Well, I have always known that I´m not so good with kids but today was just ridiculous! 15 kids spent about five minutes each with me individually in a room and they came out looking tired, cold, bruised and battered.. Ok, bad joke, I actually did it intentionally with make-up for Redd Barnas reality theater happening. Gosh, kids really grow up fast now-a-days. I do believe that one of the 14-year-olds was flirting with me! I mean come on!! How uncomfortable can a situation get?

Despite being mistaken for a teenager, life is fine and dandy. I am officially almost done with my essays, which makes me one happy camper**

Dear people of the world!

I would like to pronounce that I see the light at the end of the tunnel! It´s far but non-the-less I see it. This religious metaphor has been brought up due to its relevance to my paper that I just seem to have almost finished writing. And because it fits nicely into my little secular world: the tunnel is the studying, the light is Gdansk. There we have it, in a nutshell.

Raindrops keep falling on my head, da-daa-daa-da-daadadaadadripdropdripdrop.

Somehow I think that our winter superhero has left Tromsö to do good deeds elsewhere.. We had some memorable times last week, listening to the snow crunch under our feet and building a snow(wo)man. It was great, even though the snowperson got brutally sabotaged and decapitated during night.

The lack of snow has created an unexpected side effect to my everyday life. Because it´s so bleedin´dark outside all the time, it actually slows me down surprisingly much on my walk to the uni and back. Have to concentrate, you know.. And the wet bumps of ice do a good job of adding to the snail speed.

I think it was the Little Prince who said it best: "You can only see well with your heart. The most important things in life you don´t see with your eyes." Possible slogan material for Tromsö during the winter?

Today was a wierd emotional day for me. I woke up and looked outside and the song November Rain just started playing in my head. And it was downhill from there.. Collin, my computer decided that I´ve been working hard enough on my essay and started falling apart, Bit by Bit. Which caused a sudden outburst of rage that led to some books being thrown on the floor and to a soggy and slippery walk home. November rain indeed! Oh well, alls well in my world again since Kjersti and Kristian convinced Collin to put some effort into it. Maybe I have PMS. Or is it Collin who´s suffering from an alledged hormonal imbalance? After all, it is only a social construct anyway, so basically it could hit anyone? Hmm.. I´d watch out if I were you..

There is something super important going on that I think you should know about. It has to do with one of my great passions in life that I discovered only a few years ago. It had it´s 25th birthday yesterday and I feel so far away from it.. But here it is:
I would like to introduce our student theater, Lapin ylioppilasteatteri or as we more commonly call it, Lyt.

It is a place where people go to feel at home, get away from real life, express themselves and drink coffee till they drop. Its a great spot for letting out all the aggressions that reality can sometimes cause. Or just for pouting somewhere in a corner and waiting for it to pass.

Now most people only see the crazy people on the stage as the backbone of theater (actors as wee call them in the biz..) but the truth is that the heart of the theater is hiding behind the spotlights, you can see it taking shape in stage props, lights, clothes, make-up. Its hiding in the office and sitting on the back row of every performance. Those wierdos on the stage do their part too of course.. Been there, done that.


But when all is said and done and all the fuss caused by the performances is over, you can always stretch out your legs on a couch and you know that there´s always gonna be someone next to you ready to listen or to talk. I´ve left a little piece of my heart into that place..
Happy birthday Lyt!

I feel a litte detached, displaced, disconnected.. basicallly anything that starts with a D. Dumb? That starts with a D.. Dubious maybe? Anyway, this Norwegian exam experience is totally different than my first one. I feel somehow, uplifted, as I said, disconnected from the world as we know it. Flying high amongst isms and international relations. So I decided to find out if I´m just deluding myself or is this really how I feel. Don´t laugh when I tell you what I did to get to the bottom of this one, ok? Promise..

My dear friend and neighbour, good OLD Teresa told me a wisdom that I doubted but wanted to try out anyway. She said that if you eat cheese before going to bed, you´ll see funky dreams. And as I hadn´t been dreaming much lately, I decided to give it a shot. And low and behold: I had a dream that I lived in a beautiful apartement, with plants and everything. Then suddenly someone came in to tell me that in fact the bottom floor of the house is on fire and that it´s time to start packing. Everything couldn´t be taken, just what I wanted to keep. And I was surprisingly calm about it, so was everyone else in the house! And so I carefully chose what I needed with me and left. Talk about hidden meanings.. Quite a boring dream compared to the ones I usually have but I did feel mighty good when I woke up.

Our long line of parties is over for a couple of weeks cause we´re getting our killer-exam tomorrow.. So basically there´s gonna be a whole lot of sitting around in the library in sweatpants sipping coffee and hoping for some sort of inspiration. Ok, we do have a Finnish party on saturday and we get to meet Santa!! (I´m still convinced it´s just gonna be Jamppa in a white beard.. what a sceptic!) And I´m going to lose my Harry Potter-virginity (hmm..??) on thursday so I´m a bit nervous about that too. But I have to say a few words about the party last saturday, so bare with me:

Hanne and I poured our little hearts and souls into this random cake I found a recipe for on the Net. We decided to leave making it for saturday evening so it would be nice and fresh for the party but we ended up having some technical problems.. It wasn´t the sort you put in the oven for an hour but the kind you leave in the fridge for a day! So we were a bit worried it wouldn´t be solid enough for the actual event(+we didn´t put enough gelatine in it..)

So much for baking with two blonds. The party in itself was great, lots of people, surprisingly many blowings out of candles and a couple of speeches. I´m just bummed I missed Stian´s and his friend´s impressive speech on "The Lie, The Lie, The Lie!" or something along those lines. Palestine wasn´t unfortunately freed and nothing was done to help the Nepalese during the party but otherwise I would say that it rocked our worlds a little to the right. And our house.

Remember I was suspecting Line of having a secret identity of some sort? Well, there have been some hints left out for me that actually lead me elsewhere.. My guess is that this frosty gelatine mask could belong to some sort of winter superhero. We have had surprisingly warm weathers here in Tromsö and hardly any snow..


Now I have three suspects. One was at a "basketball game" yesterday night, one was "just gonna hang out and watch Animal Planet" and the third is "working out of town for the military". I don´t buy it! I guess we´ll find out if there really is such a hero if it actually starts snowing next week.

Theme of the day: Sensorisk Analyse

The irony of todays theme is in the fact that I seem to have lost all of my five senses after obtaining my sixth one yesterday night. The three senses I had to use for analysing klippfisk in the morning (smell, taste and sight) were on holiday thanks to the stuffiness in my head caused by the flue. Or actually only the first two, I forgot my glasses so that´s where the sight comes in..


My hearing got impaired after the snot found it´s way into my eartubes. Hearing isn´t crucial in fish tasting but it had alot to do with the psychological "Fear and Pain" test me and Hanne participated in just a while ago. Also the fifth of our normal senses was an important part of the test, which in my case is overworked and hyper sensitive because of the slacking off of the others.
I don´t know about the name of the test though.. my "fear" turned into laughter and the only "pain" I felt was when the tiny hairs on my forehead were exfoliated with a electroidanalysisthing.

There was a lot going on today: tasted torskelever for the first time (the whole experience wierded me out but hey, someones gotta bring home the bacon!), sneezed about 749 times, got to mess about with theater make-up and 14 year-old theater enthusiasts..


And the freakiest thing happened on my way home at night. I thought I´d make my usual couple of km walk home a bit more interesting by taking photos. And so I paused for an artsy photo shoot with this cool rundown building. I got a couple of good shots and I didn´t realize until I got home that actually half of them were covered with this eery haze (maybe a good thing I didn´t notice there..). Is it getting cold in Tromsö or do I see dead people??

I woke up to something magical this morning.. The Sun! I can´t actually see it myself but I can see it shining on a mountain that´s behind the mountain that´s across the water from our place. How fab is that then??

Anyway, I was going to get to a point which is that we had Teesa´s party last night at our place. And we made her a cake which she carefully divided among us. Yes, we are living in a socialist (maybe even communist?) household even though T is going to master capitalism in her lifetime.

After enjoying the lush cake (even if I say so myself.. I made the frosting) we moved on downstairs to engage in serious discussions on life, the universe and everything. And when the conversation started getting heavy and aggressive..

..we decided to take out the aggressions on the tatami. And started playing Twister! So there it is, that´s the red line of our party. It also envolved a few beers and a couple of bottles of bubbly.

We went on a hike last sunday and when we got to the destination it started getting mighty dark and something had to be done. As a former scoutgirl I naturally came prepared for any kind of situation. And so my solution for the problem was to through balls of fire =) viciously around so that people could see something.. Is this what really happened?

This is me. I would just like to quickly go through the twists of fate that have brought me here. As I mentioned earlier on, I had plans for this year. Making money in Balestrand and going to Thailand/Indonesia with my friends from Finland for a few months. What I thought was in store for me, after drinking up the coco locos on the beach, was an intense half-a-year of volunteering in Ecuador or in the best case, Nepal. But someone read my application wrong and thought that I was applying to school already for this year instead of 2006..

And so I quit my job almost 2 months ahead of time just to find out that my uni had messed things up and that I couldn´t start school after all. But as things usually have a tendancy to do, they got sorted out. I was seriously not sure if I was glad about it or not.. I must admit that there have been times during my stay here in Tromsö that I have actually looked like I do in this photo. But as a great believer in fate, I have a feeling that this might have just been a stroke of pure luck for me. I don´t know why yet, but when I find out, I´ll let you know!

We are starting to notice the effects of the rotation of the earth up here. Needless to say, we have entered the Pitch Black Times. Now you would think that things calm down during this period and that people start hibernating or something...

..but I don´t see any signs of that happening any time soon! Lucky for us, many of our fellow peaceniks are scorpios by nature (or horoscope?) which means a lot of parties and in general massive amounts of mucking about and going crazy. Last weekend we survived André´s party, this weekend we have little Teresa getting older and the week after that it´s Kjersti, Rachel and Moustafa who are shoving the toes of one foot into the grave.