Today I travelled to Stavanger to meet Terese! We haven’t seen each other since Mongolia, so it was about time to meet again. After making pizza and catching up we are now playing “take it to the limit”. An extension of “take it easy” if you’ve played that ;-)
Hipp Hurra for Norge! Today I have celebrated the national holiday here in Haugesund. The day started with going down to the city center to watch the parade. The weather looked nice when we got down there, but while we were there it started to pour down.
This was before it started to rain…
…Not long afterwards all the umbrellas were up and it was hard to see the parade.
One of the oldest police cars in Haugesund. Not the fastest car… :-)
We had dinner at Radisson hotel where they served a lot of good food as well as dessert and later we went to Kikken’s house.
Team Ecuador and Bolivia were responsible for the fellowship evening yesterday and we decided to have a quiz night. There were a lot of different categories; GUS, geography, Bible, a little bit of everything, sports, face recognition and in the end we had a mini version of “Beat for Beat”. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and it was fun coming up with questions. I had geography and these were the questions:
How many did you know?
On Monday we had a little pre- 17. May celebration. We played a lot of games in the gym that are typical for 17. may. I actually filmed a lot of this and I’ll post it later :-)
Ice cream is a big part of the day!
Martha, Hilde, Eirunn and I played Bohnanza later in the evening.
Martha and I decided to go running because we were free most of the day :-)
On Thursday we celebrated the mission festival here in Hurdal. First we went to church and then later we ate dinner here at GUS and afterwards there were two seminars that we could attend. This is an annual event, hosted by GUS and the church and the seminars focus on mission in other countries. 
Spring in Norway actually kind of feels like spring in Mongolia, with the weather going from sunny and without a cloud to see to windy and cold. Idol, Nytt på Nytt og Senkveld has kind of become a tradition to watch ever Friday evening here and yesterday was no exception :-)
I’ve finally turned in my exam :-) since then Helen and I have played a Cambodian game. I played it before in China, but I don’t know what it’s called, but here’s a picture of us playing
Very fun :)
The weather here in Hurdal has been so nice for two days now and I wish that I could spend my time outside enjoying the sunshine. Unfortunately, I’ve spent the past two days writing my exam and staying inside my room. The exam is finished tomorrow and hopefully we’ll have nice weather all week!
A little update from my writing, it’s good to have breaks sometimes so my writing is effective. I actually went out running earlier and that really helped to clear my head as well as talking to my family for a couple of minutes. In a about a month I’ll get to see my family again, but before that there are so many things that are going to happen! I have so much to look forward to once this exam is over :-)
Tomorrow my two days exam starts and I’ve spent a lot of time reading and I’ve finally finished all the books that I’m going to read. Apart from studying the teams from Africa were responsible for the fellowship evening on Thursday. We played “store maya”, a dice game – really fun!
Karen, Marte and Hanne are also really good at making cupcakes:
Monster cupcakes! :-)
Traditions are always nice and who said watching TV isn’t social when you’re 15 people in the room?
Helen and I biking around in Hurdal.
Still cold here in Hurdal….
And Helen, Martha and I spent Saturday night playing Settlers with our own set of rules :-)
I ordered some new cases to my phone a while back from miniinthebox, a great place to order cases from. They’re cheap, high quality and the delivery is fast. I got mine yesterday and I’m really happy about all of them:
I also realized when I got this one case yesterday that it had the same pattern as my mac cover, which I made a while back.
It’s May, which has gotten a new meaning for me now – here in Hurdal it’s snowing! Hopefully it’ll get warmer soon.
Here at GUS you can take on semester at Gimlekollen, a college here in Norway. You can take a subject called Interkulturell kommunikasjon and you have two home exams, one in May and one in June. The first one is coming up on Monday and I’ve spent a lot of time reading and studying. Right now I’m reading a book about social anthropology and at times it’s very interesting and I don’t have many pages left :-)
Today I only have a month left here at GUS and the year is almost over and it has gone by so quickly. What’s more surprising is that it’s been 6 weeks since I left Bolivia! I’ve actually started making a photo book from Bolivia, inspired by Helen, who just finished hers. It’s nice to have my pictures on my computer, but it’s something very different to have them in a book. I’ve never made a photo book before, but the photo book program on iPhoto, isn’t really that hard to use and it looks good as well. I’ll post some photos about it when I’m finished.
There are a lot of different photo editing programs out there and I have by now means an expert, but here are the ones that I use and best of all – they’re free :-)
This is a program that you download, available for both mac and PC. You don’t need internet connections to use it. It’s created by Google and while it’s also a photo editing program it’s also a place where you can store your photos. The photos you add to your computer are automatically added and deleted on your Picasa account when you delete/add them on your computer. On Picasa you can either edit photos, make collages or create a movie presentation. Since it’s Google made it’s easy to upload your photos to your gmail account or to YouTube. Editing photos is quite easy. You have simple editing tools, such as adjusting the light, highlight colors and different tools so you can make your photos B&W, sepia, polaroid and much more.
This is an online program that is kind of similar to photoshop. You can edit photos or create a photo collage. There are more tools that you can use and the tools are also more advanced to use. You can add layers to your photos, adjust levels, curves, exposures and more, and there are a lot of different filters you can add.
This probably doesn’t look very realistic, but I’m still learning :-) But you get an idea about how you can use pixlr. Making collages is a lot easier and there are so many different things you can do. You can adjust the photo, add effects and borders, stickers and text. The photos I used for the post “Turkish Rivera” were all created using Pixlr.
The place to make panorama pictures. I actually found this quite recently, but you can make great panorama pictures with just a few clicks.
Panoramic view over Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Picmonkey.com is also a great place to edit photos, but it’s similar to picasa.
