I'm not going to China after all... My grandmother got ill, and she doesn't feel like taking the trip after all. My brother in Shanghai wanted me to come on my own so we could travel around for a month and a half, but that's impossible for me. I've got to go to university, you know.
So I decided on using my money on something else, something useful AND fun. And then I found it!

OK, so I study linguistics. Some of my friends would even call me a nerd or geek because of it. I've got t-shirts, cups, bags and fridge magnets with stupid linguistics jokes on them, I relate everything people say to things I read or learn in class, I correct people's grammar, I write essays about phonological changes in the Oslo dialect for a students magazine, so maybe I am. But I enjoy it, it's actually fun. And now I've used all my general linguistics knowledge to learn a bit of Russian and next semester I'll start with Welsh.

So how am I going to spend my China money now? I've been saving for two months, all the money I get from aunts, uncles or my grandmother whenever I see them end up in my piggy-bank. I bought a new one in September. A bright red one with Chinese letters on it; my China-Piggy. Maybe I should get me an other one, one with syntactic trees on it, or the IPA-chart. Because my China money is no longer China money, but Linguistics money.

This summer will be t h e b e s t s u m m e r e v e r! I'm going eight weeks (yep, you read it right, 8 weeks) to California and one week to the Netherlands for extra linguistics courses that I can fit into my study program here in Norway.
Eight weeks at the UCLA with phonetics and phonology; to help me get motivated to write my bachelor thesis, and one week at Universiteit Utrecht with syntax; to freshen up what I learned in my first year at the university. And when I get back to Oslo after nine weeks of fun study, the serious study begins. More Semantics and Pragmatics, more Morphology and Syntax, more Phonetics and Phonology, and the fun subject of the year: WELSH!

Why do I want to spend all my summer on more classes and exams? Well, I want the foreign experience. I've already done two years at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and two years at the University of Oslo (Norway), and I want to have even more experience from other countries and other scholars, but I can't take one semester here and one semester there and then back again to Oslo, because I'm almost finished with my Bachelor degree and I need my to see my mentor often enough to finally finish my degree. I want to be able to use the knowledge I get when studying aboard for my Master and later PhD, and I think this might be a golden opportunity. I also get to see more of the world and broaden my horizon, don't you think?

Well, enough talking now I have to go back to study for my Semantics and Pragmatics exam Wish me luck!