First Post.

Hello everyone (and a special shout-out to everyone at Block Yeshiva High School in St. Louis, Missouri, USA)!  We've finally arrived in Norway!We took a plane from St. Louis to Chicago, and from there embarked on another plane that took us all the way to Stockholm, Sweden.  Then, got on another plane to Oslo, the capital of Norway, at which point we took a train, a bus, and then a train again to reach the city of Kristiansand, which is on the coast of southern Norway.  Looking outside of the train windows, we got some notion of what the terrain looked like.  Unlike the American midwest, where the landscape outside of the cities and suburbs is overwhelmingly agricultural, with lots of fields filled with corn and soybean plants, in Norway the land (or at least the part of it that we've seen from the train) is much less hospitable to farming--there's lots of exposed rock and plenty of pine trees.  For the last leg of our train trip (normally, it would have simply been one trip, but there was a detour due to construction, so we had to take one short train trip, then a short bus trip around the construction, then a longer train trip), we arranged to ride on the railroad car designed for children--it had fewer seats and more open space so that children could walk around.  What was also nice is that riding in the children's car did not cost any more money.

The weather here is cooler than in St. Louis--tomorrow's high in Kristiansand is supposed to be around 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  That it's colder here is not so surprising--given that the latitude here is about 58 degrees north on the map, as opposed to St. Louis, whose latitude is a little more than 38 degrees north on the map.  What are lines of latitude?  They are imaginary horizontal lines circling the globe going east-west.  The further north you are in the northern hemisphere, the higher the latitude, with the latitude at the equator being 0 degrees, and the latitude at the north pole being 90 degrees north.Because we are so far north, the days in the summertime are longer than in St. Louis.  Sunrise today was at about 5:35, while sunset will come at 9:31.  By comparison, sunrise in St. Louis arrived at 6:09 this morning, and sunset will fall at 8:04 pm.  This will change pretty quickly, until during the winter the days will be shorter than they are in St. Louis.  Many people here speak English--they really push the learning of English in the grade schools--so we haven't had to use the phrasebook that we brought along.  That's all for now--more later.