Picture update, among other things

Hello!

FINALLY some pictures...unfortunately, I do greatly apologize that the pictures are out of order, as is everything else on this post. Going forward, I will try to see what I can do to solve this....
Anyway, enjoy for now!!!



Gro learning how to swim!!!

It seems photos won't do this justice, but I can at least put some on. This is Gro and I at Sognsvann, and a documentation of her first time swimming in a lake....

This is just a funny side note, but this very knowledgeable and friendly lady was my guide the first time I took a tour of Oslo City Hall in January also. The knowledge she gave on that tour gave me SO MUCh information for my final paper, so it was great to be able to see her again and thank her for her help!

With Sylfest Lomheim, leader of the Norwegian Language Council, who also attended the ISS opening ceremony at Oslo City Hall, and who I got to meet in January as well...it was really an incredible course.

The amazing Oslo City Hall ISS opening ceremony!

Now that I have finally posted more pictures...

I once again apologize for a long and apparently convoluted blog post.

On an interesting note (the day before I left for the Bergen trip), when I started writing this post, I had just got back from a very, very interesting discussion/debate on the pros and cons of globalization. I really value that there are these panel discussions hosted by the graduate students apparently every Tuesday evening, because they really put into perspective everything that we often just hear as sound bytes. I found it both fascinating and quite disappointing that I was one of a whopping two Americans in the room, and one of only maybe 3-4 "Westerners" who were present. I think this is great because it means that the dialogue was almost entirely conducted by people whose countries are really experiencing a wide variety of the effects of globalization that I think even the most well-informed of us may not entirely know about. It's refreshing to hear about globalization and the concerns/support surrounding it from the people who we know are being heavily impacted, but we don't necessarily know how, why, etc....and it's nice to talk about the relevance of globalization in these concrete, economic, and political terms, rather than just as yet another "lofty" word fluttering around in the vast crevasses of JSTOR, to be used as part of some esoteric (right word..?) discussion harkening back to the Latin used in European universities in the Middle Ages, drained almost completely of all real relevance... So KUDOS to this opportunity. I'm quite disappointed because....I felt like this was an opportunity that may have largely been preaching to the choir. As we know, much of what makes up "globalization" is frankly "Westernization." Where...where were the Westerners??? I'd like to know that, honestly. Shouldn't they have been there? Out of all the people from the US alone who attend this school, out of all the young American college students here, WHY was I the only one here to hear what people from various parts of Africa, India, etc., had to say, especially when a large concern with globalization is the imbalance of information coming into/being exported from the West to and from other countries? It's not democratic, and I think this is wrong and, in a larger context, borders on dangerous.