holaaaa

Just got done with my first week of school yay! My classes do not meet tomorrow, so 3 day weekend! Only one of my classes met this week, for two hours each day (the next one doesn't start until next week) so it was a pretty chill week. This week I had the sedimentary history of Svalbard. My teacher's name is Maria, she is super pregnant though, so we will only have her for part of the year. I am enjoying the class so far. There are about 20 of us in the class, all of whom I had already met, and I think it will be a good group. The first day we talked about what we are doing during the term. There are lectures, practical exercises, field work, overnight excursions, a research project and oral presentation, and a final examination at the end. Field work and excursions start in a few weeks when the sun comes back and I am so excited! On Tuesday and Wednesday we learned about the geological history of Svalbard. Svalbard actually started near Antarctica and has been making its way up towards the North Pole over millions of years. Because of that, Svalbard has experienced several different climates and has many unique kinds of rocks, geologic structures and tons of dinosaur and plant fossils. We also began to learn about the huge sedimentary basin (the Foreland Basin) on Spitsbergen and the processes that led to its creation. Today we split into groups and made dictionaries of geologic terms and made field guides for the different places we will be going to for excursions.

Next week will be more lectures, I will start my class on the physical geography of Svalbard, and a 2 week Svalbard history class. Of course it is not all about school here, I have been having so much fun with everyone here! Since it has been pretty bad weather and dark we haven't done a lot of outdoor activities yet, but there is still a lot of fun to be had. Monday night was Allison's birthday (one of the girls in my hall) so we had cake in one of the barrack kitchens. Tuesday night started out innocently enough with a few glasses of wine in the upstairs barrack, and ended up with four of us squishing into a child's play tent on the roof, passing around a bottle of whiskey; needless to say a super fun night, the next morning not so fun though haha. Last night I went to another barrack for dinner to have burgers with a bunch of the norwegian students. It's super entertaining to be with all of the norwegians, because they start speaking in English, eventually switch to Norwegian, and then freak out when they realize I can't understand anything they are saying. They are trying to teach me Norwegian, which is not going so well, and I am trying to teach them some "American" words. They think it's hilarious when I tell them it's "snow machining" not "riding my snow scooter" as they say here.

Anyways, enough for now. I am going to make some food, and check out Eiven's new bread making machine. Hopefully learning to telemark later tonight!

Sara