My mom would be so proud!

This post is dedicated to my MOM because she always wants me to try new foods. I would like to tell her that I ate MOOSE. Yes, her favorite collectible. She has moose everywhere around her house, from on pillows, figurines, to a singing christmas moose head. She loves her mooses. Well, last week I went to Sweden with school and walked and walked and walked around the woods counting piles of moose poop for a study on the population of moose in the area. On my second night there, we had moose for dinner....and it was GOOD!!! I didn't know it was moose until after I ate it, I thought it was just a special meatloaf we were eating, but after I found out it was moose, I went back for seconds because it was so yummy. Moose is eaten tons more here than in the States, by the way, but I hadn't had it before then....oh but maybe I had. Another time I was in Sweden with school we ate moose sausage...it wasn't as tasty, but everyone else liked it. Anyways, that is my adventure with counting moose droppings and eating moose (not eating their droppings....sick!) OH...one other thing. We had a little tutorial before we went out to count the piles to teach us how to tell the difference between fresh and old piles....and also what other animal droppings looked like. The place we were staying is a youth hostel in the middle of the woods and we were learning what all these droppings looked like. We had samples of them on the dining tables in the hostel. Yes, there was poop spread all over the tables...where we eat (it was dry and old). I feel sorry for the other occupants who noticed this. :) We wiped off the tables quite good before eating, don't worry. I told one of my friends that one subject that is talked about quite often in my program is moose poop and he laughed maybe thinking I was kidding....well, I wasn't kidding. :) It's true.

Did you say "paste"?

I hereby have a new favorite thing that a friend accidentally said. We were walking along and we had to hurry a little bit and he said "we have to pick up the paste". I asked if he really said paste instead of pace because I thought I heard wrong...but no, he said paste. HA HA HA HA. All I could think of was picking up a new bottle of Elmers. :)

A Dedication to the Bathroom and a Bucket Update

I keep forgetting to mention a little piece of bliss that I enjoy most weekends. When I go to peoples' houses on the weekend there is one thing that makes me a very happy girl when I get up in the morning. Many of the houses here have heated bathroom floors. What joy I feel when I step off of the cold unwelcoming floor with my chilly toes onto a nice toasty one in the bathroom! An unlikely place, you might say?? Oh no, not in Norway! When I "grow up" I want a heated bathroom floor too.

Aside from the amazing warm bathroom floors, I have an update on the bucket situation previously written about. I stayed at the house that doesn't have an indoor toilet and they, INDEED, had a bucket for inside use. :D They mainly prepare the bucket for night-time use so you don't have to wander outside in the middle of the night to the outhouse and fall, perhaps breaking bones, peeing your pants, or getting eaten by the moose. :) Gotta love it. I, however, could not bring myself to use the bucket. I am ok with outhouses and the woods, but I just couldn't do the bucket for some reason....call me a city-girl, call me a wuss, or whatever you want, but the bucket was an impossibility. I held it all the way to church in the morning so I could use a toilet. (to clarify....I did not hold the bucket....I waited to pee until I got to church) :) Oh man, I could never make it in the old days.

A Mix of Stuff

I got to spend a couple days at the Stockholm Temple after Easter. My eye decided it was going to be red for a few days, so I had to wear my stupid glasses. I hate glasses, but I love the temple! It was fabulous. I went to 4 sessions....1 Swedish, 2 Norwegian, and 1 Russian. I must admit, though, that massive amounts of jetlag combined with temple sessions does not make for a very alert Lindsey...I fell asleep...a few times...at least. Since the temple is far away for most people in Scandinavia, there is a temple guesthouse you stay at for a week or two at a time instead of just going to the temple for a couple hours every once in a while like we do in the states. Here you do all you can in those couple days/week/weeks and then you don't come back for a long time because of the distance.


I got back to Evenstad a few days after the temple trip and all the snow was gone. When I left 10 days before that, it was quite in tact....but now it's just mud and brown everywhere. I can't wait for it to be green again. It's getting warmer and I haven't had to wear my coat any lately and it looks like I won't have to until Fall. YES! I'm ready to wear my flip flops again.


Here's the pick from before when I was talking about capturing and marking the red deer. This picture is classic! It looks like I'm a pretty hardcore "capturer," but if you knew the whole story, you'd know that really I'm just a hardcore flashlight holder. It's a very high tech and important job to hold a flashlight, you know.



The next picture will go down as another thing that Scandinavia has and the US doesn't, and I think it should stay that way. You tell me why they wanted to call a snack food "Funkies." I found this little delight in a grocery store in Sweden under the gluten-free section....that's probably why it was called that....

One more picture...I get to say that I have spent time in The Netherlands (Holland)...even if it was only 11 hours and was spent asleep in the Amsterdam airport. That still counts, right?


I have to start writing my thesis soon. I don't feel like a grown-up who is supposed to write such things...how did I get so old???

The Best Whirlwind EVER

Last week I was sitting in my room, bored, as usual, wondering how much I can't afford to come home for spring break and Easter....the next thing I know, I'm getting out my credit card and leaving on a plane to Texas the next day for a surprise trip home. This trip was not strictly for fun, it had practical purposes, but really it was just for me to get out of boredom and into some much needed happiness and fun with friends and family. I decided not to tell anyone I was coming, except for my friend Shannon who would be picking me up from the airport and taking me home.

This is my reasoning behind this trip:

Pros: a friend's birthday on Thursday at the Cheesecake Factory (oh yeah)
a friend's wedding on Friday
surprises (which I absolutely LOVE to do)
Easter Sunday with my family (which is where it should be)
take care of student loan business
renew driver's license
fun

Cons: money
be by myself for a week in the middle of nowhere while everyone else is off galavanting.

Now, wouldn't you make the same choice???? I even called some of my Norwegian friends before I bought the ticket to try and get them to talk me out of it, but they weren't there, so I gave into a little temptation and started packing. OH YEAH. It turned out to be such a good trip and so much fun surprising everyone. I did everything on my list and even got to do extra things I wasn't planning on that added to the justification of buying the ticket. I also rejuvenated myself by getting to go to the temple and having church in English. Oh how I miss that!! I had no idea that I was drained so much until I left Norway and stepped foot off the plane in Texas and felt happiness flow back into me as I saw my friends and family. It's amazing how much we can deceive ourselves sometimes. I'm not saying that I don't love Norway, I do, I'm just saying that I get a little drained by not being around anyone of my faith during the week and not being able to go to the temple. This is my grand once in a lifetime adventure, though, so I don't have any right to complain! I have been revived, as well as severely jetlagged. I am posting this at almost 3 am Norway time. You should feel sorry for me....HA!

What I got to do: hid in the bathroom of the Cheesable Factory to surprise Pammy Wammy as her unbelievably fantastic birthday present, surprised Sharon at her wedding, surprised my family by walking in the door unannounced, play Rockband...twice, went go-carting, ate at Fuddruckers...mmmm, have Easter with my family and get an Easter basket :), stocked up on some American food to take back with me, ate burritos...mmm, ate bagels...mmm, slept in my comfy bed, drove my CAR....WOOHOO!!!

I am one lucky kid.

Field Trips

A couple of weeks ago, my class went on an overnight field trip to Sweden to track a wolf pack. We tracked the pack where they had been about 4 days before to see if there were any fresh bed sites or carcasses of animals they had eaten. The trip was so fun and we found 2 moose carcasses, a jawbone from a beaver, and several bed sites where the wolves had slept. We were on skis and snowshoes the whole time and this is what I looked like 17 times during the trip....


How embarrassing...yes, I counted. I fell 17 times. We were back-country skiing and I hadn't done that yet. I had only skied on flat areas and this was through woods and hills and such, however, I had a blast and I got quite an arm workout from pushing myself back up so much. :)

About a week before this trip, I also got to see a pack of wolves out on a frozen lake eating a fresh moose kill. It was very far away, about 2 kilometers, but here is a somewhat close picture of the wolves we saw. It is quite rare to see wolves like this so everyone came out of the woodwork to come see. There were at least 10 other cars lined up across the lake with us.
Like I said, we couldn't get very close.

ALSO. Last week I got to go see some actual collaring of deer. A classmate of mine invited me on one of the trips where we sat in the car next to the big pile of hay known as a "feeding station" where some red deer were eating. We inched up closer and closer to the deer and then when we were close enough, my friend darted one of the deer by leaning out the window. We found the deer after it had fallen asleep and collared it with a GPS collar so we can get data on where the deer goes. I just stood there while they did all this stuff, but at least I got to go. :) I held a flashlight, that was my contribution. There is a picture of me with the deer, but I don't have it yet. I'll get it and you will see that the deer looks pretty dead, but no worries, it's alive and has no idea that I got a candid picture with it. Needless to say, it is exciting to live here sometimes and go on adventures like this. :)

Another field trip was last weekend with all the international students in the area. Mostly I went sledding and made a large snow-deer/llama (you can choose what it is...).

AND. Here are some pictures of the icicles outside my window. So cool. I wanted to reach out and lick them, but thought that might be a bad idea.

I hope everyone's doing great. I miss you all!

Why Norway makes me Fat

This is called brunost or brown cheese. It is completely Norwegian and completely tasty. You just eat it on bread or these big cracker things they call hard bread (which is gross). They say most people that aren't from here don't like it, but I'm not most people....as you know. I love it. Cheese makes me happy.




Oh Good ole Walter! What would I do without your chocolate. This is my favorite candybar and I keep eating more and more of it and can't stop.

These two things are just two of the reasons why I get fat, the other one is that I just can't seem to stop eating. Even when I'm not hungry, I just want to eat whatever is in site. People say it's from the cold, but I think that I just really like to eat chocolate and cheese. Who doesn't???