn't understand her.  Oh, the joys of understanding other languages.  During this period of time, it began to snow!  We went dancing, had late night kebabs, and then went to bed.

The next day, there was definitely snow on the ground, which excited me greatly.  Katie and Noreen took me to Lillehammer to go to the Nansen Center (where they're doing their field work) and their teacher/advisor/mentor/brunette Santa Claus took us around the city and got us into a couple of museums for free.  Lillehammer was absolutely gorgeous covered in snow.  It took us a while to actually get to the Nansen Center from the train station because we all kept stopping to take pictures.  But how could we stop ourselves??

Probably the most Christmas-y thing I've ever seen

Gorgeous church and cemetary in Lillehammer

See what I mean?  Stunning.  I think my favorite part of the day was going to the Olympic jump.  It may be because I'm such a geek for the Olympics, but I always get overly excited to see anything linked to the Olympics (remember my trip to the Olympic museum in Lausanne?  Yeah, I turn into a giddy five year old).  Their advisor (or whatever he is) Steinar, drove us to the top, and then we climbed the millions of stairs down and he picked us up at the bottom.  That was definitely the way to do it; I would NEVER want to climb UP all those stairs.  But the view was absolutely gorgeous and we had a wonderful time traipsing through the snow, and - at least in my case - pretending we were Olympians.

Nothing like a good, steep drop.

Katie and I at a flat portion of the ski jump area.  Note the snow covering our shoes (mine are originally all black).  Thank goodness for water proofing agents!

After this, we went to a museum that had a Munch/Warhol exhibit (Warhol twice in one year?  What lucky lives we lead).  We went back to Hamar at some point - I'm really iffy on the time because I was thrown off by how much earlier it gets darker in Norway than in Geneva.  I shouldn't have been surprised. - and had taco night!  Mexican food is one of the things I miss the most about the states, so this was a very good thing.

We then had movie night.  I have to elaborate on this to prove that Katie is the absolute best friend ever.  One night last Spring, we didn't want to go out with everyone else, so we convinced Jenn and Deanne to let us stay in their room for the evening.  We watched Bring It On together, and at the end of the night, Jenn returned to find Katie asleep on her bed with a muffin in hand, and me with cornrows in my hair (courtesy of Katie) singing along to "Hey Mickey" by myself.  Needless to say, this is one of my favorite nights on record.  Katie surprised me in Norway by getting a projector from school and getting Bring It On, so we had a mini-reprise of that night.  It was the best :)

Sunday we bummed around the apartment and had a relaxing day seeing the sights in Hamar.  It's a really pretty little town, made even prettier by the wintry atmosphere.

Lake Mjosa by afternoon sunset

Once again, Katie is the best ever, and understood that I wanted to see all the places Glenn saw as a way to connect with him from thousands of miles away.  As such, after a dinner of fried rice, she and Noreen took me to the Hydranten, which is the student bar in town.  We had a fun evening there laughing at the Norwegians singing along (quite robustly) to songs such as "Living on a Prayer."  We decided to leave when Katie's ghost struck.  The first time this weekend we experienced the ghost was when there was chocolate mysteriously missing from the fridge.  We had bought a couple of bars to break up for cookies, and one morning there was just a row missing from one of the bars.  We had no idea who did it or when it possibly could have happened (or why they didn't go for the Swiss chocolate I had brought...).  Ghost!  At the Hydranten, the ghost reappeared when a few votive candles fell off a ledge and splattered wax all over the back of Katie's shirt.  I literally do not think there is an explanation in line with the laws of physics for how this happened.  Ghost.

Monday, we hung around the apartment, made breakfast sandwiches around noon, and then I hit the road in the early afternoon.  Overall, it was a wonderful trip :)

As of today, I have 5 days left in Geneva.  After these 5 days are up, I have 18 days in Croatia, and then I head back to Phoenix.  I honestly had no idea time could pass this fast.  It seem surreal that I'm already at the end of this semester.  I'm not ready for it to be over!  I think I might be ready to be back in the states soon, but I'm not ready to leave Europe.  I want to be in two places at once, and sometimes I don't want to be in any of the places.  How is this possible?  Well, I guess the only way to live life is to roll with the punches and go where the wind takes you.  Currently, the wind is compelling me to work on my ISP, so I must conclude this mammoth of a post.  Love you all, miss you all, and will see you all soon!