7 Days In

Hello friends and family-
Things are going relatively well on the boat, we are all getting very antsy to get to Norway. We’ve been at sea for seven days and the closest thing to civilization we have seen are sea gulls. The conditions have been a little rough, especially these past few days. I started with the patch behind the ear but those side effects lead me to multiple hour naps and slight blurred vision. Considering I have over 200 pages of reading a night about western civilization with a font size of 8, I decided to switch medication to the pressure point bracelets.

Minus the unreasonable amount of reading, classes are going well. I’m enrolled in anthropology, globalization in the curriculum, and global studies courses. Because we only have about twenty-five classes this summer, projects and papers are coming at warp speed. I’ve just finished one anthro paper; I’ll have two more due after our port in Bergen, Norway.

Unfortunately the weather looks quite miserable the entire time at port, but nothing will stop this group from spending as much time off this boat as possible. I arrive in Bergen at 8am on Tuesday (2am EST). It’s been hard losing an hour of sleep every night but it will all be well worth it when we see land. We’re hoping to get to bed early Monday night so we can wake up around 5 to see the sunrise and docking at port. Once we arrive I’m going to spend my day at port in the city. The following day, 40 of us from the program are going to take hike up Mount Floien. We start by taking a gondola ride up 320 meters half way up the mountain, from there we continue the trip by hiking up the rest to 570 meters. There is a good chance we’ll have rain showers at the bottom on the mountain, and by the time we reach the top we could have some snow.

After our hike, 10 of us are going to hop on a train to Voss which is about an hour away. Voss is having their annual Ekstreme Games week. From the website it looks somewhat comparable to our XGames. They have events like kayaking, white water rafting, sky diving, BMX biking, etc. This is a very popular event, all the hotels and hostels seem to already be booked, and so we’ll probably end up just going for a long day. After spending a day or two in Voss, were going to come back and visit some fjords outside of Bergen.

Wish me luck on my travels and cross your fingers for some decent weather. Hope you all had a great weekend. I’ll be sure to have many stories come Friday.

-ANM