Time to relax

Today has been a really nice and relaxing day, consisting of going swimming and out to eat lunch! Then relaxing at home, talking a little with the neighbors (or attempting to ;), making bracelets with a neighbor girl, and finishing off with some fried rice and a movie at my friend Esthers. Since I've been constantly snapping away with my camera this week, I even took a break from that today! So here's a Google picture of the movie we watched instead. I promise to to better tomorrow ;)

Continuing on with culture events these last days :) This is some if the stuff we saw and did:

 Slightly bigger than the ones back in my house in Norway ;)

 My new house...not. The entrance of a really nice resort in town, where we went to take pictures of some animals, and have a smootie ;)

 A & E's ant infested printer ;) Yes, that black stuff in there are ants!

 Taking pictures of absolutely everything!

 A road side market that sold lots of kitchen utensils

 And some really neat wooden toys!

 Then we tried some fruit-soup!

 This is a nutmeg tree (muskatnøtt tre)

 A smart way to grow your salat!

 Beautiful!

 Check out the long ears :)

 If you look carefully in the middle of the picture, there's a green iguana!

The pool at the resort, pretty nice!

And the learning continues!

Continuing learning about the culture here. These are some of the things we have been doing:

 Observing a neighborhood "pond", where people was their clothes and themselves. Fresh water was continually coming in, so it looked really nice and clean, and it smelt lovely from all the soap!

 Meeting someones rooster, this one had apparently won 7 fights

 Seeing people get creative with their step-ladder, this would not have gone well at NC for you who have been there ;) I'm pretty sure the health and safety manual disapproves of using a step ladder in this fashion

 Going to the meat market and seeing people just chilling on their bench with a bunch of fresh somethings dangling over their head!

 Learning about how you serve guests

Taking pictures of everything

 And then filing all the information into our computers. Next week we will attempt to learn all the words we are gathering from these "cultural events"!

Stage 1 !

Today we have finally "warmed up" sufficiently and we are now in stage 1 of language learning! This means that for instance we will be meeting 2 hours 4 days a week with language helpers, we will follow daily lesson plans and we will be filling out time sheets to make sure we do our 40 hours a week of culture and language study. Today me, A & E went downtown with our language helper to buy fabric for curtains and go to the fruit and flower marked to gather pictures and words and cultural information :)

First hike!

Today I went on my first hike in South East Asia! This was supposed to be a short trip I thought, just up a hill in order to get in shape for hiking some of the volcanoes in the area. Turns out it was a full on hike Norwegian style, that is straight up a mountain, a proper mountain! Also turns out I could quite easily keep up with some of the locals, and leave most of the other foreigners behind, so there is definitely hope for my volcano climbing! :)

 First we drove motorbikes for quite a while to reach a little village.

 Beautiful farming landscape

 Some of us before starting up-hill, people from Brazil, Austria, Canada, Norway as well as locals

 As you can see it was fairly steep ;) There were some monkeys on the hillside, but that was (thankfully!) all the animal life we could see. No snakes!

 On the top it was really foggy and cold

 But as we were heading down hill, the sun shone through the fog for just a minute..

 ..and we could just make out one of my next goals, one of the volcanoes!

 This is on the way back down. It got dark really fast and we walked the last few hundred meters in darkness, with only two small flash lights!

   We stopped for some supper (kveldsmat) and some coffee to warm up on the way back home.

Shop till you drop!

Today we had a girls day out to some malls in a nearby town :)  There was a whole minibus of us taking off this morning, first going to lunch, then going from shop to shop!

Funny ;)