Hi everyone, This is the intro for our State Department presentation on friday, enjoy!

The Final days

4 weeks have passed, and still it feels like we arrived just yesterday. We are in the final stages of the program - making presentations for the state department and preparing for the National Night. The latter is supposed to be a presentation of our own country, and we will show it to all of the people we have met during our stay. These include other students, inhabitants of the old folks' home of Brookhaven and all our professors, to mention a few. Right now we are going to evaluate the program, which simply has been great!

1 week, 4 essays

This has definitely been one of the more stressful weeks, as we have had a lot of writing to do, new classes and new impressions to digest every day of the week. We visited the Boston State House and walked the Freedom Trail, which is an historical tour of Boston, among other things. The group is getting along great and this friday we had a national cooking pot night, with everyone preparing their own national dish. As true Norwegians, Olav, Sara and myself prepared smoked salmon (imported from norway..!) with bread and scrambled eggs. The night was a great success and was followed by a trip to the amusement park Six Flags the day after. In addition to great rollercoasters, we got to run around in a water park, where everyone had great fun. Now we have only two weeks left, time is passing by so fast!
Knut

In the heights! <3

On Sunday, we went to a broadway show in New York: In the heights! <3

In the heights is a story that explores days in the characters' lives in the New York City Dominican-American neighborhood of Washington Heights. The story features and focuses on Hip-hop, salsa, merengue and soul music. It was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won a Tony Award for "Best musical".
The show has a lot of comedy, drama and even romance!

I recommend this show to everybody who wants to see a REAL broadway show :)

Our weekend trip to New York

Saturday morning we all woke up very early to Fatime (Our friend from Sweden) going in to all of the dorms and singing the New York song: "Start spreading the news, I'm leaving today. I want to be a part of it, New Yoooork, NEW YORK!". Yes, people, we were going to New York!
It was very funny, and she got us all in the mood, even though it was very early!

After a 4 hour long bus drive, we arrived at "The hotel in Times Square", which was the name of the hotel we would be staying in. After getting settled in, we went around in Times Square and that was a lot of fun! New York is completely amazing!
As well as walking around in Times Square, we also went to see the Empire State building, we walked around in Central Park (some of us) and we also took a ferry around New York. In the ferry, we got to among a lot of things The Statue of Liberty. :) But now we are only talking about Saturday. Because guess what we did on Sunday? We went to see a Broadway show: In the heights :)

We had a great weekend in New York, and it is impossible to describe how amazing the city is!

Politics and work! =)

Hi, guys! How are you?
We are sorry for the late update, we have had a lot to do.. Perhaps I should tell you about what we have done since the last time we updated?

Well, on Wednesday we had a class called "The U.S Constitution and the Supreme Court". We actually got to learn a lot about what the similarities and differences are between the U.S system and our countries' systems. As a part of the class, we went to visit the State Supreme Judicial Court.

On Thursday, we had the "American Politics" class. This was also an exiting class, since we went to visit the Massachusetts State House. And guess who we saw there? The governor!! :D Unfortunately, we did not get to talk to him, because he was in a rush. But we met a State representative who was more than happy to show us around :)

On Friday, we went to visit an old people's home, where we had our community service. We participated in a meeting where many of them read stories they had written; Stories both about things they had experienced, etc.. And since we all come from many different countries, we also sang songs for them or read stories/poems from our countries. They seemed to be having a lot of fun :) We also participated in a "dancing lesson" with them, where we had a dance instructor that taught us how to dance different folk dances :) That was so much fun

These are pictures from the State Supreme Juidicial Court:

These are pictures from the Massachusetts State house.

These are pictures from us and our friends from The Netherlands performing in the old people's home:

From Sunday til Tuesday!

We have now finished our first week here in the States, and have just entered our second week.
Yesterday (Monday) and today we have had classes about leadership. We have done a lot of things and we have learned a lot as well :)

On Sunday we went to Cape Cod. The Cape Cod is a very nice beach not too far away from campus. The weather was extremely nice (as always) and we had a lot of fun just playing around at the beach. After we had spent some hours at the beach, we went to a street called the "main street" which was not far away from the beach. We walked through some of the stores they had there and after we had lunch, we went to see a real baseball game! :D
The funny part is that the "host dude" actually announced us on the speaker, and told everybody to welcome us, something that was incredibly fun =D
The baseball game was very exiting and we all acted like we were some REAL baseball fans!

Yesterday we started with the leadership class, and after having our regular seminars (with many interesting facts), we had a seminar at the evening which was very special!
A former veteran who had been and experienced the Vietnam war came to visit us and talk about his experiences in the war and how things are working out for him now.
I have to say - The seminar was so deep and strong, that no one barely talked to eachother when we walked out of the room after the seminar.
You could truly tell that this man had gone through a lot of things, things that are so difficult to imagine!

Today, we had a panel discussion with female community leaders :) They seemed to heve a lot of experience in different types of arenas.. We all asked them a lot of questions that they were more than willing to answer!
Later on in the evening we went to eat dinner at Megan's (one of the mentor) house.. It was very nice to meet her extremely kind family :) We had a very funny evening there; we ate a lot of good food, sang in all kinds of languages, danced and had fun :D

Tomorrow, we are going to a courthouse to witness a real case, something that I bet will be very memorable :)