But is it art?

After a busy long weekend I feel like I have too many things to share in one post...so I will feed you all little pieces at a time! On Sunday I visited an exhibition from a Norwegian contemporary artist most well known for his performance art. His name is Kurt Johannessen and I have just fallen in love with some of the things he has done - lots of hippy, lets explore our relationship with nature, type stuff (see www.zeth.no but be warned that most info is in Norwegian). For example, in one piece he wandered through the mountains and read fairytales to stones. In another he stood waist deep in a river at dusk and slowly moved his hands above the water until it became dark. He also does things with the dust from vacuum cleaner bags and lots of other crazy stuff, but of course it is his treehugger work I love best. In one of his books I bought from the exhibition, he gives a range of less typical exercises that we should all try. I am going to try and share some of them with you over time and will refer to them as 'Kurt's crazy, but worth trying, exercises'....so the one for today is..."Turn suddenly into a wolf"

I am posting 2 pics here from one of his pieces in the gallery that I thought was just fantastic. It was a small corridor covered in mirrors on both sides. If you look closely you can see that one mirror reflected the line 'Everything is the same, it just looks different', while the mirror on the other side reflected the line 'Everything is different, it just looks the same'. And of the course the mirrors on each side of the corridor reflected these lines over and over for as far as you could see. Just fantastic! What I want to know is, what does this mean to you?

Off to see if I can turn suddenly into a wolf...xxx til i start howling...

17th of May

The 17th of May is Norway's National Day. To help us understand exactly what this means, my project manager at the Uni kindly offered to let J and I tag along with his family to get the full experience. The day began with breakfast at his house - lots of salmon, scrambled eggs and a 'brown' cheese that tastes exactly like caramel. From there we went and watched the big parade in town - lots of marching bands and waving children, the standard parade fare really. Then we had lunch at a sushi restaurant, not at all traditional but dang fantastic food anyway! The afternoon saw us visit the local school, where Roger's daughter played the national anthem with her band. Then we toured the neighbourhood trailing the end of the small local parade. J was even seen waving to onlookers on one occasion - he is really integrating! Finally we had to eat icecream because apparently on the 17th of May Norwegian children are allowed to eat as much icecream as they like - a fabulous tradition I think! The best and most interesting thing about the day for me though was the fact that almost everyone wears 'bugnad' or national costume. They are absolutely gorgeous with lots of embroidery and silver jewellery. They are usually made by hand and there are lots of subtle differences between the outfits from different areas of Norway. They were absolutely gorgeous so I took a few pics of complete strangers just to show you all how wonderful they were! Lots of XXXXs...

The ladies....

The boys...

Old meets new...

Watching the band at the local event...

Springtime in Bergen

Spring has finally arrived and the city of Bergen looks simply splendid! There are tuilps and blossoms adding splashes of colour everywhere. Maybe photos of flowers are a little cliche but I simply could not resist showing you how pretty the city is looking! J and I have been busy working in our little garden too - cutting up old dead trees, pulling weeds, planting herbs in pots and preparing a veggie patch. Very exiciting! We have also begun a project of painting the outside of the house, just to keep things looking fresh. The landlord has agreed to pay J for some of this work, which is great - his first paid job in Norway!

We have a short week this week because the 17th of May is the National Day of Norway, and hence, a holiday. Apparently we can expect people dressed in national costume, parades through the streets, drumming competitions, lots of alcohol and plenty of sausages. Sounds a little unusual so I will be sure to post with pics after the event, when I am sure the city will look a lot less civilised than it does in these lovely spring shots! Xxxx

Little things: Part 2

Welcome back to our series of the little differences between life in Australia and life in Norway.

In Norway they give their canned meat an accurate name...

And the echidna's we find snuffling in our garden look strangely different...

While we love the hedgehog, we are not so sure about the bog...
XXX

2nd Mountain

Yesterday J and I managed to hike up our second of Bergen's 7 surrounding mountains. This one was a much more 'civilised' affair, in the sense that it had clear tracks, a cafe at the top and multiple fenced viewing locations. It also had a furnicular (little train type beast) running to the top, which we of course did not take, and therefore mountains of tourists. Actually we did not find this hike particularly pleasant, probably because we had to share it with so many other people...we are so greedy!

This mountain was smaller than the last - as demonstrated by this shot showing our previous climb in the background...

This second one did however give a better view over the main part of Bergen city. This pic is of a lake in the middle of town - where lots of people sun themselves when the weather is grand. It certainly does not compare with an Aussie beach but does look beautiful from above I think.

As the base of this mountain is right in the middle of the city, J and I thought it would be a good idea to catch the bus in so that we did not exhaust our energies before beginning the climb. Because I wanted to take the dogs with us, this meant that we would have to negotiate their first bus ride. J was very worried about this, thinking that there was no way we would get Mina on a bus. We managed to get her on but had to laugh when she ran straight down the aisle and jumped on the back seat! She was a little scared but survived it okay. On the way home things got interesting when another dog boarded the bus. Mina made everyone jump a mile high by barking to let them all know! Another amusing doggy anecdote involves this critter...

We came across this statue around the base of the mountain. When Moj saw it he immediately stood to attention, super stiff and alert! He then ran over to it sniffing madly, circling it and standing on his back legs to get a better look. It was as if there was some ancient part of his brain telling him that this shape was worthy of attention! So funny.

A is for Arizona

Not to be outdone by the Hollywood hills, Phoenix has it's own sign on a mountain...although the city could only afford one letter it appears. While I was there, some of the crazy uni kids painted the A purple. Of course it was redone yellow again before the end of the day, although I am not sure why it had to be yellow and could not be purple or orange or green.

Here is a bunch of those crazy uni kids gathered for a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, which happened the day before I arrived...carazy American gun laws!

Talking of crazy kids though, it seems that May 1st is when the kids in Norway start going crazy. All the school students in their final year are now wearing bright red overalls and driving around in big old red vans. Turns out that all across the nation the school leavers join in 2 weeks of celebrations before their final exams, which for some reason involves them all wearing the same red overalls (personalised with various white transfers that they buy from a particular supplier) and transporting themselves from one party place to another in big red vans. Madness I tell you.

I did promise some blog news on my nightmare flight details in my previous post though so here they are. During my flights between Bergen and Phoenix I learnt that flying is not always fun. On my flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis (just one leg of a multi-stage journey) I was sat next to possibly the worst passenger in the whole world. To start with he was an absolutely huge, and I mean HUGE, stinky man. He was from Nigeria and spoke no engligh except 'one more', which he used for everything offered on the flight, and I mean EVERYTHING! One more bag of pretzels, one more dinner, one more bread roll, one more water, and always one more wine. Even the normally super polite hosties were getting the shits with him. After he had very noisily stuffed himself full of plane food (did I mention that he had a gold tooth?) he promptly kicked his shoes off to my side of the floor, spread his legs as wide as they could go and fell into a very deep sleep, with his head occasionally lolling onto my shoulder. Of course he also had three children who sat in the centre row and went beserk while he was happily snoring at my side. At this time, the entertainment system on board failed and I thought that this might just be the longest 13 hours of my life. Then of course I had to pee but was not at all game to wake the sleeping giant and could certainly not get by him, or indeed even over him. His bottom lip alone was almost literally as big as my fist, I know this because I measured them as a form of entertainment while he slept. Anyway, somehow I survived that journey and thought the trip home could not possibly be worse. While that trip fortunately involved pleasant travelling companions, it did not involve functioning aeroplanes! We had both primary and reserve generators fail before we left the ground, which rather than boarding a functioning plane (themost obvious solution perhaps) actually meant waiting on board for hours while they tried to fix them, which in turn meant missing connecting flights, which in turn meant sprinting through massive airports to catch other ones, which in turn meant promises of delayed luggage etc. Lesson learnt...Flying is not always fun.

Anyway, to leave you on a lighter note...here is a pic of some native American etchings in a rock. Something soothing and spiritual about spirals...ahhh, yes, that's better. Kisses....