The last two weeks have been, simply put, a bit overwhelming. I think the only way I made it through an entire week of goodbye’s was the emotional Vicodin that set in about Sunday and didn’t wear off until I saw the first exit sign for the airport on Wednesday morning. My flights were fairly uneventful aside from the two hours my plane from New York spent camped out on the jet way and the consequent six hour lay over I experienced in Amsterdam (which I spent playing cards with Anton from Germany). My host 
‘mom’ Helene (Helena) and her son Nicholas (6) picked me up from the airport and drove us back to their flat in Åsane which is just north of downtown.
I have a great little room on the bottom floor of their four-story flat, next to Helene’s office and across from ‘the room for the treadmill’. The house is in the middle of some minor remodels but is still beautiful and very cozy and also, ironically, Ikea’d out. I’ve only seen the inside of four homes now but they’ve all been pictures out of Ikea (or as its pronounced here-Ickea) catalogues.
I heard a few nightmare stories about au pairs before I left so I was a bit weary of my living situation but I have to say I could not have asked for a better family. Helene is a single mom, a physiotherapist, and a star runner of Bergen. She is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, very inspiring. We get a long great (and her English is perfect which always helps), we laugh a lot, share stories, swap books and chick flicks, and she even has me contemplating running a half marathon that’s coming up. Nicholas is about as sweet and cute as they come. He is half Belisian so he has a mop of brown hair on his little head and these big brown eyes. He doesn’t understand much English so communication is limited and yet he has been the best Norwegian teacher so far. We open the newspaper and I point and he says the word and then I repeat it until I get it right, he’s very patient with me. He attends an ‘outdoor daycare’ that is part of one of the companies Helene works for. When I went yesterday to pick him up they had all the kids in raingear and they were literally swimming in a giant mud pit. Helene and Nicholas have an ideal community here: her best friends live right next door and they basically run their families together, the school is minutes away, there is a soccer field in their backyard, and kids everywhere. The mall and central bus station are both a two-minute walk from the house and it is only ten minutes into the city.
The Aspelund-Strømme family that lives next door is just as welcoming and warm as Helene has been.
Kristen is a dentist and his wife Janne (Yannah) is a therapist and they have hired me as an au pair to get their three kids ready and off to school in the morning. The children have been the light of my days here. Vilde is nine and she is just beginning to learn English in school so we’ve been practicing together and if ever I run into a situation where I just cannot communicate with the other children we call Vilde (Vilda) to help sort things out. I’ve overheard her kindly reminding her siblings that I don’t ‘snakke Norsk.’ She and I have chosen song as our medium for communicating so we sing popular songs in English and she teaches me songs in Norwegian. 
Thale (Talla) is six and they say she has a bit of a temper but I have yet to be witness to it. She is a very independent, very happy, and very helpful little girl. 
We have absolutely mastered the art of sign language (our own version of course) and drawings so she uses a lot of pointing and charades with me. Andreas is three and wonderful. He follows me around telling me stories and asking me questions and is never discouraged when I don’t respond or can’t understand. He picks up whatever English he hears and uses it quite liberally; it needs to be on youtube. He discovered that when he says my name in question form I respond by saying his name the same way and that has been our main form of communication so far…it never gets old. They also have a dog Theio (Tayo) that has to be the least intelligent creature I have ever encountered. He trips over nothing, runs into walls, comes to anything but his own name, and has a snot problem. He literally leaves a trail of snot everywhere he goes. He sneezes snot balls and even has his very own snot rag.
My day starts around 6:30a, I wake the children up, feed and dress them, pack their ‘matpakke’ and walk them to their schools and I love every minute of it. I have time after that to work out and shower and then I walk to catch the bus by about 10:45a.
I have a job at a landscape architecture firm that is a block from Bryggen which is the historic port of Bergen. I buy groceries and prepare a traditional Norwegian ‘skive’ lunch for eight employees and myself (it is part of my job to have lunch and socialize with them). Then in the afternoons I’ve been doing odd jobs: cleaning house for two different women, assisting an English teacher, watching the children, and taking Norwegian lessons.
There is definitely a reason they call Seattle Bergen’s sister city. The mountains, the water, the rain, the grey, and the trees are all very similar to Seattle’s. The weather was pretty mild my first few days and then it just went crazy. Today there was a thunderstorm in the morning that was changing from rain to hail to snow, then lightning, then a wind storm hit, and after a two-hour drizzle it is now dumping snow. It has snowed everyday for the last three days.
Everything gets covered in a blanket of white and then by morning it’s all been washed away by the rain. Helene says the suicide rate is very high here.
There is a distinctly different pace here. Everything seems to run efficiently and to the point without being stressful or drama-filled. As it was explained to me Norwegians are a duty driven people so they have accepted that they have these tasks that must be completed and once they’ve finished their days work they truly relax. Most nights, after dinner is made, Helene and I sit with Kristen and Janne just talking and laughing and sipping tea.
‘mom’ Helene (Helena) and her son Nicholas (6) picked me up from the airport and drove us back to their flat in Åsane which is just north of downtown.I have a great little room on the bottom floor of their four-story flat, next to Helene’s office and across from ‘the room for the treadmill’. The house is in the middle of some minor remodels but is still beautiful and very cozy and also, ironically, Ikea’d out. I’ve only seen the inside of four homes now but they’ve all been pictures out of Ikea (or as its pronounced here-Ickea) catalogues.
I heard a few nightmare stories about au pairs before I left so I was a bit weary of my living situation but I have to say I could not have asked for a better family. Helene is a single mom, a physiotherapist, and a star runner of Bergen. She is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met, very inspiring. We get a long great (and her English is perfect which always helps), we laugh a lot, share stories, swap books and chick flicks, and she even has me contemplating running a half marathon that’s coming up. Nicholas is about as sweet and cute as they come. He is half Belisian so he has a mop of brown hair on his little head and these big brown eyes. He doesn’t understand much English so communication is limited and yet he has been the best Norwegian teacher so far. We open the newspaper and I point and he says the word and then I repeat it until I get it right, he’s very patient with me. He attends an ‘outdoor daycare’ that is part of one of the companies Helene works for. When I went yesterday to pick him up they had all the kids in raingear and they were literally swimming in a giant mud pit. Helene and Nicholas have an ideal community here: her best friends live right next door and they basically run their families together, the school is minutes away, there is a soccer field in their backyard, and kids everywhere. The mall and central bus station are both a two-minute walk from the house and it is only ten minutes into the city.
The Aspelund-Strømme family that lives next door is just as welcoming and warm as Helene has been.
Kristen is a dentist and his wife Janne (Yannah) is a therapist and they have hired me as an au pair to get their three kids ready and off to school in the morning. The children have been the light of my days here. Vilde is nine and she is just beginning to learn English in school so we’ve been practicing together and if ever I run into a situation where I just cannot communicate with the other children we call Vilde (Vilda) to help sort things out. I’ve overheard her kindly reminding her siblings that I don’t ‘snakke Norsk.’ She and I have chosen song as our medium for communicating so we sing popular songs in English and she teaches me songs in Norwegian. 
Thale (Talla) is six and they say she has a bit of a temper but I have yet to be witness to it. She is a very independent, very happy, and very helpful little girl. 
We have absolutely mastered the art of sign language (our own version of course) and drawings so she uses a lot of pointing and charades with me. Andreas is three and wonderful. He follows me around telling me stories and asking me questions and is never discouraged when I don’t respond or can’t understand. He picks up whatever English he hears and uses it quite liberally; it needs to be on youtube. He discovered that when he says my name in question form I respond by saying his name the same way and that has been our main form of communication so far…it never gets old. They also have a dog Theio (Tayo) that has to be the least intelligent creature I have ever encountered. He trips over nothing, runs into walls, comes to anything but his own name, and has a snot problem. He literally leaves a trail of snot everywhere he goes. He sneezes snot balls and even has his very own snot rag.My day starts around 6:30a, I wake the children up, feed and dress them, pack their ‘matpakke’ and walk them to their schools and I love every minute of it. I have time after that to work out and shower and then I walk to catch the bus by about 10:45a.
I have a job at a landscape architecture firm that is a block from Bryggen which is the historic port of Bergen. I buy groceries and prepare a traditional Norwegian ‘skive’ lunch for eight employees and myself (it is part of my job to have lunch and socialize with them). Then in the afternoons I’ve been doing odd jobs: cleaning house for two different women, assisting an English teacher, watching the children, and taking Norwegian lessons.There is definitely a reason they call Seattle Bergen’s sister city. The mountains, the water, the rain, the grey, and the trees are all very similar to Seattle’s. The weather was pretty mild my first few days and then it just went crazy. Today there was a thunderstorm in the morning that was changing from rain to hail to snow, then lightning, then a wind storm hit, and after a two-hour drizzle it is now dumping snow. It has snowed everyday for the last three days.
Everything gets covered in a blanket of white and then by morning it’s all been washed away by the rain. Helene says the suicide rate is very high here.There is a distinctly different pace here. Everything seems to run efficiently and to the point without being stressful or drama-filled. As it was explained to me Norwegians are a duty driven people so they have accepted that they have these tasks that must be completed and once they’ve finished their days work they truly relax. Most nights, after dinner is made, Helene and I sit with Kristen and Janne just talking and laughing and sipping tea.
