Goodbye South Carolina

Saturday we said goodbye to all hour lovely host families and Sharon drove us to the airport in Greenville - Spartanburg. At the airport many people showed up to say goodbye. That was so nice! Thank you all! 

The first plane went too Texas and Dallas, the next one went to London and finally, and after 26 hours, we ended up in Oslo. At the airport our names was announced on the speaker and if you have been reading this blog from the beginning... well its true. Our luggage didnt make it this time either. So no, 24 hours after we landed at the airport, i finally got my luggage. I hope that the rest of the group has got their luggage too. 

The last four weeks has been a trip i never forget. We have learned a lot about USA and South Carolina and i hope you have learned something about Norway too. W have seen a lot of different places and we all had a lot of fun. We have met many people and everbody has been so nice and friendly.  The lovely host families has open their arms and hosted us norwegians. Amazing. I can only say thank you so much!!!! Fantastic trip and a memory for life! We love you!

The GSE Team in Norway write a blog too. 

http://rotarynorway2008.blogspot.com

zzzzzz

The earliest start on the trip, 06:45.... puh. Aiken Sunrise Roatry meeting and the last presentation. I think we hold our presentation 18 times in South Carolina. So if someone didn`t see it... well you had a lot of chances so bad for you...:)

Aiken County Museum conducted by Elliott Levy was the next thing on the program. And finally we went for a hike in Hitchcock Woods with Dr. Harry Shealy. If it is something in that forest he don`t know, i am sure you don`t need that information. Very nice walk with a man that can everything! 

Friday was the last day before departure. Martin, Christian and me got a very nice experience. We played at Palmetto Golf Course. Wow, that was amazing. Difficult course and very fast greens, but what a place! Thank you so much!

After lunch at the Green Boundary Club we got a croquet demonstration. Next time i hope it would be a tournament. norway against America!

The goodbye party that night was at Windham Performance Stage. Richard Pearce was the chef of the grilled meat and it was delicious! So after that party we all went home to try to pack our stuff.

Charleston

The day started at 7 am and and by 10:30 we saw the beautiful city on the coast. This was the place most of the slaves came in with boats and was sold to people. 

After a short visit we drove to Middelton Place, not very far from the city. This place had 800 slaves working at the same time and it was a very big farm that produced rice and cotton. After this visit we returned to Charleston. Three hours of shopping and relaxing in a beautiful city. Then we returned to Aiken around 22:00.  Here you can see the names of the slaves and the price that Middelton payed for them. At the last photo you can see a part of the beautiful place.

Aiken

Monday 19. may we went to Aiken.  The first thing on the program was to hold our presentation at Rotary Club of Aiken. After that we went with the host familyes. The other team-members went home, but i drove to Augusta in Georgia to visit TV Channel 12. 

At 5 pm all of us went to Bob and Kathleen McClure for a welcome party. Thank you for that! I was a nice evening. 

The next day it was a vocational morning. I drove back to Georgia and this time i spend some hours with the people in Augusta Chronicle.

After that we all went to Batesburg and a tour on Joe Watsons peach operation. I think that this was the firt time for all of us we saw peach on a three. And Joe led us threw his beautiful farm. The tour ended with peach ice and coke. 

Then we went to another party and once again we hold our presentation. The plan was not to do that but heavy rain did disturb the party so everybody had to go inside. So the GSE-Team was the entertainment that evening.

Charlotte

First of all, sorry folks but the last week was very very busy. Thats why the blog has not been updated. But anyway, here is what we have been doing the last week. 

Sunday 18. may we went to Charlotte in North Carolina. It was the biggest city on the trip and a nice place. 

17th of May-party

We had a great party at the 17th of May at a lodge by the lake in Rock Hill. Our host-families and new friends did a great job to make sure that we had a super celebration of our national day! Thank you everyone :-) We even had a guest who could speak Norwegian, he remebered it from 1972, when he spent a year in Ski as an exchange student. Amazing!
Linda took Christian and Martin on a shopping-tour to get hold of all the food we needed for our party. Gale helped me to shop for my baking-experiment (blotkake) while I was strolling around in the botanical garden. After a quick call to my sister to make sure that we had the equivalent American measures compared to my Norwegian recipe. It worked out very well, our guests thought it was a very good cake! I forgot to take a picture, so you have to imagine this: a white fluffy cream cake filled with strawberries both inside and on top. Mmmmmm.
As you can see from the picture, me and Kristoffer put on our best clothes, our national costumes. All five even sang our national anthem, like we always do on the 17th of May.















MY VOCATIONAL DAY AT THE IMAGINON
Friday I had a fantastic day in Charlotte, visiting the main library, and then having a tour of Imaginon, the children and youth library (ages 0 to 18). This quote I found outside the main library:



















Imaginon is a great library. I wish I could pack it in my suitcase and bring it back to Oslo. Imaginon is both a library and a children's theater, the house is full of activities, a great place to hang out.














I had to have a picture of myself in this comfortable chair made of telephone catalogues. The 6R Movement is a group of young people who work with different environmental projects at the library, for excample recycling old telephone catalogues into chairs.
















This is an overlooking view over the library, but to get a full picture of this fantastic library, you'll have to visit it. I enjoyed every minute of it.

17. may

First i have to tell you about vocational day. I went to the first radiostation on this trip. WHRI in Rock Hill. When i was with them they had a live broadcast from down town and after the radioshow we got back to the radiostation. Good people and a nice day.

In the evening it was another baseballgame. This Nascar was in front of the stadium.

Baseball. New York won.

So, 17. may. First we went to Historic Brattonsville. The staff at the museum worked inside the old houses. They did the same thing that they did on the same place many years ago. The museum have 775 acre site feature over 30 colonial and antebellum structures, two battlefield site, a d heritage breed farm animals. A living history from 1750s to the 1850s.  This is also the place that over 30 percent of the film "The Patriot". 

In two hours we are going to celebrate our 17. may. What happen there is a secret. Come back here soon.

York

Today we have been to York. First we went to King`s Mountain and the museum. After that we went to York Rotary Club and hold our brilliant presentation. A lot of people asking good questions and it was a nice hour at the club. After the meeting we had a guided tour in York, a small village. The last stop on todays program was American Eagle who makes wheels. We saw how they make them and was told that inside the plant during the summer it could be 130 fahrenheit, or about 45 celcius inside... puh

Pictures from today will be published tomorrow. 

Here are some other pictures from the trip:

Abbeville

Breakfast for kids...

I went to an Elementary school in Greenwood with kids between three and six years and told them about Norway. That was a big hit!

Norway had the largest flag in Greenville.  By the way, how are you outbound team???

You can do everything in US and still sitting in the car. This is a bank.. even drive thru waterfalls exist in this country:)

Arriving Rock Hill

Today we just arrived in Rock Hill, a city close to the North-Carolina border. I am at my host family's home, tucked in bed, ready to go to sleep. My hosts' got six cats and three birds. I do not need any other entertainment :0) Marvin, the oldest of them (18 years!) and I are already good friends. Toby is the rascal in the family, and knows how to open doors and to fall down from the upstairs porch several times, when will he ever learn.... I'll be back with more cat-news and even more interesting stories about our doings tomorrow. Zzzzzzzz

Abbeville

Yesterday our plan of hiking the mountain Table Rock had to be cancelled because of heavy rain. I had been looking forward to that trip, so I was a bit disappointed. Anyway, it was nice to have a day without a time schedule. My host took me for a drive to Ninety Six. For those of you that aren't familiar with South-Carolina's geography, Ninety Six is the name of a city. The city got it's name from what the Cherokees thought was the distance to the nearest cities, ninetysix miles. I thought it was a bit funny :).
Today we went with rotarian Tommy to Abbeville, a small city with 6000 inhabitants (Abbeville county has 26 000 inhabitants). We had a short introduction about the city at the Welcome center, had a tour in the opera house, Burk-Stark's Mansion and the oldest church in town, very beautiful. We ate lunch at The Dutch Oven, a restaurant run by Amish-people. I have always thought that the Amish are living quite isolated from the rest of the modern world in Pennsylvania, but that proved to be wrong. In Abbeville they live side by side with all the others, and participates in the commmunity. I learn something new every day, that's why travelling is so great. Tommy also took us to Erskin College, where we had a tour on campus.
There are so many things to take in, and I can honestly say that we are enjoying everything we do and appreciate the work that has been done to show us all parts of South-Carolina!

Flower-power in Newberry

We are now staying in Greenwood, but spent the day in the neighbouring city Newberry. Two very nice ladies picked us up and took us on a tour in the city. They showed us their opera house, which was very nice. They also took us to the Newberry County Hospital, the local radio station, and the college. Before we had our presentation we visited an orchid greenhouse, Carter & Holmes Orchids. Enjoy the flowers.

Baseball - I love it!

Yesterday we had a long, but enjoyable day. First of all we visited the Phillis Wheatley Center. We learned a great deal about what challenges the African-American community in Greenville meets, and that it's also problem for the city of Greenville. We admire the people working to make Greeenville a better place to live for everyone, also for the African-Americans, although the people we met thinks it will be a long time struggle.

We did our fair share of work in Greenville's soup kitchen. An experience for life. We poured soup and drinks, portioned salad/vegetables and cakes. It was a busy hour, and finally we got to sit down and eat lunch, eating the same food we had been serving the people coming to the kitchen. This is a part of Greenville as well, and I am thankful that we had the chance to see it.

Upstate Forever is an organization that tries to prevent the city sprawl, the way cities tend to grow and take over nature surrounding the cities. An interesting issue for us Norwegians who are used to our government taking care of these problems to some extent, or at least has it on its agenda. We also visited the Governor's School for the arts, a High School for students that are creative in the arts. A great chance for them to make their talents grow. We had a tour, and enjoyed it.

BASEBALL














Finally, the day was completed by a baseball game: Greenville-Rome. It lasted for 3 hours and it's not at all as energetic as soccer, but I enjoyed it. I was supplied with my beer, hot-dog and Tom and Cathy who explained everything I needed to know about the game. Greenville won, of course we supported Greenville! Thanks to all hostfamilies and other significant people for giving us a fantastic stay in Greenville. Then it's off to Greenwood :)

Busy busy busy - we've got a tight schedule

Greenville is full of good stuff! Yesterday we went to Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research. An interesting way of doing education, both government and private enterprises (read: BMW, Mazda etc.) fund the school. They are educating tomorrow's working force.
We also went to the Greenville Art Museum and The UpcountryHistory Museum, great guides at both places!

Today we've had our vocational day. I spent mine i Greenville County Library, being taken good care of by Bev James and her wonderful colleagues. I had a great time and will go home with some new ideas, as I will from the visit to the library in Spartanburg.

We finished up with a Pot Luck Dinner at Burt's place. A wonderful evening with good friends. We got to say goodbye to the outbound team that is going to Norway on Saturday (except for Lamesha and Rebecca). We know you will enjoy your trip, and we'll meet you in Oslo when we get back! I have an early morning tomorrow, so I have to go to bed. We're going to work in a soup kitchen. That'll be interesting, keep reading!

Our first day visiting the Greenville Area

The district conference is over, and we are now living with our lovely host families. Yesterday (Sunday) I spent in the Peace Concert Hall where the symphony played The Resurrection by Gustav Mahler. Wonderful! Afterwards I went to a dinner with my host family were Dr Paul Farmer were the guest of honour, how great! For those of you who do not know Farmer I can tell you that he was one of the speakers at the conference this weekend. He gave the most inspiring speach, about improving peoples health in Haiti. What an amazing man. He even signed my copy of his book.

Breakfast with the mayor
Lucky as we are we had breakfast with the mayor of Greenville, Knox White. The view from the building was fantastic ( I don't remember which one it was...). He told us about the city and some of the city plans. Interesting! We had a nice breakfast, but forgot to take pictures.


The Chamber of Commerce
We had an interesting visit to the city's Chamber of Commerce where we met Hank Hyatt. He could tell us al about how Greenville is trying to make the county a great place for business. There are a lot of international businessess in the area and we had a great time learning about their focus on business and also education.

News
The Greenville News and WYFF Television were having the honour of giving us guided tours today. I have never been in a television studio before. Morten is going back to both of these corporations on his vocational day later this week. We enjoyed our few minutes of fame. Well, okay, we didn't actually go on air, but we had fun sitting in those chairs.



















Birthday boy
Our presentation at the lunch with the Greenville East Rotary Club went very well. They even had figured out that we had a birthday boy in our group: Morten, who is turning 31 tomorrow, had his birthday cake. We all tasted it, so we know it was good! Congratulations Morten :)
























Ride with Sheriff Deputy
In Greenville you can ride along with the Sheriff Deputy. We did, and I found it quite interesting. I haven't spoken to the rest of the group, so I do not know what they experienced. I'm sorry I didn't get a picture of me and the deputy, but it's all true.

Pictures

Saturday afternoon it was a duck-derby in Greenville. 10000 ducks was thrown into the stream and if the duck you had bought was first over the finishline you will win 2500 dollars. It was a prizes from 1 to 18th place, and Kristoffer and Mette both won. Kristoffers duck was number 7 down the stream, Mettes number 14. Congratulations.

Here we are ready to go to Greenville after almost one week in Spartanburg.

Friday we went to BMW between Greenville and Spartanburg. 660 BMWs rolling out every day and here you can see the X6.

This has been our ride for several times in Spartanburg. 20 year old car and we love it!

This is a picture from Cowpens. 

District Conference

Friday the hole group went to Greenville for the District Conference.
After checking in at the Hyatt we left for a tour of the BMW plant just outside of Greenville. That was one cool factory.
It was impressing to see how all the robots and machines can build 660 cars a day.

We also met the outbound team that is going to Norway. They were realy exciteed and wanted to learn to speak some norwegian. And that proved to be a little difficult :-) Keep training !

Spartanburg

Wednesday morning we went to Cowpens and the battlefield. It was really interesting to see how they fought the Britts, and how Capt. Morgan planed the attack.

In the afternoon we all went to Gaffney Outlet mall for some shopping. The dollar is being very nice for us norwegians right now :-)

Thursday was also very interesting. The Chapman Cultural Arts Center had a huge collection of old artifacts spanning from the Indians to the 18'th century, the civil war, 1 world war etc.

We have been in Spartenburg for almost a week, and everybody has been so nice to us.
It's a place we all will miss!

THANKS TO YOU ALL !!!!