Vegard

Exciting news! The Englishman has been replaced by a Norwegian student, and Emma is once again staying with her brother. The Norwegian's name, as you may have already guessed, is Vegard. Roughly. I've only seen it in Cyrillic so far. I was afraid, at first, that I was going to have to communicate with him entirely in Russian--but he's European, so of course he knows English too. That's probably an unfair generalization (though I hesitate to call any generalization which can be paraphrased "lucky bastards!" unfair); but in Norway, at least, English is taught from first grade on. So.

Vegard is here studying Russian, naturally enough, and has already taken six months' worth of it at home. I'm going to go ahead and suppose that all the studying of English taught him how to listen to foreign languages, because he already seems to be doing a lot better than I was when I got here. Not as well as I'm doing now, though. Anyway, it seems that things are coming full circle, since I will now be here just long enough to make things easier for someone else who will be living here for a while. I got to explain to what to expect from and how not to offend Emma, and I started to explain about the white nights (in connection with the question of whether or not the streets are safe at night) before I realized that he comes from the land of the midnight sun.

It should be interesting--but I'll give him until tomorrow before I start grilling him about Norway.