Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Day 65

Posted by 雯雯 at 10:13 PM 0 comments
The internet has been pretty bad lately, so I've been waiting with posting in hopes that it'd get better, but no luck. Thus, I'll just post now, using my phone as a router, though it is pretty bad as well.

I've gotten a new roommate since last. Red Cross needed to switch rooms, and though I've said I preferred a single room on my application, I've valiantly offered to be her roommate for the rest of the year. It's not really much of a loss for me. I'll pay about 1000 NOK less every month, and she probably spent more time in my room than in hers before (apart from sleeping and changing), so it's all good for me really. The only negative is I suddenly have less space, but I didn't use that much to begin with so I'm happy with this arrangement.

The course weeks continue, and last week was super fun. We got to try quite a few weapons, a double-edged sword (jian) for taichi, nunchuks for sanda and a staff for taolu. Personally I don't like nunchuks much, they're very.. all over the place. I've always liked swords, but the movements we're learning in taichi are mostly pretty and slow, but not so impressive when I do it. The staff is pretty cool though! Strong Handshake and Mr Prepare have "been running around with the woods with sticks since they were kids" so they're pretty good at staffs already, but I try to practise extra with the staff (also the other weapons) so I can handle them well too.

In the meantime, Red Cross fell for the nunchuks at first whirl and decided she was going to become the Nunchuk Queen (new nickname??), so she's been practising a lot. She's getting pretty good too! E managed to sprain his leg pretty bad and was out of commission for most of last week and decided that nunchuks were awesome too. He's been practising like crazy, and at breakfast one day, upon hearing Red Cross was going to be the Nunchuk Queen, decided he was going to be the Nunchuk Emperor. Of course, Red Cross wouldn't be beaten and decided that she'd be the Nunchuk Pharaoh instead ("since Pharaohs are obviously more awesome than Emperors"). They've got this little nunchuk rivalry going on now, which I'm happy not to take any part in.

We finished our presentations successfully last week, and this week we started the next culture part of our course week - tea and philosophy. This means sitting in pairs of two on blankets in the classroom with special equipment, learning to prepare tea a fancy Chinese way while we talk about Buddhism and Daoism and so on. It's very relaxing and good, apart from the fact that my legs keep falling asleep, and we've all gotten to taste some of FT's awesome Chinese tea.

Completely unrelated to my course, it is a fact that Game of Thrones often has a hard time getting up in the morning. If you miss the morning meeting you get loads of absence noted down, which is bad, but it's his responsibility so I usually don't mind it. Doll Girl, however, does get up and we usually go to breakfast together. It so happened that this Monday, the entire art class (Doll Girl and Game of Thrones included) we're going on an overnight field trip, so they needed to get up early to prepare mattresses and such. Doll Girl felt responsible and decided it was her job to make sure all the art class people in our dorm were up and ready. Since I was with her, I decided to help. Game of Thrones likes Game of Thrones. I also like Game of Thrones. Doll Girl has seen some, and so we're making her like it as well. We have a small game going (kind of a role play, I guess?) related to this, where we've got our own House with a banner and everything. I'm a Knight, Doll Girl is the resident Scholar-type ("Maester") in our castle and Game of Thrones is the Lord. Sometimes we sit and chat in our roles in English and, for some reason, Doll Girl and I decided that we should wake him up "In character". Thus, I started banging at his door quite loudly going "MILORD! MILORD!", yelling about our castle being under siege and that he needed to wake up fast. I stood there for quite a long time actually, and attracted a small audience, including E. Eventually I realized his door was unlocked, and so Doll Girl and I opened it softly, asking "Milord, are you awake?", to which he quite grouchily answered "Get out!".

Usually that'd end there, but it turns out that I hadn't only woken up Game of Thrones, I had woken up everybody still sleeping as well, including the theatre people who get to sleep in because of evening performances. They had apparently been quite scared, shocked then somewhat annoyed and told E about it, so he told me during dinner later. Of course I apologized to them (though, to be fair, it was already 8 am!), but now I randomly have Mr Prepared and E yelling "Milord, Milord!" after me. Well I don't mind, I think it's funny actually. The more playing along, the merrier!

29.10.2013

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Day 59

Posted by 雯雯 at 5:37 PM 0 comments
Hello again!

Time sure flies when you're having fun~ I'd like to skip straight to talking about this week, but I should talk about the weekend too...

Last Saturday, we had a seminar arranged by the equestrian class. That meant that we listened to three hours of talk about stables and racing and horses in general, and watched loads of Youtube clips. Apparently the equestrian class is sick of people saying that riding a horse is easy and not a sport, so we had to sit through two very similar ones that reprimanded us all for looking down on them. I felt somewhat insulted since I've never tried to tell them that riding a horse isn't difficult or tiring, but I'm sure it wasn't really a personal attack on any of the students. We're all nice, I think!

After the presentations, we all went to the racecourse. There were ten races set up for the day and we were to watch them all. To make us feel more involved, the horse class had taken the programme and cut out the horse information for all the races and given every person in school a horse or two. If your horse won a race, you won a secret prize which you'd get at supper later! It did work, somewhat. I got a horse called "The Sheik's Gold", and it was, as far as I could tell, the only horse owned by a Sheik from Dubai that had entered that day. I took it as a good sign and sat in the cold to watch.

As it turns out, it was a good sign, and my horse did win. As a prize, I got a large bar of chocolate, which I was going to eat later that evening. The evening before, we had started watching the X-men movies, since Doll Girl and Game of Thrones were feeling keen on an X-men marathon. Doll Girl had bought a nice fancy screen that she and Game of Thrones use for playing the Playstation, so we used that to watch movies on Friday. On Saturday, however, one of our other dorm mates (my neighbour, in fact) had fixed us up with a projector, so we watched two more X-men movies on the wall of the living room, this time joined by even more people. I shared my chocolate, and we all had a good time.

This movie watching continued, with a progressively better canvas for the projector, and more and more people coming to watch it. On Monday, we had the living room full of people as we watched Les Miserables. It's nice to have a proper place to watch movies in the dorm!

This week, then, is special. Usually, my week is filled with course subjects (i.e. China or martial arts subjects), plus electives and some common courses. This week, however, is the "Course Week", which means that, apart from PE, all my non-China subjects are changed out with course subjects. Thus, every day this week, we have one two-hour period of history, then one two-hour period of martial arts. It's very tiring, but very fun!

The history is basically the entire class working in groups of one to three on one Chinese history topic. I'm working together with Very Bendy and Red Cross, and we've chosen the Tang Dynasty. So far, us working is basically just us sitting in Very Bendy's dormitory listening to relaxing music and reading, but we'll get to making the actual presentation tomorrow. After that, since FT likes non-technological, more classical things in a presentation, like a poster, we're going to make one of those. With glitter. Very Bendy was very keen on glitter, and luckily for her, FT had some in his office (??). We'll make an absolutely fabulous poster!

Now, I should probably stop writing. We agreed to have written the main points for our parts of the presentation by tomorrow, and I'm running out of time, since I'm probably watching a Chinese series with Strong Handshake, maybe also Sheep and Mr. Prepared. No time!

23.10.2013

Monday, October 14, 2013

Day 50

Posted by 雯雯 at 9:44 PM 0 comments
Wow it's been a while since my last post.. already 18 days! Since the last time, I've continued as usual, and also gone home for a week's holiday. It was really nice to go home for a bit and just eat loads of food and relax. I tried to exercise too, but in the end found I had pains in my legs and knee that didn't go away, so I relaxed completely on Saturday and Sunday before I left.

I'm not too fond of travelling, well the actual travelling part of it. I'm sure I'm not alone in this. It didn't help that when I arrived at the airport with my parents, the airline had overbooked my flight and suddenly told me I might not be able to go. I stood by the boarding queue until all the normally boarded people had been registered, and then checked to see if I could go or not. Luckily, they did have room for me. I even almost got to sit in the cockpit!

The bus ride to the school was more tiring. I waited for a while because I met Very Bendy at the airport, and she was waiting for someone to arrive on a slightly later flight. In the end, we were 10 people or so from the school crowding up a bus, first to Bergen, and then onwards to Hylkje. The school was pretty quiet by the time I got in, but that was all right, since I was pretty tired at that point. When I got in, only Game of Thrones, Doll Girl and Mr. Prepared were there and still awake. We all hugged and laughed and said hello - it seems most people have been really missing the atmosphere here at school, which I can understand.

After packing out, I went to bed and had a terrible night's sleep. I kept waking up for some reason, and woke up feeling completely unrefreshed. Still, I dragged myself to breakfast. The first lesson was sanda, and it was fun. Well, fun I say. We did some light kicking and punching practise, and some wrestling, and I am really bad at restraining myself. One of my classmates who grew up on a farm and knows all sorts of cool stuff about catching sheep and other farm stuff said jokingly said he wanted to hit me, so we paired up for the activities. He was much kinder to me than I was to him, he's probably used to it since I'm a girl or whatever. I ended up kicking him full of bruises and hurting his knee, as well as strangling him into submission during the wrestling. I was so ashamed afterwards. I spoke with Red Cross about it after, and she suggested I think more about the technique the next time so I don't get carried away. Hopefully I'll be able to be a better sparring partner in the future.

The school has a yearly "Stoltzen race". This is the mountain I climbed in my first week here. What happens in it is pretty self-explanatory, and whoever wants to can join. They'll get driven up to the Stoltzen for practise, and because I absolutely hated it the first time and hate being tired, I naturally signed up. I'm hoping the training will improve my shape a bit, because I'm always wheezing after warm-ups. I always thought that you should only be warm after warm-ups, and not wheezing. In any case, I don't want to run up Stoltzen like some crazies, so I'm for now just trying to walk up without taking any breaks. Red Cross also decided to join my walking, and, in fact, many China class students did as well, including Mr. Prepared, E and Strong Handshake. Mr. Prepared and E had done Stoltzen before in the first week, so they sped up, while Strong Handshake had come late and so missed it. He went up with Red Cross and me at our pace today, and it was pretty tiring but quite all right.

Now I'm pretty tired after all the exercise, and I'm pretty ready for bed. Good night!

14.10.2013
 

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