telemegaphone

Someone has to do this and report back. You call the phone number and big speakers project your voice over a Norwegian village and fjord. It's an international call, but I'm pretty sure it would be worth it. It's art, see. I read somewhere that it's hooked up through September 6th.

peer gone

Peer Gynt is over now. It was really a pleasure to sing. Also, I'm told by people who came to the concert that it was fantastic. And most of these people didn't even give birth to me.

Tonight when we finished there was tons of lightning. As I drove home I put on a recording I'd been using to practice. The first few miles of my drive home are along a dark winding woodsy road - with In the Hall of the Mountain King playing and lightning turning the sky purple. Not a bad end to the evening.

The conductor has apparently been taking this Peer Gynt show on the road for the centennial of Grieg's death, so if you get a chance, you should definitely check it out. And if you can, arrange for lightning afterward.

velsignede morgen

Tonight was the opening night for Peer Gynt. It went quite well. This is our biggest choral moment. (That is not us singing it, obviously, but OAMers should definitely look at who *is* singing it.) It's right near the end of the piece, we have to remember our starting pitch through about 30 seconds of narration, and the orchestra comes in soon enough after we sing that we really ought to end it in the same key we started in. (Those of you who have sung in choirs will know that this is really hard.) And the conductor is taking it suuuuper slow and milking it for all its got. Good stuff.

And to balance out that awesome moment, a totally dumb moment: We sing "slagt ham" a whole bunch of times in one section. It means "slaughter him!" and it's really loud and fast and violent. There's a series of them where someone says a line, then we yell - ok, sing - "slagt ham!" while the orchestra plays two notes really fast. Well, the first one of those? We didn't sing it. It was like the whole choir agreed to not bother coming in. Heh heh. Oops. (After that, we paid attention.)

telespringar

Here's a video of the main Norwegian dance I do, although I don't do it anywhere near this well:



This is from March of this year - it's the same competition I went to (as a spectator!) last year. Some of you know the male dancer. (I think only Miss Shirley knows the female dancer.)

peer gynt

Guess what? I joined another choir. This one is singing Peer Gynt next week and they really needed some extra voices. And they're singing it in Norwegian. I was afraid I might be put on the spot, so I went through it with a dictionary last night but I couldn't find most of the words I didn't know - there's Danish, dialect, all kinds of wacky stuff going on in there. And indeed, when the alto who recruited me introduced me at tonight's rehearsal, she said that I speak Norwegian.

So we're working on diction in this one passage and the director asks me for some sense of what we're singing, and I'm like, "Uhhhhhhh...." Here's what I can translate of that section: "We are thoughts, you should have thought us. [Noun], you should have [verbed] us. [Adverb] we should have as [adjective] [plural noun]...." It's this really odd, abstract poem sung by a knot (yeah. no idea.) and a chorus of withered leaves, and it has a whooole lotta vocab I didn't learn in Norway.

I think he gave up on my alleged language skills then, but I redeemed myself later in the evening when we were singing a passage that goes "The prophet has come! Play flute and drum! To us he has come, over the sand sea riding!" *That* I can translate. Basic nouns and cognates are my forte.

vermont

I got home this evening around 7:30 and realized it was the first time I'd been at home at 7:30 p.m. in two weeks. Here's what kept me from home the last two nights:


Norwegian desserts. Well, really Norwegian dancing, but I did almost as much eating as dancing. I also spent a lot of time doing jigsaw puzzles, because someone had brought them and those suckers are *addictive*. And there was some quality napping, too, and a lot of reading.

This was at a "ski-dance" weekend in Vermont, although I didn't ski - it was totally cold, and I probably spent a total of 10 minutes outside the whole time I was there. I was up til 3 last night, alternating between puzzles, dancing, and staring into space. My eyes kept closing during my last two dances, but I hear the hard core made it til 5.

carless life

New reader (and stranger!) Sarah Moffett, who bravely uses no pseudonym in the blog world (she appears to be promoting a book, so it makes sense), asked last week how people live without cars. J.Po, Sophist, help me out here. How *does* one survive to the late 20s (and beyond) without driving? I'll kick things off with my narrative of the carless life, but there must be many ways.

In high school I didn't go out. So that was easy. When I had stuff after school, I took the "activity bus" home. In college, you could walk all the way across campus in 10 minutes, and out to the Happy Chef in about 20. And when it was -37 degrees out, well, a car probably wouldn't have started anyway.

In Norway, I took buses, although this kind of sucked. It sucked even more when the bus drivers went on strike. I walked a lot. In Japan, I was all about the awesome public transportation and, for longer outings, friends. Besides, they drive on the wrong side of the road there. No way was I going to learn to drive with *that* nonsense.

At My First Graduate Alma Mater, more buses, plus I finally learned to ride a bike. Long-suffering friends took me along when they went to grocery stores, parties, airports, and whatnot. At MSGAM, I finally bought a damn car. And here we are, five years and a few thousand miles later.

(S.Vix is carless, too, but she followed a normal carless pattern - knows how to drive a car, but gave it up because she lives in a city with high insurance rates, good public transportation, and zipcar. J.Po, Sophist, and I just never learned how to drive.)

diana

In case you missed it (how would you have missed it?) today is the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's death. Which means it's time for where-were-you stories, and I think mine is particularly amusing, so I'm going first. I'd been in Norway since June, but most of that time I was in Oslo at summer school, learning to speak Norwegian. I got to Trondheim in mid-August, and was there just long enough to get into my apartment, be confused, pack again, go to work, and drive off to spend three weeks on the coast, where we were running a big experiment in a little cove. Man, it was beautiful there...if I had a scanner, I'd show you pictures.

So there I was, fresh out of college, limited social skills, everyone was speaking Norwegian, and I hadn't learned enough to even guess at the topic of conversation, most of the time. When people talked to me, they spoke English, obviously, but the rest of the time I was lost. So sometime in the afternoon on August 31, I was filtering some sea water outside when Matilde, whose English was about as good as mine, made some joke about how we should be wearing black armbands because Diana died. And I was like, who? What? And she was like, you didn't hear?

Come to think of it, it might not even have been Aug. 31. It could have been days later. I don't think we had TV there. I do remember puzzling through a tabloid article (in Norwegian) about it.

That pretty much kicked off three solid years of me not knowing what was going on around me. Ah, living in foreign countries. I love it, but it does cut you off from the world. Even when my Norwegian, and later my Japanese, got much better, following a conversation between other people was still the hardest thing.

Anyway. Anybody else have a where-were-you story?

fiddle courier

This is what a hardanger fiddle (hardingfele) looks like, for the record:


If you look really closely, you can see the extra strings that run under the bridge. I carried this sucker to Wisconsin and back on behalf of the fiddler who lives near me - she takes extra loaners for students to practice on. I felt like a total impostor, toting a violin case through the airports.

When I was coming back, a TSA guy at the Madison airport joked about how they were going to make me play it. I was like, ha-ha-ha, I can't play it at all. He's like, no, you'll be fine, we had this girl play trombone once in here, it was great! I said, no, really, you don't want to hear me play it. *That* would have been embarrassing. I don't even know how to make a stringed instrument make a noise. And imagine what would happen if the TSA found out I was impersonating a fiddler! I'd probably be on all kinds of lists by now!

hardingfele

This workshop I went to last weekend centers on one instrument: the hardanger fiddle or hardingfele. It's the Norwegian national instrument, it has extra strings, it's totally cool-looking. No, I don't play fiddle, but I love the dances that are done to the fiddle and the songs I was learning are mostly fiddle tunes. Every night at the beginning of the dancing, the fiddle students did something called "lagspel" or "group play" in which they play together and we dance around the outside. See those three couples at the top left? They're doing a waltz or a reinlender or something.

The hardingfele is really a solo instrument, and when you have a bunch of them playing in one room, it's a bit cacophonous. It is not a sound of which the hardanger purist would approve, and it's definitely not as good for dancing as a solo instrument. But I still love it. The tunes are cheerful and the students are having a good time, and it's one heck of a joyful noise.

embarrassing photographs

I submit to the fashion police this evidence of my crime:


Yes. I wore crocs outside of the house. However, since I wore them at a weekend workshop filled with people who think it's ok to wear shorts with dress shoes and white sport socks pulled halfway up your calves, no one was really in a position to judge. These are the shoes I wear for dancing, and I think their awesomeness makes up for the crocs:

(I got them in Norway in February, and I love them.)

det var nils og jens og gjeidaug

The workshop I was at this weekend focuses on music and dance from a different region of Norway every year. This year it was Setesdal, a very rural valley in southern Norway. I didn't have any particular interest in Setesdal, but I had fun at last year's workshop and figured I could get people to teach me new songs. I'm still not all that into Setesdal dance, but I learned a couple new songs and worked on the songs from last year, so I'm happy.

Several months ago, Sophist sent me an album of Norwegian music that includes lots of singing, and it turns out that the main singer on the album, Kirsten Bråten Berg, is from Setesdal. So the first night I was listening to that album on my iPod as I was falling asleep, and suddenly she starts singing Nils og Jens og Gjeidaug, which I'd just learned that afternoon! It was basically the theme song of the workshop - we sang it for dances, various fiddlers played it, everyone was humming it in the dinner line. Another win for the musical tastes of Sophist!

Stupidly, the Amazon sound clip only has the fiddle...here, I've uploaded my recording of the class to Savefile. This is really a solo art form, but since we were singing it in a group, one of our teachers went ahead and made up a harmony part.

wisconsin again

In the morning, I'm off to Wisconsin for the same workshop I went to last year, although Miss Shirley is not accompanying me this time for some silly reason. Something to do with the fact that her baby is due in six weeks. I know, it's a totally lame excuse. I just found out I have to take my own sheets and blankets, and I'm carrying a fiddle for the local fiddler, so basically I'm going to be drowning in luggage tomorrow. Nothing I love like riding the metro at rush hour when I'm drowning in luggage!

I'll be back Sunday. Between now and then, entertain yourself by leaving comments. I love comments. More comments! More! More! Give me something to read when I get back so I can put off unpacking!

ideas

A good chunk of my new job is supposed to be generating story ideas. And, just between you, me, and the people who get here by googling "Norwegian clothing," I don't think I'm very good at generating story ideas. This week, though, I made my first attempt at proposing stories and had a total story idea triumph: I submitted two ideas I thought were good and one I thought was marginal to lame, and they loved the good ideas and rejected the other one. Yay.

Both the good ideas came from people I know - one was from something sent to a Norwegian dance listserv (random, I know - maybe I'll run a contest in six months or so for you to guess which story it was) and the other was a comment a scientist friend dropped at dinner on Sunday. For as long as I've been doing this journalism thing, I've tried to find ideas by reading, but, really, the good stuff comes from people who know me. I used to feel bad about this, but then an older and wiser journalist told me this was a really good way to get story ideas, and I felt better.

So, the solicitation: if you hear about anything and think, "Oh my god, that sounds like something I could read in the front pages of [towwas's employer]," shoot me an e-mail! Nine times out of 10, you'll be wrong (a lot of the time, I'm wrong), but hey, give it a try! Bonus points if you also think, "That sounds like something towwas would think was funny!" because that's the stuff I really like to write about.

Hm...I wonder if they'd go for a story on high-end denim?

norway: the final episode

I guess I never really finished my Norway trip blogging. To wrap up: I spent the last day after everyone left wandering around Kongsberg, then watching TV in the hotel room, and caught a 5 a.m. train to the airport. This is obscenely early, yes, but the good thing was that the hotel was right across the street from the train station, so I just walked out of the door and across the parking lot and got on the train, then got off again in the basement of the airport. Very easy. The hotel even made me a matpakke, which was (major letdown) in plastic, not in paper.


And I flew home. And I went to choir practice that night. And it wasn't even all that bad.

The end! Now, who's coming with me next time?

that's a lot of money for a pizza

One thing that *hasn't* changed since I lived in Norway is the prices. Behold this special offer from Peppes Pizza:

That's a large pizza, a 1.5-liter soda, and a DVD for only 359 kroner (plus delivery). Allow me to convert for you: that's 60 dollars. And even if the exchange rate didn't suck, that would be a lot of money.

rundstykke

You wouldn't things would change this fast, but food in Norway has dramatically improved since I lived there in 1997-98. The staples are still delicious - those folks know their way around the meat, fish, and potatoes. But when I was there before, "salad" meant sliced Chinese cabbage with canned corn. I kid you not. Iceberg would've been a major step forward. So imagine my surprise when I got this here rundstykke (= "round piece" = "roll with stuff on it")...

...and it was totally delicious. I've had a lot of rundstykker in my day, and they were generally like, here, have a hard piece of bread with too much butter/mayonnaise and a piece of sandwich meat. But this was pretty much a taste explosion. I got it at the little concession stand at the folk competition, where various members of the local dance group were selling soup, hot dogs, rundstykker, cake, and whatnot. I mean, look at this - green onions! Lettuce! Etc.! On another day, I had a salad with some kind of spring mix thing! Crazy, I tell you!

dancing...in Norway!

After the competition was done and all the prizes had been given out, the fiddlers started playing for dancing. Fiddlers have varying ranges of awesomeness - sometimes apparently some of them are really *on* for dancing. Me, I can't tell the difference, but I did notice that the party got a lot better when this one guy started playing after midnight.

The woman in red in that picture is an American from our group - she competed in couple dance and won her category, which is totally awesome. She's dancing with an old Norwegian man, which is basically what the evening was about. And lemme tell ya, those old guys, they're good dancers. The dancing went on til about 2, when we all stumbled back to the hotel for the after-party, in the room of a retired fiddler (retired not voluntarily, but because of a terrible accident that damaged his left hand).

This picture is, like, total Norwegian party. There are way too many people in that room. There are especially way too many people on that bed. Two people in the picture are wearing bunad. And there's not only a guy playing the fiddle, there's a couple dancing. Also, somehow not captured in the picture, there's a very high alcohol-to-person ratio and a lot of salty snacks.

compete

So part of the market in Kongsberg is this day-long folk competition. Anybody can enter - a few of the Americans in my group competed in dance, and the fiddler would've competed if she hadn't been totally sick. So there's fiddle, singing, couple dance, halling (the fancy men's dance), and the occasional competitor in mouth-harp, accordion, or langeleik.

This is the lady dancer's daughter and one of the star dancer boys, competing in couple dance. I think they're doing a telespringar.

How awesome is her skirt?? The Telemark bunad has a few different skirt options, and one of them is this absolutely enormous skirt that weighs a million pounds and spins almost straight out. Apparently it's quite a job to manage when you dance - if the guy gets in the way, there's the danger of the thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip-thwip effect, and you can't start or stop turning too fast or you'll get totally wrapped up in it.

In my vague fantasy dreams, I'm going to compete in the vocal category in a few years. This is a vague fantasy in which I have somehow gotten over my fear of standing on stage in front of a bunch of foreigners, in their country, singing unaccompanied in their language. Right. So, we'll see about that. To at least get over the singing alone part, I'm taking every darn solo opportunity that comes my way. In a little over a week, I'll be singing a big ole Handel piece with a nearly two-octave range (middle C to B flat) and many enormous jumps in church. Yowch. Cross your fingers for me.

for J.Bro

To answer your question, J.Bro, they do have wheeled transportation in Norway. Totally modern and impressive wheeled transportation, too. See?