2 weeks left!

Only two weeks left before I go to Belgrade. It's pretty hard to understand that I'm actually going to move to Serbia for 6 months. Yesterdays lecture was about all riscs and how to handle them. It was enough to give most people paranoia. Going through all potential grave accidents and catastrophes can make a chill going up your spine. For every day thats closing in on departure I start to realize more and more that I'm leaving my safe harbor of Norway and entering the danger zone (personally speaking). I will not have my Norwegian social network around me anymore. It's more up to me than it's ever been before. Will I get a culture shock? Will I get depressed? How will I react? How will Serbia react to me? There's a lot of questions wandering around in my head, and there are few if any answers up there. Trying to figure out the questions only tends to generate new questions.

Last weekend were spent in both Stavanger and Oslo, approx. 48 hours in each place. I had not been home for many minutes before I realized that I missed Hald. And I don't tend to miss stuff easily. The humor, the people, the special atmosphere here and the "culture", it had all been a great part of me the last month. Even the building it self is pretty special. There is a lot of old buildings moved together to create Hald. All the old interior creates a special mood.

A lot of time at Hald is spent in the computer room. At least for the internationals. It's important to keep the communication going with their home country so Skype, MSN and e-mails are important tools. We also had a blog lecture which is part of the reason I ended up having this blog in the first place. Another lecture was the photography class. Most of this was basic knowledge which I already knew, but we got to take a lot of pictures and experiment a lot.

Ingrid Karin is chewing her glasses.

Sak Li is demonstrating some of his countless skills in combat technique.

Agnar is teaching in Faith & Mind. Every Wednesday we have a program which is kind of similar to an Alfa-Course where we discuss what we believe in.

Picture of Ingrid Karin from the Photo lecture.


Faith and ElineHarald, one of the teachers at Hald, during break.

Marita is trying to make a friend of her camera.

Eline and Sanny in the yard.
Picture from a photo shoot with Tiago and Eline.

Hiking and Swimming

A recent sunday we went for a little trip to the forrest near Mandal city center. We were even lucky enough to see a little deer running around in the forest. Sadly enough I didn't get any good shots of it. Anyway we went for a 2-3 hour hike and I snapped like crazy with my camera, which I sometimes tend to do. Both Thiago and Sak Li joined for the hike which was enough to guarantee that this would be a fun trip. We got to see some of the beaches surrounding Mandal. Hopefully most of my blog articles will contain more reflection than this one...

As a girl with the name of Faith should, Faith is always happy and full of faith in what she is doing. Here she is walking...

Ingrid Karin and Eline are almost inseparable. One of them are usually carrying the other one around.

In Mandal not even the man on the roadsign can feel safe. This man was shot in the shoulder while trying to cross the road!
As always Eline is doing all the acrobatics she can think of in all thinkable (and unthinkable) places.
Sak picked up an expression the last time he went to church. A lot of kids was baptized and the priest repeatedly said "Hva heter barnet?" (What's the name of the child). Sak Li found this as a good way to start a "conversation" with a random kid walking with his father in the forrest.Again a picture of the inseparable pair of girls.
Mandal calls it self a bike village, and if nothing else at least they have bike racks that can impress most people of their creativity.
Thiago and Sak Li
Sak just needs to take "one" more picture.

A recent day provided us with great weather and "warm" water and after class the choice wasn't to hard. I ended up with bringing four hot girls to the dock for a refreshing swim in the great ocean. It's hard to describe the feeling. After spending the day in class you get to go and jump into the ocean from a 5 meter tall diving rack. It was brilliant!