Some of my pictures from around the Lillehammer area

This is the second night in Norway, before classes started.  We each got a bottle of alcohol from Duty Free shop in the Iceland Airport.  Alcohol here is so expensive.  About for the cheapest 6 pack.  It costs on average about for a .5 liter glass of beer at the clubs.  Our friend Espen we met right away, from Alaska, took us out on the town!

Ryan, Jo and Chris outside the apartment to get some air.  Our group this semester is the best.  We became so close in a matter of days.  We will be friends for life, and never forget this great experience we are having!

Ryan and Dave with their new friend outside the cafeteria.  Actually this wood statue is one of the theme characters from the Olympics.  You still see them around everywhere, on pins, postcards, and statues like this around the city!

For the first week we where here it snowed over a foot.  We had at one point over 3 feet of snow outside.  It was an amazing site to look at through the valley.  We decided to have a snow war one night at about 10pm, what fun we had!

This is what we get to see everyday when we walk to class.  It has become so normal to use to be surronded by mountains and amazing sites that I don't even notice it anymore.  It is definately a treat to beable to live here for an entire semester.  It has become home!

This is us with Espen (right) and Erlund (left) after a night out clubbing.  It was about 4am when we got home, but that is a typical night here in Norway on the weekends.  Erlund is a friend of ours that is President of the Ski Club, so we have been to Skidag with him, and going to World Cup Downhill the first weekend in March. 

Everyone at the college got free cake and coffee because Lillehammer College was voted the Best College in Norway.  This is the cafeteria we eat in every weekday.  We get cold sandwhiches, or soup for lunch typically.  For dinner there are 2 choices for a hot meal, which have been really good so far!

We got a tour of the city from Per, a family friend of Kate's and also our contact from Luther.  Per was in charge of the building we go to school in and all the media operations for the Olympics, a very important man but he doesn't like to admit it.  We stopped at the Olympic Park and got to see where the opening cermonies took place, to the right in the picture.  We were there when ski jumpers were practicing, which was cool to see.

We went to the top of the ski jump and watched the jumpers disappear over the giant drop.  This view overlooks the downtown area of Lillehammer.  At night they have the jumps lighted, and you can see them from the downtown area, it looks so cool.  There is World Cup Jumping competitions the second week of March that we are planning to go watch!

This is one of the bars that we have gone to a few times already.  It's called Nikkers and is right in the center of downtown.  It has dining downtairs, but a nice bar and dance floor upstairs.  People usually go here first to hang out, and then go to Breineriet, a club up the street, for the rest of the night.  Nikkers is free on Thursday nights, but 40 kroner on Saturday nights!

We heard about this frozen waterfall concert last minute.  We new the general area but followed the music through the woods in the dark until we found this.  We came in the backside unknowingly, so we didnt have to pay to get in.  It was literally a frozen waterfall covered in neon lights and ice sculptures with a techno style group playing.  It was really cool to see, I have seen nothing like it before.  Pictures were hard to get because it was so dark outside!

The Ski club puts on Skidag every year at Hafjell.  They Close of a portion of one run on the mountain that we used all day.  They had a DJ with a huge PA system playing music.  They made hotdogs, and we all drank beer.  There was a sledding race which Greta and I took second place, Chris and Jill won it!  My team of Chris, Espen and I took second place in the beer chugging race.  Lots of fun all day!