November 29, 2015 American thanksgiving. After a crazy week out exploring the areas of Aalesund and learning to push ourselves in photography we were ready for a bit of a break. Unfortunately, we rushed right into another lecture week that was a bit questionable to many of us. It was made out to be a really powerful week, but in the end a lot of us were left with an odd feeling in our guts. The good news of the week was that the lady who was speaking this week was an extremely nice lady with a very motherly nature. I did learn and find out a few things about myself on the last day during the last 30 minutes of lecture week. We had a quiet time where we were supposed to sit and process what we had just learned and while we were doing that I had a really good talk with one of my fellow students. We talked about how hard it was to relate to the speaker and how life doesn’t have to be like the way she described it. So it was really good to know someone sympathized with how I was feeling throughout the week.
The entire week was rainy and gross, so unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to go on any exciting adventures or explore any new spots. So the highlight of my week was watching 6 episodes of Modern Family in a row…
The weekend came around and turned life around pretty quickly. Friday was a creative day and we spent the morning sharing photo stories from the week before and it was just incredible to see how people captured different moments around Aalesund. The realization too that all of the events shown in the story happened in the same week was really neat too. To see how different people spent their time in different ways to get different emotions into their stories. My story, which I was a little secretive about, was about the surfers in Alnes. Alnes is a little town about an hour away from Aalesund, and on the Tuesday of last week the weather was perfect and the waves were the best they had been all year. I got to spend the day talking to locals and surfers, photographing them at the same time and enjoying the incredible scenery! It was just one of those perfect days I will never be able to recreate in a photo, but the memory I’ll cherish forever.
Friday night was long, but awesome. We spent the night in the kitchen playing live fruit ninja and lighting stuff on fire. We enjoyed several really good heart to heart talks and just all round had a blast. And after a long week like we just had, it was really well needed. We finally went to bed at 5am…
Saturday was our impromptu American thanksgiving and because of Friday night I slept in till noon. As soon as I woke up I was drafted into the kitchen crew and from there on helped make thanksgiving for the 75 plus people that came to the base. We had 9 turkeys, 4 giant pots of potatoes and several other dishes that had to be made all in those few hours. It was real blast being in the kitchen trying to make everything come together and in the end it turned out perfectly! My main job was carving the turkeys and I did it alongside a vegetarian! It wasn’t till we were almost done carving the turkeys that I remembered that she didn’t eat meat, but she was a real boss ad got right into cutting up the meat and setting it up for everyone else to enjoy. Safe to say being in the kitchen was a real joy and I’d certainly do it again if I got the chance.
So for it being one of the slower weeks we’ve had it was still pretty great and more memories were definitely made.
