Mondag og Tirsdag

Well, compared to the excitement of my weekend when I took an excursion to Hallingdal, my Monday and Tuesday have been relatively uneventful. However, on Monday afternoon I went with my Literature class to Henrik Ibsen's Apartment on Henrik Ibsen's Gate in Oslo. I thought it was very interesting although hardly any of it was original. All of the rooms except his study have been recreated based off of pictures of Ibsen in a room using his known shoe size to recreate the floor patterns and other items. So much of the museum is unoriginal because after Ibsen and his wife died, their son offered the state the opportunity to buy the apartment, but they turned the offer down because Norway was poor at the time and the apartment was expensive. So, all of their belongings were sold to other museums around the country and the world. The museum has done a pretty good job and is still working on reobtaining items from Ibsen's apartment. When I saw the museum, it was though I was looking directly at the apartment of "The Doll's House" set in Christiana at the end of the 19th century.

I also learned some interesting things about Ibsen. Ibsen was a very vain man and was known to put on all of his medals and wear them around the house even if he didn't go out. Also, after he obtained an honorary doctorate degree from a university in Sweden, he insisted to be called Dr. Ibsen after that. Besides being a vain man, Ibsen was also a man of habit. He wrote at his writing desk from 9:30 t0 11:00 each morning, when he would put on his overcoat and top hat and walk down Karl Johans Gate to the Grand Café where he would sit everyday in the same chair drinking a German beer while reading the German newspaper. How could he afford this you might ask? Well, in those days a typical salary for a university professor in a year was about 3,000 kroner or about what Ibsen paid for his yearly rent. However, he made much more: upwards of 30,000 kroner a year.

Today (Tuesday), was not an extraordinary day by any means, but interesting nonetheless. In my literature class, we had a guest lecturer who discussed translating. He is currently writing translations of Ibsen for Penguin Classics and he is a professor at University of Surrey. He talked about the various challenges of making a translation in that it can't just be word for word -- one must try to encapsulate the feeling the words provoke in one language and provoke the same feelings in another language. Overall, one of the more interesting topics I've heard about in a long time.

In the evening, we went to Sognsvann to study and enjoy the nice weather while it's here.

Well, that's all for now. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures.