Getting Adjusted

Kyle and I meet with our buddy group on the University of Oslo campus. International students are encouraged to join a buddy group where 3-4 buddies (either Norwegian students or international students who have already been at the university for some time) show new students around. Our buddies are Manuel from Spain and Rima from Lithuania. We all sit on the lawn, very university-catalog-esque, and introduce ourselves. There are a lot of students from Germany, but also Spain, Italy, Finland, France, Brazil, South Korea, and Australia in our group. We also meet Gabrielle, a fellow USAC program student. She is from Canada but goes to Humbolt State. Our group all gets coffee at cafe on campus, mostly to take shelter from the heavy rain shower that sneaked up on us and overthrew the sunny morning.

We have plans to take the T-bane to the central station where the mayor will give a welcome speech to new international students, but the rain makes Kyle, Gabrielle, and me a little reluctant to stand in what is likely a partially flooded square for a long speech. Instead, we get off the T-bane and get a pizza lunch. Unused to the Norwegian krone-U.S. dollar conversion and the tipping custom in Norway, combined with the usually confusion that goes with splitting a check amongst students, we unwittingly tip the waitress $10 for our shared pizza.

Having made the waitress's day, we take the free bus to IKEA where we marvel at the low prices. The conversion is about 6 kroner to $1, so we stock up on the kitchenware and bedding that our airline-regulation-size luggage did not allow us to bring. On our way home, we stop by KIWI which is a grocery store in Kringsja Village, so it is actually in our apartment complex. The store has pretty low prices as well, and pretty much all the necessary foods and cleaning/grooming supplies a student will need. Considering the prices at IKEA and KIWI, combined with my single room's monthly rent of about $500, it appears that Oslo's notorious high prices can only be found in restaurants (and I've heard gasoline as well).

The rain has stopped, and things are looking up finance-wise. Before leaving the U.S., I was preparing myself to spend quite a bit more on things, but it seems that if I steer clear of restaurants or visit them sparingly, I might be able to manage living in Oslo at about the same price I live as a student at UCSB. (But then again, this might be saying something about the rent in Isla Vista where rent for a shared room is usually around $600.)