17th Of May Norway Independence Day

Elder Decker, Elder Mitchell, Elder Nelson, Me

May 22, 2017

Hello Everyone!

I hope you all had a great week. I sure had an incredible one.

The 17th of May is the biggest celebration in Norway. It's their Independence Day. Last year, I was in Oslo to celebrate it, and this year I was in Drammen. Last year was crazy because it was like a million plus people all crowding the streets of Oslo, and the parade went past the King's Palace and everything. So that was a ton of fun. This year was more relaxing. We saw the parade here in Drammen, so that was really fun. It's so cool to see everyone's national pride.

Arizona Drink

After watching the parade, I found an Arizona juice. I drank a lot of in the States, but haven't seen in Norway. Don't worry, it wasn't the tea one. It was such a throw-back though to days on the golf greens. Good times haha. So it was fun to see that someone had found some in probably Sweden and it's now here in Norway. That was cool.

Dessert on 17th of May

I left, Arizona juice in hand, and we went to a little tiny town further up the valley to spend the afternoon with a family up there. We saw the 5 minute long parade (I'm not exaggerating, it really only was 5 minutes long haha) and had some ice cream. Then we had a nice barbecue, had a nice afternoon, and played a round of frisbee golf. I've never played frisbee golf, and I'm not incredible at throwing a frisbee either, but we sure had a lot of fun! It was such a relaxing day, and got to spend it with some incredible people!

Last P-day, we hiked up to a lake behind our house and had a little barbecue with the four of us elders. We took up a little grill and some hot dogs and had that. It was a nice little evening activity. They had a rope course too there!!!! It was way fun. It wasn't very big, but enough to entertain all of us for a couple minutes. So we enjoyed that and stood inside a tipi that's set up there. Pretty cool place.

Grafitti on a wall

The ward here in Drammen had a self-reliance day this week. We went along to that. It was cool to learn different things. Everything from, budgeting, to food storage, to cooking out on an open fire, to eating random (edible) plants, to practical outdoor skills was covered in it. It was a way fun activity they had. Then we had a little barbecue. Brought some hot dogs and cooked them up. The more I write this letter this week though, the more I realize that we have a TON of barbecues here! haha. It's good, I love it!

To top off the week, we were invited over to a family's home for dinner this week, and they made homemade Cafe Rio... Wow... Boy was I impressed. It was DELICIOUS! That was the food story of the week. It was on point. Loved the food. Don't need much, just good food.

Well I hope you all have a great week! Take care!

Sincerely,

Elder Justin Mickelson

17th of May parade

Dead frog