Such a Stereotype...

I turned a load of washing blue.

I know, you probably expected it sooner. My bachelor skills (though probably better than Mom thinks) are pretty limited. There has been a lot of pizza in my life.

Well, and now some faintly-blue athletic socks.

Oh well, could be worse - at least there were no white shirts in the load (and really, who cares if your dishrags are baby blue?)

This past weekend in Ulsteinvik turned out to be really quite busy. On Friday (only 3 weeks after the rest of the world), I attended the Ulsteinvik premiere of "The Incredible Hulk". I like the genre, and reviews seemed to imply that it was worth watching, but of course I went because Bella Coola, British Columbia plays a vital, 30-second role in the movie - it's where the main character has run away to by the end of the movie. It was neat to see the name of my hometown on a movie screen on the other side of the world.

Then, Saturday, I drove to the neighbouring municipality, Herøy kommune, to see their annual "Viking musical", Kongens Ring ("the King's Ring"). While I admit to missing most of the plot due to the language barrier, some was obvious (there was a love triangle, duh), and I spent a lot of time distracted by the very impressive costumes, music and production quality (I suppose they can afford some tech gimmicks - they only put on four shows per year, but they charged us Can$60 (kr. 300) each, and there were probably 500 people in attendance. The weather was fabulous, and the show was very impressive - 200 people in the cast, and apparently over 50 behind the scenes.

While the Herøy one is particularly impressive, apparently this is common up and down the coast - one weekend in the summer, the town will put on a major theatrical production of a story (this one was entirely fictional, but they vary from recorded history through mythical stories to pure fiction) from the region's past. Of course, these towns may now be only 15 minutes driving from each other, but in ancient times, they may even have been different kingdoms - giving many different storylines to explore. Particularly for the children of the area, this is just "one of those things you do" if you live in the town. Herøy has a total population of about 8,300, and put on a show with over 300 people (once you include people directing traffic, etc.) Very impressive.

The "second half" of the soccer season has now started (they take a summer break, like everyone else), so Sunday was back to Høddvoll to see Hødd take on Nybergsund. Not a great start (down 3-0 after 20 minutes), but they came back to make it 3-2 by the end, so it was worth watching.

The weather here has been fantastic, 20+ degree temperatures, and sunny. Everyone tells me that I'm just lucky. I don't care, I'll take it. It turns out there is a nice little white sand beach in Ulsteinvik, so I went there on Saturday evening. The water is still the North Atlantic, regardless of the air temperature, though, so it's not so great for swimming!

The office is emptying out, as Ulstein's official three-week designated summer vacation (which I'm not taking) starts next week, so many people are getting a head start. I would say we're at about 50% of the staff present this week, and we'll be down at about 10% next week - the cafeteria even shuts down for three weeks.

During that time, it'll just be me and the contract workers (the Romanians and my Venezuelan friend), so I'm hoping to get a lot of work done on my boat.

Cheers,

Ashley