Norway in Spain

Gran Canaria is a rediculously strange place. Totally weird. It's like being in Norway, except that the mountains and the snowy May temperatures have been replaced by palm trees, deserts, 30 degrees Celcius on average and a vulcano. Same same but different, as they wisely enough would have put it in Asia. Virtually all signs are in Norwegian, Norwegian is spoken wherever you go and they have Friele kaffe, leverpostei, nugatti, sursild and Toro fiskesuppe in all shops.

It's like going away and ending up where you just came from, only that a little hot and sunny twist has been added to it.

I would never have thought of going here had it not been for the fact that we were offered an apartment free of charge for two weeks. So why not! The 5-hour flight definitively seems to be worth it: Anders and I have three bedrooms, a superb kitchen, four bathrooms, a heavily furnitured living room, a garage and a big veranda with a private swimming pool all to ourselves!

Will post some pictures later, but for now I have to go relax a bit on the beach and work on my tan. It's a hard life... I feel really sorry I skipped an exam for the benefit of this. Oh well...

Splitter Pine

I accidentally turned 27 last Friday. It was great! After the cake, the menu included: DumDum Boys live, beer, splitter pine, Loco, time warp, more beer, where is my mind, and I wanna know if you feeeeeeeeel the saaaaame waaaay cause if you do I wanna stay forever.

Red, round and pounding

Oh sweet heavens, it feels so good to be back!
Studentersamfundet i Trondhjem is no doubt the most fantastic red round house in the whole wide world.

It is home to several bars, cafés, discos, pubs, and concert and theatre scenes, including a big circus hall. Its fascinating and lively machinery keeps going solely thanks to 1200 students working voluntarily - selling beer, cooking food, organizing meetings, lectures, poetry evenings, quiz'es, debates and a wide variety of other events, booking concerts, making PR-posters, ensuring that there's great light and sound on concerts and happenings, fixing everything from loose door knobs to broken toilets, running IT-systems, showing movies - basically any thinkable and unthinkable task that needs to be done in order to keep the house pounding with life and love. In addition, there's also a student theatre, a number of different choirs, bands and orchestras, a newspaper, a great library, a radio station, a photography group and a TV-station. Moreover, two great student festivals, UKA and ISFiT, are associated with the house. And let me repeat this: nobody gets paid. It's all done out of pure love and passion for the house, some people sometimes working more than 50 hours a week (while simultaneously 'studying'). Everything is organized in a chaotic number of groups and committees; each group has its own room (hybel) in the house and there's a bar in each of them. Nobody knows the exact numbers of doors and rooms in the house, and trust me, unless you've spent at least a couple of months in the house you'll definitely get lost if you venture out on your own.

I spent two years here in the group called KulturUtvalget, running the film club and organizing a wide range of differents events on the week-days. Words cannot really express the experience, but fantastic, absurd, awsome, crazy, exhausting, super-fun, amazing, confusing and insane are words that hint to some of its essence.



And haleluja, I'm back for almost a week!

Summer vs School 1-0

Summer is still here. It simply won't go away. It just goes on and on, each day followed by a warmer and brighter still. What can you do? Three days and quite a few unwritten pages before the spring semester's last deadline, this leaves me with an intriguing dilemma: What is most important; finish the promised draft to my supervisor in a dark and depressing room or go out and enjoy this ridiculously beautiful day before it's gone?

Difficult, difficult.

This seems to me just the right time to apply the ancient thai wisdom that nicely translated to thenglish is summarized thus: 'be very luuuuuv and enjoy in this life and mai pen rai'.

Very well, I feel luuuv and enjoy, and mai pen rai means never mind.
Over and out.
Here comes the sun.

(and I say
It's all right...)

Sommarkort (en stund på jorden)

Oh May oh my. Seagulls yell and flies have woken from their winter sleep. The sea sunbathes by the beach and doesn't seem to plan on going anywhere, while children run around and everything cold is busy melting.
Nights are light, days are long, Air smells of Earth and Cornelis Vreeswijk delights the world with Deirdres Samba on the radio.
There are things to be done by deadlines approaching with horrifying speed, but for now lets just enjoy this eagerly growing life and relax with a cup of coffee in the garden.






Sow some basil, carrots and yellow Calendula officinalis, breathe slowly and watch it grow.
Indoor writing-papers-weather will be back soon enough.