Anita's Diary

Norway!!! Made it perfectly and my flight was special b/c it was the first Ryanair flight to Oslo I believe and so a red carpet was laid out when we arrived to walk down the plane on!!! Woot woot! And there was cake and fake flamenco dancers (norweagen haha) for the party in the lobby!!! Pretty neat. The cakes in Norway have a weird frosting…its like a layer of rubber and it is all made out with words and all from a computer it seems and printed out and just laid and pressed around the cake…it’s cool! Sara and her dad, Ivar, picked me up! Sara brought me a present and it was a cute cute bag with an avocado and Norwegian chocolate inside!!!! Soooo sweet!!!! She is so loving and generous!!! Then when we got to the house, Sara showed me to her room where I would be sleeping in as well in the extra bed/couch on the upper deck part (neat layout of the room!) and there on my pillow (where I my bed was made perfectly with the blankets pulled diagonally back and everything next to the pillow) was a white rose!!!! All wrapped with green tissue and green and white ribbons!!!!! Sooooo thoughtful!!!! Wow! I felt so special!!! We ate a great supper and apple cake desert made especially for me with Ivar and Trude, her mom!!! The house was sooo absolutely amazing. It was so neat, clean, cute, cozy decorations, good view, lookes like a log cabin inside, and the layout is soo cool—it has different levels for everything with lots of wooden stairs!! And the town, Slemmestad!!!!...amazing!!! Everything was super cute, all the houses, the roads, the mailboxes, the stores, the sidewalks, the nice people—it seems so countryish and laid back where everybody just waved and talked! The next day I woke up to look out the windows to the beautiful mountains with changing colors of trees!!! My fall for the year…oh how I love the fall!!! I couldn’t have gone to Norway at a better time of year…BEAUTIFUL! Then we went on a long hike through the mountains with John and Anne-Maret the couple who is her “director” I believe and help her with learning the language. The two of them are so cute together, so loving, and love taking part in nature together—it’s adorable! We stopped and had lunch (ham sandwiches on great bread Anne-Maret made, hot tea and Norwegian chocolate for desert) on a mountain overlooking a pretty lake down below (or maybe it was part of the ocean I don’t remember) with trees all around it….so beautiful!!! I want to live there! Then we went back to their house, showered, and ate a Norwegian supper—salty fish, mashed potatoes, beats, and cooked cabbage…really good. Later that night, Ivar and Trude came and we all sat around their little cocktail table, next to the fire and had Norway’s famous waffles and coffee!!! So great, cute, and cozy! I didn’t know what they were saying but it was neat to just have people talking and looking up information in an encyclopedia—it was seemed so laid back like old times! I felt so comfortable! We walked a little the next day down by the harbor right along the ocean!!! Sara and I had kabobs next to all the boats that were tied up and then hiked through the mountains that are right on the ocean…we lost the trail a bit and had to climb some to find our way back!! Haha That night we were invited to the musical, Mamma Mia by Ivar and Trude which was in Oslo!!!! It was in Norwegian and the ONLY words I understood the whole time were “tussen takk” (which were the first words I learned..”thousand thanks”) but it was THE BEST musical I have ever seen EVER!!! It was awesome to not understand the words. Because then you could just listen to the sounds and see their reactions and voice inflections (I think that’s the right word??) and it made it so fun! Also, I had seen the movie before and so I knew what was going on and so it made it neat to watch!!!!!!!!!! It was awesome!! Saturday, we went to the Viking museum and got to see the ships...awesome and we went to the Folk museum which was a bunch of houses and buildings you could walk through that were like old times in Norway…super cool as well! It felt like Laura Ingalls times!!! Neat! I’d live there too! haha On Sunday we got to have a nice tour of Oslo with Sara’s “cousin” Tur and his friend Heidi. They were so much fun. We went all over the city, to different little festivals, markets, places, and ended at the top of a hotel in a bar that overlooked the city…super pretty! Then Sara and I went to the English mass they had on Sundays in Oslo. It was PACKED!!! We stood in the back of the entrance room and listened through some speakers…very neat though, I liked it a lot. Afterwards, we went to catch the bus to get back to Slemmestad and got on to find that we didn’t have enough money and got kicked out …no cell phone, no money—kinda scared, I said a short prayer and right then, at that very second, a silver car drove by, honked, and quickly swooped in and it was the one only Ivar!!!! It was like an angel dropped from the sky haha! He is soooo amazing. He took us really quickly to catch the bus on its next stop and we missed it again, on the third try we caught it and were on our way. It was still in shock as it was the weirdest thing to be saved by Ivar on that exact moment! When we made it to Slemmestad we were walking up the cute road with beautiful houses and trees all around to get to her house and we passed Sara’s future house and her host mom, Laila, and sister, Therese, happened to be out on the deck so I got to meet them! Everybody is just so nice there, it is unbelievable! I know Sara will enjoy her whole stay twice as much because of the great families she was blessed with! On the last day Sara and I went to the mini mall in Slemmestad to get some presents to take back. I got the famous Norwegian Brown Goat Cheese to take back to my “family” that Peter, a kid from the program, had told me about and I got two smaller versions of the chocolate bars that Sara got me. Then I packed up and was on my way back to España to start school!!!