Today I am declaring the first day of being a "real" student here at UiO. Today I will have my first class, Norwegian Life and Society. I have been stressed about my class schedule the past few days because I wanted to free up my fridays for traveling. Yeah, yeah school comes first. Whatever. But I am in Europe and I knew if I had a class on friday it would severly hinder my ability to travel and to do so cheaply. The problem was that there are not very many classes that will transfer back to Elmira as sociology credits. I had it narrowed down to the few classes and planned to get up early this morning and come to campus to see if I could find someone to help me sort things out. No need. I woke up with the obvious answer (further confirmed by my advisor-thanks Dr. Shephard!) that I should take the Norwegian Society course since that will fit nicely into my pregrad internship I plan to start while I am here. So yay problem solved! And now since I do not have another class until Monday of next week, I think Sarah and I are looking to planning a trip tonight.
May I say that it is very annoying typing on Norwegian keyboards because the symbols are all in different places and there are extra letters in places where symbols usually are.
So you have probably figured out I am on campus now. I decided to come buy a book for the class I have today but the bookstore is out. Luckily the library keeps some copies on hand. You can take them out for two weeks at a time and if no one wants to use them, you can renew them for another two weeks. For my Family Gender class I only need parts of books for a couple weeks so hopefully I can just rely on that option. The rest of the class requires reading from articles, all of which are free online. The only bad thing is I will probably have to read them off a computer screen because we only get so many free prints. (Shout out to Elmira for free printing) When you check out books at the main library, you do not even need to see a person. They have a touch screen kiosk where you scan your card and place the book on some sort of sensor (no scanning necessary) and it automatically knows what book you have and checks it out for you. Brilliant! Each department building has a small library too and that is where I had to go to get my Norwegian Society book.
On a less scholarly note, today is the first real snowfall I have seen in Oslo. It is the kind of snow I refer to as magic snow because it floats straight down, ever so slowly. It is almost as if it is suspended in the air. Luckily there is not much wind here. That would be brutal! It is freeeeeezing again today. Online the temperature says -10 C for Oslo. This morning I had it timed perfectly so I would not have to wait more than two minutes for the train to campus and it was late! (the first time since I have been here). I waited almost 20 minutes. There was some kind of technical problem because when it did finally come it was on the wrong side of the tracks and everyone had to walk to the other side of the platform to board.
Wish me luck at my first class at UiO, exciting stuff!
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