Sunday, September 23, 2007

10 Degrees and Cloudy

Before I write shallow, narcissistic stuff about my own life, I would first like to draw your attention to this story. I think that it is incredibly exciting and has the potential for a non-violent revolution - of course there is also the potential that the military will turn it into a bloodbath and that would be horrible. Nevertheless, I feel like this is an excellent example of religion being put to good use. Religion often gets blamed as being the cause of every war in the world (and perhaps, rightly so) but it seems to me that the folks who point this out tend to neglect the positive contributions of religion and religious people to society. For those of us who pray, let's remember Myanmar and its buddhist monks and nuns.



All right, so you may or may not have noticed that I tarted my blog up a bit. The old template was broken so I migrated to the new one with a fancy archival process. Looking through the archives I noticed that it is nearly the end of the year and I don't even have 1/3 as many posts as I did in 2006. I think that is due to several reasons. The first being that I spent most of 2007 in Canada, which I find less stimulating and less conducive to blog-post-coming-up-withness. I believe also, as Matt pointed out, Facebook has contributed to a general decline in the world of casual bloggers. After all, it's a lot easier to change your status update (one line) and upload a bunch of photos from your camera (automated process) than it is to actually sit down and come up with something to say. However, I am not content to let my blog die. I have never felt obligated to post (nor would I want to) but there are still times in which it is the better suited medium. So having said that, I will try to be more intentional in sharing my life and thoughts here in the future.


What am I up to then? The truth is, not a heck of a lot. I have had lots of visitors the past little while (both couchsurfers and dear friends) and while it has been nice to see them, it is also going to be nice to have some time on my own again. School is, well, I'm not sure - I've kinda been neglecting it with my visitors, so it's important to focus on that again for the next little while. I'm also hoping to move into a room in a flat in the city centre, but that hasn't been finalized yet, so more on it later. I'm slowly adjusting to the Norwegian lifestyle, and hopefully even more so if I move in with this bunch of Norwegians. Oh! Speaking of whom, I have another Norwegian fashion update!

For some reason, clothing from UCLA is really popular here. One of my female norwegian friends told me that they even sell it in clothing stores alongside other popular brands. She also believes that a lot of young norwegian girls don't even know where it's from since they refer to it as 'ook-lah' (which is how it would be pronounced if it was a Norwegian word). Ha!

PS: For the Facebook-less, here are pictures from Oslo and Fredrikstad.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great pictures Chris. Thanks for sharing.

Some of us are only face-book less because we are uninvited (:

Bree Barton said...

Was just browsing blogs and very much enjoyed yours. We're both self-proclaimed nomads, although I've yet to fully capitalize on my nomadic impulse. For now I'm wandering through html as a newly christened blogger (www.dantedegreed.com). It's utterly addictive. To use your termninology, it may be shallow and narcisstic, but damn is it cathartic.

Anyway, keep up the good work. And I'm glad to see facebook has truly infiltrated the world.

Cheers,

Bree