A Journey of 8567 Kilometers...

(That's about 5323 miles for everyone back in the states.)
It all started Thursday in Los Angeles when Uncle David dropped me off at 6:15 pm. I got on a plane at 8 am and arrived in Newark, New Jersey at 4 pm. In Newark, I was lucky enough to run into a girl from St. Olaf I know and together we met another student travelling to the International Summer School, by the name of Aaron, from the University of Chicago. We got on the plane and left Newark at 7:30 pm and settled in for a long flight. Our plane flight took us far up north, over Iceland and across the Atlantic. Even as we traveled mostly due east, we could always see the sun just over the horizon, shining down on the lands up north where it stays up all night.

I flew SAS airlines, which is the official Scandinavian airline, and they treated us quite well. We got two meals (dinner and breakfast) as well as the Norwegian newspaper, water, coffee, and tea, and free movies to watch. In addition, all the stewards and stewardesses were Norwegian, so I got to practice a little bit in answering the short questions they asked. Even though it was a nice flight, it was quite a long one, and I did not sleep well, mostly because my body couldn't quite figure out what time it was supposed to be. But seven hours later, we started our descent into Oslo.

My first glimpse of Norway

After we landed, I tracked down the other two ISS students I had met in New Jersey and we set off to find the University. After exchanging US dollars for Norwegian kroner (A quick digression on kroner: $200 US gets you about 1100 kroner. However, the exchang rate is deceptive. For instance, to mail a letter, which costs $0.50 in the US, it costs 15 kroner, or about $3 US), we bought train tickets to Oslo central station. The airport is located about ten or fifteen minutes away from downtown, and it's a pleasant train ride through some pretty country.

From Oslo central station, we bought tickets on the T-bane, which an electric train system that runs all over Oslo, and this took us to the Blindern campus of the University of Oslo, which is where we were staying. We got to Blindern at 11:00 am Norway time (for those of you on the West Coast, Oslo is 9 hours ahead. Greenwich Meridian time +1). All told it took 18 hours of travel time to make the 5,000 mile journey. Not too bad if you think about it.

The west side of Oslo