White by Vera Wang

It's a shame that the White collection by Vera Wang won't be available in Europe (as I understand it) because I totally fell in love with this dress!!! Not only I like the skirt but I also adore the colour.

weddinginspirasi.com

Project 2012 - To get married

Within the last week I learnt two very important things about weddings - they seem to be difficult to plan/organize and are a great business which earns money. In fact, why not? The divorce rate in CZ is over 50%, so if half of those divorcée gets married again, they might use the same vendors as previous time, especially when they were happy with their vendor's services.

jewelryfind.blogspot.com

Winter holidays in Estonia

Two weeks before my plane took off from Bergen, Estonia was hit by very low temperatures, like minus thirty, etc. My boyfriend was genuinely enjoying emphasizing the freezing weather in his homecountry, which made me not being very about the trip there. Try to understand me, my host family was heading to Las Palmas with its lovely over twenty degrees  for winter holidays and I was about to go to Estonia and freeze to death. In addition to that, it was foggy, rainy, snowy, slushy in Bergen...I definitely „was“ in the mood for travelling.

There were several reasons why I had to overnight andspend exactly 12 hours at Oslo Gardamoen airport:

1) My plane from Oslo to Tallinn was scheduled on Sunday, 8 am.

2) There were no connecting flights, trains or busses between Bergen and Oslo that early in the morning.

3) I booked my ticket on a wrong date, when I changed my reservation, there were no late night flights.

4) I considered it as a waste of money to spend a night in a ho(s)tel.

All in all, I survived a cold night at the airport but will never do it again.

Nobody was expecting me at the tiny Tallinn airport (it’s impossible for me to remember its name), no boyfriend with flowers, just no-one. To make the most out of the waiting, I decided to buy some tickets for public transport. With new currency, euro, the single ticket prices went so up! Lucky me, I still have my Estonian ID and permanent address in Tallinn, so I paid about 9 euros for a 10 day ticket – that was quite a fair price.

On the way back home, we stopped in several shops, after living in Norway for more than half a year, I thought that the prices are more than friendly! Yes, I did some clothes shopping. :-) When we came to our little apartment, I was thinking about two things: It’s small and Viktor keeps it clean! Good for him!

A bit blurry but you at least you get the shape:)

One day,  during the week before my arrival, my boyfriend woke up and felt old enough to get married. So he got dressed and went to a goldsmith's and bought me an engagement ring. When I received it, I thought he was joking. It took him several days to convince me he was absolutely serious. We even went to a wedding dress shop to try on several dresses. Surprisingly, Viktor didn’t looked bored but as he was enjoying it. Unluckily, we didn’t like the same dresses, we cannot agree on which hand we will have our wedding rings, it’s left hand in CZ, it’s right in EE, we disagree about my future surname,...etc.

  

I suspect him a bit that he proposed because he wanted me to come back to live with him...but honestly, being married doesn’t mean I can’t just travel around, at least I hope.

There were other great moments during this trip including:

1) Watching Black Swan in the cinema – it was breath-taking! Even my boyfriend, who didn’t want to see it, gave it 9 points out of 10.

2) Meeting my substitute in MarkIT, she seems like a very nice girl!

3) Walking on the frozen see.

4) Shopping.

5) Cooking, especially lasagna. It was nice to eat together again.

6) Bathtub filled with hot water!

Walking on the frozen sea.

Moments I didn’t enjoy:

1) Hairdresser, the haircut she made would be perfect on another hair type but mine. 

2) Doing what my mum asked me to do. I am still so angry with her that I don’t want to get into details here.

3) My flight back to Oslo had more than an hour delay, I missed my train to Oslo Central Station, I had to buy a new ticket for 200 NOK but fortunately caught Oslo-Bergen train, otherwise it would get damn expensive. (In Norway you can buy a ticket in advance for a certain day and time for a very customer friendly price, the hook is that you cannot change it.)

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.

Living a dream

As many of you have probably learnt from my facebook posts, I have relocated from Estonia to Norway to fulfill my high school dream - to experience living in Norway and learning the language.

It was definitely not an easy decision to go, to leave my boyfriend behind but it'd been my dream for many years and I just couldn't give up on this dream.

I came to Norway to work as an au-pair for the same man as I did two summers ago. I had a blast that summer.

We spent 10 days in amusement parks in Denmark

Bergen, Legoland, Denmark

Got a car with a debit card, so I spent some days travelling up to the north.

I even got to island Runde to see the puffins! (which I have always wanted to do)

I had enough time to stroll around in Bergen

I also got a week off to have enough time to travel across the country with David, French I met on the Internet.

All in all, I spent about a month (out of two) working as a slave of the kid, the other month was dedicated to fun...

So what was the reality of coming to the same family two years after?

The kid grew up and moved with his mother to the island next to our island. The day after I came, his father had to go up to Trondheim and I was left with the kid alone for two nights. My Norwegian and his English was sufficient for both of us to survive. I had to drive him to school the next day but I got lost. Fortunately, he slept the first hour, so he had no idea how much lost we were :) When he woke up, he panicked and wasn't helpful at all. At the end, I managed to get him to school, surprisingly on time. That was because I didn't realize that my phone was still set to Estonian time.

The beginning was a bit hectic and, in fact, my whole stay has been so far. I've been working for the Estonian company (my job is more or less Internet based) and also looking after the kid from Thu-Sun or Fri-Sat.

We've been to two holidays so far, one in Gol and second in Windsor. I would  have never believed it's possible to spend the whole holiday inside the hotel (because the kid wanted to be in the swimming pool all day long). But the Gol holiday was so much better than the other one in Windsor. I couldn't wait going back to Norway. Since then I knew I cannot stay with this family any more. There was/is just too much drama...

Legoland, Windsor, England

I should move in with a new family in January, it's a widowed American with two boys, which is great because we won't have any problems with understanding each other and there won't be any crazy ex-wife, former KGB agent.

But the reason why I moved to Norway wasn't that I wanted to dedicate my days to taking after kids, I wanted to learn the language.

I started Norwegian language course twice a week in September. The courses have been a disappointment so far...it's a great topic for my next post and I'm also too tired now and the kid requires my attention...

Living in Tallinn

As some of you already know, I moved to Tallinn at the end of April and surprisingly started to work a month later. So, today, it’s been almost two month since I started to work for MarkIT and I’d like to share some Estonian experience. 

Estonia is a small country in the north of Europe with a population about 1,5 million (30% of them are Russians). It lies next to Russia and under Finland. Both Swedish and Russian rule left its remarks. If the Communist didn’t take over, you would think you’re in south Sweden, the same houses, flat countryside with lots of forrests. The Communist built huge areas of blocks for new coming Russians who were seeking a job and better life here. These people working in a (heavy) industry are now mostly unemployed and think that Estonian government is stupid because it closed most of the Communistic factories and decided to focus on IT, not to be manufacturer for the western countries (as CZ is). The future for these people is not so bright because they cannot (and don’t want to) speak Estonian and don’t have education needed for getting a job in Estonia.

I live in Tallinn in a huge block area which was built in late 80s and it’s Russian one usually hears there. When you go to a shop, both Russians and Estonians speak their own language – they understand each other but wouldn’t „lower“ themselves to speak in their partner’s language. With government institutions, it’s different, all clerks have to speak both languages, so it’s possible to communicate in Russian there even though Russian is not an official language here. The interesting thing is that at the Immigration Board, there were signs only in Estonian and Russian, no English. I felt a bit discriminated when I was there applying for a working permit. The question of Estonian – Russian relationship is extremely interesting and it would like to know more about this ethnic myth reproduction. Estonians see the Russians as the bad guys who took their freedom and made their country ugly with its statues and buildings (that’s why the downtown is totally renovated in the „glass-skyscrapers“ style). In contrast to Estonian point of view is how Russians see the history. They think that everything was much better during the Communism, people had their work, everything was high quality and today‘s Estonian loyalty to the USA is definitely a destructing thing. Also the Russians having been living here for three generations would never call themselves Estonians even though they have Estonian passports.They are Russians although the only thing they have in common with tRussians is a language.

Some people ask me why do I always go to the east and not west. Not only for getting unforgettable experiences but also e.g. living in Estonia is much cheaper – I earn the same money as I would in Czech but wouldn’t be able to live on it so comfortably as I can here.

Another great thing about living in Tallinn is the sea. It’s not very deep, so it’s possible to swim in it after three nice sunny days :) For mid-European it’s just so cool to go to the sea and watch boats and people passing by jogging, roller skating, etc. Besides that the days are so long here! I think winter here’s going to be hell :(