Haha, yes, i believe the matpakke is still strong in Norway. (You don’t buy lunch, you bring your own two sorry slices of bread from home, often with the caramelly fake cheese «brunost»). Still, it’s not a bad place to live.
Well, he has a myriad ideas -- cup, vase, generic bricks, sling ammo, pot -- but so far we have just been gathering clay and leaving it to dry into oblivion on the porch.
Son dragged me to this brook to show me the great clay he has found there. (The original image has a much higher resolution.)
Ja, men har bodd litt rundt i verden. Barna har lært bishops av sin bosnisk-norske mor og arabisk da vi bodde i Marokko 2018-2021 (men alt glemt mye).
Jeg kan snakke norsk på ut- og innpust, jeg:)
My mother tongue is Norwegian, and it’s the language we speak at home. However, I get up next to the Swedish border and watched a lot of Swedish TV and went shopping there, even studied there a year, so it’s also quasi native. As is English, with Scottish & American family. (My American uncle had lived in states for 60 years, his Norwegian is atrocious.). Since 2009, I have lived in five different countries, only two years in Norway, and spoken mostly English and French with some Danish, German, Arabic, Czech, Bosnian.
I used to be a writer, but now my Norwegian is a mess and I haven’t got one language I can call my own.
Well, I didn’t, as the teachers all spoke both my languages (Norwegian and English), but my kids do it all the time, with me and at school: they go to an international school (English/French) and often use Norwegian or Bosnian or even smatterings of Arabic just to mix things up, depending of who they want to understand.
Nor serious. Playfully melancholic.
Just a black dog against a white wall begging for a treat.
I don't think this is a great photo, but something about it is soothing, somehow, or just nice, in some way, and I'll share, just to share, if anyone finds anything here, good, if not, also good. He got the treat, that's the main thing.
Tervuren, just outside Brussels.
Thanks. The light was truly magical.
Bach. Both easy to listen to and a never ending trove of new discoveries. Emotional and yet silly. Spiritual even for an atheist. Simple yet cerebral. Occasionally melancholy yet always life affirming. Rule bound, yet jazzy.
Lac Blanc near Chamonix. The first day of our tour around Mont Blanc. My wife insisted to go up there; some hours later, she regretted bitterly as she hobbled down in the dark, no lamp, knees hurting, dead tired. Some days later, though, we finished the 170km loop and it had all blurred into being a funny story.
The famous jet d’Eau in Geneva doing its best to impersonate a boat mast.
The best part of a walk in the French mountainside, the only good part as far as he was concerned: a green spot flat enough to kick his football as high as he could.
Son found a green spot during a walk in a mountain in France.
In academia, I would guess most Europeans consider race a social construct and not a lens through which one judges other people. Yes, we’re all leaning more and more right, unfortunately, but race is seldom a major part of what makes someone an Other. (But I do know it can be, my daughter-in-law is from Uganda). Outside academia… I would hope most Europeans are more informed than most trumpists.