YES Canada - Learn, Travel, Experience on a Student Exchange!

First Few Days in Norway - by Mario Haemmerli 2011-08-16

Got to the airport in Oslo on Sunday, Aug. 16th. I was met by my host family Knut, Grete, and Asmund and we drove back to their house. It was cloudy and rained for the first two days. Here where my host family lives there are a lot of hills, not all flat like in Ontario. If you go uphill on the streets you can get a pretty good view. We also went to Oslo yesterday. We went to see the ski jumps and took some pictures, its a few hundred metres above sea level so the view is very good too. 

Read below for an excerpt of the blog of a YES student who did an exchange to Italy last year. This was one of her last posts before returning home......

"host mom came into my room to wake me up at 7:30 yesterday morning, got dressed then at 8:30 my fellow exchange student friend arrived and we headed to naples for the day! after many warnings and lots of advice we got on the train. arrived in naples and i was pleasantly surprised that i remember where we were… we started be heading over to il duomo di san gennaro (church) and then walked back and up and down other streets visiting more churches and other beautiful parts of naples.

me somehow ended up near the ocean and spent a little bit of time looking around and sitting watching the ocean. we then spent a while looking around for somewhere to eat, chose a little cafe with a few of the ocean nearby a beautiful big park.

afterwards we weren’t entirely sure where we were, but after asking for directions from a nice middle-aged man, we got along the path to get back to where we started. we then decided to switch plans and go visit the famous pizzeria “da michele”. after asking directions from another man, who not knowing called up a friend and instructed us to take the bus and a third who helped us figure out what tickets we needed we finally got on the bus and found the pizzeria! thank goodness for kind neapolitan strangers!

anyways, being thoroughly exhausted at the point we headed over to the train station (no the one we got off at) and looking confused asked directions from a few more people (including a cute guy working at the bar) and figured out where we were. we watched the multitude of people get off the trains, all the teenage boys and men with their “napoli” scarves on for the game later and laughed when i guy, realizing we spoke english went, “OHHHH. OHHHH. INGLESE!” haha.

meet a funny man on the train who explained the key to life to us… then arrived back in san vitaliano, hobbled with our sore legs down the 3 flights of stairs arrived home and… instead of resting went straight to the mall. :P "