Dealing with expectations so far..

66 days, a little more than nine weeks, a good two months – thats how long I have been living in Askvoll now. I have had my Up‘s and Down‘s and I have definetly been homesick, but so far I can say: I like Norway and I am still excited for the rest of this year.

In some aspects Norway is how I expected it to be:
The nature is stunning. The fjords and mountains are incomparible to any other place I have ever seen; after two months of living here I still stop and stare at the view from my kitchen window whenever the light slightly shifts.
The weather is bad. Most of the time it’s raining and 23°C with sunshine are considered “a hot summer day“.And of course the food is very expensive – especially chocolate.

In other ways it is very different:
Learning “Norwegian” is rather difficult, because there is not ONE Norwegian to learn. Instead there are (at least) two official languages, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and countless dialects. So even if I am learning Nynorsk in school, what I hear outside of class sounds totally different.
Also Norwegians (at least those I encountered so far) are not as open to strangers as I thought. The people here are very nice though – once you get to know them a little, which is a little hard because most of the time they won’t make the first step.

Other than that I tried to stay open minded and to come here without fixed expectations. I believe this is a great advantage for me enjoying my time here: I don’t have to try to meet any standarts. I can just experience everything totally unbiased and be content with the events as they happen.
This makes it very easy to have fun while working in my project and I hope it will stay this way.