We are juggling regular life with having company so things are a bit out of whack for me this week. We would like to indulge the Schaubs as much as possible but Kaleb and I still have to go to school and Kory still has to work, so Willy and Nancy were up early this morning in order to take the bus with me into town to see all that Aalesund has to offer. It’s a small town, so it was good I was only in school four hours. They walked around downtown, went to the Aalesund Museum and later to the Sunnmøre Museum, and after we got home, we went for a walk down to “our” beach, which is where today’s photo is taken.
Right after school we walked over to the only second-hand store in town and Nancy bought a few small things and I got a great old painting for 200 kroner ($40) to hang on the wall in the big empty space in the living room. I was thrilled not only with the bargain price but that it’s a painting of the fjords, mountains and grass covered cabins by the water. I couldn’t wait to show Kory, and when I did, he thought right away there is a chance that his dad might have painted it! His dad did a lot of paintings in the 1940s (this painting was dated 1949 but not signed). His dad was a carpenter by trade but the Germans were requiring all the carpenters to do work for them during the war and Halvor (Kory’s dad), didn’t want to help them in any way so he registered himself as an artist. He sold some paintings but gave most of them away. Kory thinks the painting looks a lot like his dad’s style, so we’ll investigate it a bit more and see if we can solve the mystery. It would sure be a “God Thing” if Halvor did paint it, as Kory didn’t end up with any of his dad’s work. (But a few years ago a friend of Kory’s heard we didn’t have any of his paintings and they had one Halvor had painted of their dad standing by a cabin, so they gave it to us.)
Today in class we started learning about the gender of words and how to make nouns plural. The gender matters greatly because that determines which “a” or “the” you use with it. For a masculine word you use “en” so to say “a” or “the,” so “a car” would be “en bil” or if you want to say “the car” you attach the same article to the end of the word instead of putting it before the noun and you would say “bilen.” If you use a neutral word you would use “et” for the article instead and you would say “a table” as “et bord” or “the table” would be “bordet.” And if the word is feminine, well, that’s a whole other story. (Is it a coincidence that the feminine version of a word has all the exceptions to this otherwise easy rule?) I think I might develop an aneurism over this one as there seems to be too many exceptions to keep it all straight. The worst part is there is no way on earth to know what gender words are – they basically suggest we just memorize the entire dictionary so we will know for sure. I want to cry. It would be so nice if all I had to know how to say is “Hello” and “Good-bye” because all this other information about how to carry on a decent conversation is going to be the death of me. Maybe that’s why Norwegians as a whole are so tight lipped? It might just be easier for them to keep quiet about things than to try and remember all the rules of grammar and risk sounding like an idiot when they carry on a conversation.
Kaleb had a field trip today to the beach. All the fourth graders walked an hour to get there and an hour back and they were gone the entire day – no other school work. He failed to tell me about this ahead of time however, so when all the other kids brought their hot dogs to roast, their beach towels, swimsuits and beach toys, he was fully clothed in jeans, long sleeved shirt and tennis shoes with nothing to change in to or put on the grill. Only after he got home and started complaining to me about how hot he was all day (it was in the high 70s), did he realize he only had himself to blame for not giving me the information. I guess this is how children learn to be more responsible. He’s still a bit clueless on some things that go on at school but he is improving rapidly in his ability to speak the language. It’s so impressive to listen to him. I wish my brain worked like that. It seems we are both a bit forgetful, however….
Kory spent the day working at his caretaker job so he took two more loads of grass to the dump. It was a very hot day so he was incredibly tired by the time we came rolling in. He mustered up enough energy to make us all a dinner of fiskeboller (fish balls), however. Nancy and Willy had never tasted such a thing before, but they loved it, nonetheless. We are so wanting our company to experience as much of Norway as possible and eating all that “special” food is part of the experience. It wouldn’t be much fun to come all the way to Norway to eat American food, so it’s with great pleasure that we serve them food that I wouldn’t eat in a million years. (It’s not how I usually treat company, but we’re in Norway now, so we must do as the Norwegians do.)
Right after school we walked over to the only second-hand store in town and Nancy bought a few small things and I got a great old painting for 200 kroner ($40) to hang on the wall in the big empty space in the living room. I was thrilled not only with the bargain price but that it’s a painting of the fjords, mountains and grass covered cabins by the water. I couldn’t wait to show Kory, and when I did, he thought right away there is a chance that his dad might have painted it! His dad did a lot of paintings in the 1940s (this painting was dated 1949 but not signed). His dad was a carpenter by trade but the Germans were requiring all the carpenters to do work for them during the war and Halvor (Kory’s dad), didn’t want to help them in any way so he registered himself as an artist. He sold some paintings but gave most of them away. Kory thinks the painting looks a lot like his dad’s style, so we’ll investigate it a bit more and see if we can solve the mystery. It would sure be a “God Thing” if Halvor did paint it, as Kory didn’t end up with any of his dad’s work. (But a few years ago a friend of Kory’s heard we didn’t have any of his paintings and they had one Halvor had painted of their dad standing by a cabin, so they gave it to us.)
Today in class we started learning about the gender of words and how to make nouns plural. The gender matters greatly because that determines which “a” or “the” you use with it. For a masculine word you use “en” so to say “a” or “the,” so “a car” would be “en bil” or if you want to say “the car” you attach the same article to the end of the word instead of putting it before the noun and you would say “bilen.” If you use a neutral word you would use “et” for the article instead and you would say “a table” as “et bord” or “the table” would be “bordet.” And if the word is feminine, well, that’s a whole other story. (Is it a coincidence that the feminine version of a word has all the exceptions to this otherwise easy rule?) I think I might develop an aneurism over this one as there seems to be too many exceptions to keep it all straight. The worst part is there is no way on earth to know what gender words are – they basically suggest we just memorize the entire dictionary so we will know for sure. I want to cry. It would be so nice if all I had to know how to say is “Hello” and “Good-bye” because all this other information about how to carry on a decent conversation is going to be the death of me. Maybe that’s why Norwegians as a whole are so tight lipped? It might just be easier for them to keep quiet about things than to try and remember all the rules of grammar and risk sounding like an idiot when they carry on a conversation.
Kaleb had a field trip today to the beach. All the fourth graders walked an hour to get there and an hour back and they were gone the entire day – no other school work. He failed to tell me about this ahead of time however, so when all the other kids brought their hot dogs to roast, their beach towels, swimsuits and beach toys, he was fully clothed in jeans, long sleeved shirt and tennis shoes with nothing to change in to or put on the grill. Only after he got home and started complaining to me about how hot he was all day (it was in the high 70s), did he realize he only had himself to blame for not giving me the information. I guess this is how children learn to be more responsible. He’s still a bit clueless on some things that go on at school but he is improving rapidly in his ability to speak the language. It’s so impressive to listen to him. I wish my brain worked like that. It seems we are both a bit forgetful, however….
Kory spent the day working at his caretaker job so he took two more loads of grass to the dump. It was a very hot day so he was incredibly tired by the time we came rolling in. He mustered up enough energy to make us all a dinner of fiskeboller (fish balls), however. Nancy and Willy had never tasted such a thing before, but they loved it, nonetheless. We are so wanting our company to experience as much of Norway as possible and eating all that “special” food is part of the experience. It wouldn’t be much fun to come all the way to Norway to eat American food, so it’s with great pleasure that we serve them food that I wouldn’t eat in a million years. (It’s not how I usually treat company, but we’re in Norway now, so we must do as the Norwegians do.)
