Starting over

This New Year has actually brought  something new, a new family. I have decided to stop working for both the Norwegian family and Estonian company in order to be happier here in the north.

My new familyconsists of a widowed American man and his two sons, 9 and 12, living on the other side of Bergen, so any complicated moving was included. I love Bergen and wouldn’t moved anywhere else, especially not inland. If I believed in God, I would say that He sent that family for me.  The boys are well-behaved, we can speak the same language, English and are able to socialize with their au-pair. They’re also very independent and self-sufficient – they don’t need me to watch them all the time. Their dad is a nice man who does care about his boys and his house (he keeps it clean and repaired). It’s more work here for me but it doesn’t matter that much because my days are structured and time flies faster.

I was encouraged to attend Spanish course and start swimming again. Both of these make me feel much better about myself – it’s a proof when one starts to do something except for their work and watching TV/PC, their mental health gets better.

Spanish course – what a surprise when I entered the classroom and nine pensioners were smiling at me! In fact, it shouldn’t have been so surprising for me that my classmates will be grand- and greatgrand- mothers/fathers – who else has time to go to a language course in the morning? These people are extremely inspiring for me, they lives are very active, they travel, socialize,...not like the seniors I know, who only watch TV and gossip with their neighbours. Our teacher is great. The only problem is that there is too much of Norwegian, I practise Norwegian there more than Spanish. But the lessons progress quite slowly, so I don’t have any problems to follow. Well, if I wanted to learn faster, I would have to go to an evening course but my main focus is still to Norwegian, so this Spanish course is the best fit for me.

Swimming – If one swims 10 km between 1st January and 31st March, one can win a trip to Playitas. Only 600 metres left :) I started to use sauna and do enjoy it!

Unfortunately I don’t have time to swim for 45-60 minutes, I can usually swim only 30...but it’s still ok for keeping my mind up. I also cannot see any changes in my figure...that’s a bit sad but I’m not giving up!

The last change in my life is shopping, I started to shop and have no idea how I’m gonna pack myself for my next change of address.

Norskkurs

As mentioned in the previous entry, I came to Norway to learn Norwegian. So in the middle of September I signed up for a Norwegian course at Folkeuniversitetet expecting interactive lessons full of communicative exercises as promised on their websites. Looking at the price of the course also made me believe that I was about to experience as good Norwegian lessons as were Spanish ones some years ago.

  

I’ve gone through 3 Norwegian courses so far, all at Folkeuniversitetet. If there was a possibility to change the language school, I would definitely do it, but unfortunately, the language market is kind of small in Bergen area.

Norwegian 3+4: Course which didn’t follow any 1+2 course, meaning that the class were made up from people with different level of language knowledge. The good thing about it was that our group was little, only 6 pople did attend regularly, so there was space for us to talk. But our teacher, Polish immigrant who came to Norway 18 years ago, took most of the talking time for herself. She really liked to listen to herself, I think. On the other hand, she was quite good at explaining and pointing out grammar points  when we were covering them. In fact, we didn’t do it much because Folkeuniversitetet’s policy is not to cover grammar, students should find out the rules on their own – they call this a communicative approach :-/ I was sometimes really bored there. If one didn’t want to be involved in the lesson, he just didn’t have to.

Norwegian 5+6: A huge class of 16 people! Fortunately, some of the stopped coming. Our teacher was a total opposite to the previous one: his talking time consisted only from telling us the instructions and answering our questions and he probably didn’t have any experience in teaching. We mostly worked in pairs, so we got a chance to get to know each other and also it encouraged us not to be afraid to talk (we didn’t do almost anything else during the lessons). No grammar was included in his teaching. In his defense, I’ve got to say that he had a great potential to become a great teacher.

Norwegian 7+8: The same teacher as in 3+4 course. I had to take this course because of Spanish lessons on Tuesdays (btw. really good ones), so I didn’t have much expectations. The group grew bigger but almost nobody remained from the old class, except for the Islandic couple working for Salvation Army. Now I do appreciate that our teacher is explaining some things, pointing out tricky parts of Norwegian and tries to extend our vocabulary. I hope I’ll get another teacher for the Bergenstesten preparatory course, I really do.