Learning

The more time a person spends in Norway, the more they will have the realisation of just how hard the average local is. Norwegians are constantly hunting, cross-country skiing, chopping wood and batting not one eyelid at the prospect of running up a mountain. When Martin, the twelve-year-old of the Dalseth family, was skiing two years ago, he found his path was blocked by a hapless young girl. He had two possible options and he chose the honourable, hard route - into a tree. Miriam, who drums for the youth worship group, has to wear glasses ever since the blunt scout knife she pulled out of a piece of bark found it's way into her right eye. She did not cry (well, not for a good hour). Every February, the scouts go on a trip - they find snow drifts, dig into them and spend the night in the holes. When the trees on the side of a mountain in Arna caught fire, all the men of the town walked up to beat it out. Martin's dad Rune, who is an auditor in the city, built most of his own house. And you should see the place.

Even his wife Anne Britt is tough. Dave and Anna Howey found this out when they came to stay at the Dalseth residence for a few days. Anne Britt asked them if they wanted to come out for a walk with her and her friend Solbjørg and they ended up spending two and a half hours ascending and descending the 500m high peak of a local mountain in driving rain. At the top, Anne Britt remembered she had to take Martin for a haircut and promptly ran back down the mountain. When I saw them next, she told me she had taken them on the "Housewife's extreme lunchtime walk". While the extremity of the trek certainly wasn't wasted on the Howeys, it was the fact that a neighbour does the same walk five times a week in the dark that impressed them the most.

It was, of course, great to see Dave and Anna and we spent yesterday walking around Bergen. We took the Fløibanen (a funicular - imagine a tram pulled by wires) up Mount Fløyen, which overlooks Bergen. At the top, as we discussed how incredible it was for a city to spread out and thrive over such a harsh area, I commented that "the harbour is probably the key." I had no idea I was uttering one of the finest puns that Fløyen will ever hear. We walked back down, being constantly passed by Norwegians running up and down the mountainside like it was the easiest thing they'd ever done. Norwegians have an affinity for mountains, which is convenient really. From Monday to Friday this week I had been up a different mountain for the annual prayer and fasting conference that my church runs in Hermon, a ski resort one kilometre above sea level.

John Håtveit, the son of Hermon's owner, makes ski films for a living. He produces amazing DVDs featuring, among other world class skiers, his brother Andreas. Visit skifilm.net to see clips of madcap ski stunts and the trailer for "Strike", his latest DVD. He kindly gave me a copy of it and it's really quite an exciting film.

At this point an important update should be made - no longer is the longest tunnel I've ever been through a pathetic 2.77km. On the way to Hermon, we smashed the old record, replacing it with the awesome new acheivement of 11.4km, that is, seven miles through a mountain. Fantastic.

There were plenty of visitors from England at Hermon - Roger and Faith, Chris and Jen, Graham and Angela Geddis, and Kjellmartin, who I roomed with. It was so good to see them and to even celebrate Chris' birthday in the most unlikely way an Orange could - by eating nothing. The series of talks about the Holy Place were absolute treasures too; almost enough to make up for the fact that I'll miss the climax of Revelation at Bible School this year.

Hermon was also the occasion of my first attempts at song lyric projection in a foreign language. I felt I performed reasonably well, although the frantic search for the songs I needed did affect me. I even had a series of dreams, each in a different foreign language that I didn't understand and was desperately trying to figure out. But it was good to do, not least because it helped me progress a bit in Norwegian.

It was probably inevitable that I would begin picking up Norwegian through doing acetates, and thanks to five days of song projection, my pronunciation of the language is greatly improved. I even know a Graham Kendrick chorus in the native tongue. Sadly though, acetates are not enough. I imagine that, along with grammar, my vocabulary would develop poorly. It's all very well knowing the Norwegian for "atonement" but not if you can't work out which is the men's toilet. So tomorrow I am starting my Norwegian language course at Nygård skole in Bergen. It looks like it's going to be intense - half eight until noon, five days a week, for four weeks. Seventy hours of lessons will hopefully get me to somewhere approaching fluency but please pray that I'll take to the lessons well; I'm finding communication to be awkward at times.

Whenever I send texts to the youth that don't speak so much English I try to throw together some Norwegian using the books I've got. Of course, it often comes out like an idiot toddler might sound, but my meaning is usually communicated. Once though, I was made a mockery of by careless use of predictive texting. Sending a message to John Håvard, I meant to write, "Snakker jeg så dårlig norsk?" This is a question from my reliable Norwegian phrase book, translating as, "Do I speak that bad in Norwegian?" But one inadequate press of the 5 key left the predictive text to come up with, "Smaker jeg så dålig norsk?" Tragically, this small change twists the sentence into, "Do I taste that bad in Norwegian?" Not only a surreal question, but one that I certainly didn't have the desire to ask. John Håvard has coped with the ordeal tremendously though, so no harm done.