Today, August 15, 2011 is my one-year ordination birthday!
August 1, 2011 was my one-year at Knox birthday, which was surreal to think that I’ve been in Naperville for a year and survived one winter. Continue Reading…
Rachel had a previous connection with Denmark because she had been an adult sponsor for an exchange program. Through the program, she met a woman our age, Camilla, and Camilla was nice enough to offer us her place to stay at while she was on vacation. She even went one step further and asked her dad, Mr. Olsen, to come to the train station and drive us to her apartment. It was really nice to have an apartment with a kitchen and multiple rooms. Rachel gave me the big bed and slept on the couch, so I was able to spread out for the first time in a week. Very relaxing and refreshing. Thank you Camilla.
Mr. Olsen driving us to Camilla’s apartment:
One of my main connections to Denmark is Karen Blixen, who was a Danish writer who spent 17 years in Kenya from 1914 to 1931. During my year in Kenya, I lived in Karen, a suburb outside of Nairobi, where Karen Blixen had lived and is now her namesake. I actually lived less than a mile from her house the entire year. Continue Reading…
We arrived in Oslo, Norway with our list of things to do and an idea of what order we wanted to do them in. We spent our first night settling in and finding our bearings by walking around Oslo.
Norwegian Parliament Building (flag is up when Parliament is in session):
Thursday we got up and headed over to the City Hall, which is where the Nobel Peace Prize is handed out every year.
Nobel was Swedish and the rest of the Nobel Prizes are handed out in Sweden, but he wanted this one prize to be handed out in Norway (there are some assumptions to why he did this, but no one is sure). We had an excellent guided tour by our guide, Ivan, who was paid by the city to give tours throughout the day at no charge. They only had two murals on the wall of previous people who had received the Nobel Peace Prize: Obama and Wangari Maathai from Kenya. I had the opportunity to meet Wangari Maathai when I was in Kenya at an Obama Election Party… kind of cool. Continue Reading…
