Trondheim, Norway - EAIE Conference (12-17 Sept. 2007)

I have been in Trondheim Norway for the last few days for the European Association of International Educators conference. Always a good chance to learn more about your job and the best practices of other universities. It really gives you positive drive to better your programs and ideas to improve and implement things. I've had a few good ideas come through over the last few days. Besides that, meeting 2,500 people who are working in the same sector as yourself is always an interesting experience.

As far as the city goes, I always enjoy new cities. I hadn't been to Norway since I was knee-high and 4 years old, and didn't remember much about it. Well, that's not true, I spent an afternoon in Tromso, in northern Norway in 1994 while on student exchange in Finland when we had a field course in the north. I remember the colors from that trip.....grey, a bit of green, and more grey. The water seemed grey as well as the sky, and it was broken up by the green of the vegetation (not too much of it, this is tundra country) and the dark grey granite of the rocky coast. I find that although Norway is a fascinating country geographically, with it's crazy coastline, it doesn't really appeal to me that much otherwise. I think this is mostly due to the inclimate weather. It ranged from 5 degrees Celsius to 12 degrees, which is fine, but the thing is that you can never tell when it will rain! It might be clear and in 5 minutes clouds move in and it rains for ten minutes. Then nothing. Then it starts to rain horizontally with gusty winds. Then nothing. Then it hails. Umbrella's don't help. I ruined two of them in the last few days. The last one basically collapsed on itself while I was walking to the conference from the hotel. i arrived soaking. Unfortuantely all of my winter stuff is in storage at the moment and I only had on a business jacket. I was freezing and a pathetic sight. Today it is raining again (it's rained every day) and we are supposed to take a boat tour of the fjord. Hopefully it will clear up a bit so we can enjoy it. Someone told me the other day that last year they had 87, yes, 87 days straight with rain. I couldn't live in a place like this. But there are good things, like the salmon, and the Norwegian people are very nice and warm. If anything, because of the crazy weather I won't soon forget the trip!