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!