Sorry for the long Delay :S

Ok so its been awhile since my last post, this time lag is a direct cause of my netbook taking a hard and fast swan dive into brokeness. The hard drive crashed and cost more than the netbook to replace. So good news I have a new netbook; the cheapest one in Bergen and its better than my last one. Bad news, it has a norwegian/swedish keyboard making this blog especially interesting to write and had a norwegian price tag on it, I am now poor :S
In other news orientation week was a blast and I've met a lot of new people. Beer is really expensive so i plan on making my own beer with a 2 week brewing window... im obviously not counting on good taste, but then again i've never had good taste for anything :p

I climbed a mountain out back from my apartment the other day, i stumbled upon this weird path that started with a 1ft wide bridge across a creek and then up steep ledges of rock. Eventually the trail came to a vertical rock face of about 20ft up. i had no idea how to get up there until i noticed something in the snow which turned out to be a rope! so the rest of the trail involved repelling up rock faces and climbing ladders to get to the peak. It was tiring but definitely worth it in the end for the view. Pictures and videos at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasonmader/sets/72157623242716276/detail/

Classes started this week, it turns out I'm considered a masters student out here even though in Canada i'm just a bachelor. The reasoning for this is that this is my 5th year of university, and since ive been in school so long and have overloaded on courses every year I have enough credits to be nearly done my masters out here (maybe I should nag them to count me as a PHD student :p ). So far I'm overloading as usual, I'm only supposed to take 4 classes, but I'm taking more mainly because we don't have most of these courses back in Canada, at least that I know of, and I find them terribly interesting compared to the usual finance and accounting classes I'm accustomed to. So far I'm taking:

1) International Fisheries Management
2) Alternative energy sources in the physical, environmental and economic perspective
3) Design and operation of deregulated electricity markets
4) Energy challenges and energy production in the 21st century
5) Environmental Economics
6) Environmental responsibility: the role of NGO's and large corporations
7) Communicating in the energy sector
8) Norwegian Language 101

Should be a blast!

Everything here closes on Sundays, and I mean everything! so all the students tend to get very bored (and hungry if they did not pre-grocery shop) so we are starting a hiking club and hiking a new mountain every sunday. This sunday we plan on hiking from the first mountain I climbed; fjellveien or Fløyen (not sure which one is its real name) to a place called ørliken. the hike starts on the peak of fløyen and goes along the peaks of several mountains around a lake and ends at the peak of ørliken where you take a gondola down (or if we have any energy left we walk down :p

I'll be sure to post more pictures of the hikes as they come :)