Two beers with Runa Tunheim

Journalist: Maiken Halvorsen
Photographer: Margreta Brunborg
Translator: Celine Våga

The life before Ås
Runa grew up on a small farm in Valsøyfjord in Nordmøre. She tells of a childhood packed with nature experiences and days filled to the rim with activities. Everything from athletics, dancing, band and fiddle playing had to be tried out. Her parents wanted her to spend a lot of time outside and to use her imagination. Screen-time was limited to half an hour a day. I would not have challenged this girl to a duel in “When I was young…”, for when Runa was young, she played with dolls made of rocks with self-painted faces on top of boulders! Creativity would be formed from the very beginning, something that she has taken with her in life and something that Ås has had great joy from.

When adolescence was knocking on the door, the Valsøyfjord girl left the small town and moved to the big city of Trondheim. There she studied visual arts and joined a folk-music group. The path then took her to Lofoten folk high school with surfing, skiing and crafts. From there, surfing trips to Portugal and Morocco followed. The life she describes makes one want to drop out of studies and join a similar folk high school right away, even though she admits the surfing could be quite scary when the winter waves grew up to five meters tall! After her stay at Lofoten, Runa went on to backpack through Thailand and Laos. This lady surely does not lack a desire for experiences!

Life in the Ås-bubble
After receiving tips of Ås offering a “year of study course” where science competence could be obtained, Runa decided to take such a year at Ås. Here she instantly got a cultural shock and discovered that this was something right up her lane. She was soon engorged by the Ås-bubble and joined Tuntreet as a journalist and Flatlusa as a bandmember, right away. It didn’t take long before she also joined the choir Lærken, where in 2019 she volunteered as the revue chief. Suddenly, this one year had become an integrated Master's degree in Landscape Architecture.

Flatlusa has had a special place in her heart since she started at NMBU, and it is safe to say that she has been a steady force within the association. When her rebellious teen years had begun, Runa tells us, she considered “becoming cool and stop playing the fiddle”. Her grandmother strongly disagreed with this thinking, and was determined to pay for her music lessons. So, the fiddle playing continued and, both Flatlusa and Runa herself (and also every one of us whom has had the pleasure of listening), could not have been happier for it. From being about five members when she joined, Flatlusa's number of members has almost tripled to this very day. Her eyes light up when she talks about what seems like a bloom of interest for folk music among students. “Everyone deserves to experience or participate in the particular world of folk music”, she smiles. One particular exciting memory from her time in the association was the time they played themselves up to the Hannkatt-attic and started a party out of the ordinary.

The board of Samfunnet
After a “Two beers” interview with the then Arrangement Assistant, Runa applied for the same position at Samfunnet. She describes the position as super fun and giving, but also quite time-consuming. During her time as the assistant, she took part in creating “Tuesday refills” on Samfunnet (something that still stands strong this very day, despite Corona!). She worked for a more varied offer, and to lower the threshold for those who were looking for something other than getting drunk. She was later recommended and encouraged to apply for the Arrangement Chief position at Samfunnet. She took the challenge and lined up for the Generall Assembly (GF) with awe for the position. She tells how she had a “downward up” view of those in big positions on Samfunnet. It was frightening to measure one’s self up to these skilled people with “chief T-shirts” and keychains around their neck, but one of these she became, and measure up she did! As Arrangement Chief she, among other things, created the committee position “KS currently” and arranged a burlesque show on the house. She is, by the way, surprised that there are not more applicants for the position of Arrangement Chief, as it probably is one of the coolest positions at Samfunnet.

Runa's positions at Samfunnet do not simply stop at Arrangement Chief: she has been a Bar Guard, Handyman/Caretaker at SiÅs, and run the Café Club for a time period. She had a bunch of ideas and dreams for the Café Club, some which she got to achieve and others not. Did you know that the meal offers in the Café Club didn’t exist before Runa and then Opperations Manager came around? It started with soup and bread, and was eventually expanded to several courses. Cozy fireplace evenings in the Rose Garden and Wednesday pre-games were also created during this time. Another dream she had was to draw those students traveling by train to enjoy the cultural offers of the big city. The catchy concept name “Åslo” would offer the weirder Oslo-hippie-cultural refills. It didn’t exactly go as she had hoped, and she and other cultural-thirsty landscaping students still traveled (before Corona) to Oslo to sit at the Cultural House or dance salsa in a café. “A lesson could be to not try to much new at a time”, she advises, and happily passes the ball over to someone else.

Exchange in Italy
Runa's exchange adventure was set to take place in the spring of 2020. After arriving in Bolzano of Northern Italy, she got two days at the school. Corona strangled the homeland of the Pizza, and everything had to be shut down in a hurry. Vaffanculo Corona! Caught in a country with a national curfew, bad internet reception in the dorm and closed airports, Runa got in a taxi in the middle of the night to cross the border to Switzerland and fly home. She completed her studies online while staying at home in Valsøya, while her “lavish taxi trip to Switzerland” was heavily covered by local media in Valsfjord! But things were not all that bad, because she had not been home long before an unexpected Corona-flirt emerged. Unlucky exchange - lucky love?

Life now
During her six years at Ås, her days have been more affected by everything other than her studies. One can almost hear the desperate Jimmy Cricket on her shoulder shouting: “What about your studies, Runa? What about your studies??”. However, she does not regret neglecting her studies over her social life. She actually remembers the former principal encouraging people to be more engaged in the student life itself and own hobbies when she first came to NMBU, and thought it was wonderful advice.

It would also seem that Runa has not changed her study style/lifestyle during her Master’s degree. When questioned about her Master thesis, she shortly replies that she is writing a Master thesis about site development in small local communities by the coast, before she quickly jumps over to talking about a business project she’s working on besides her Master thesis. The idea is to make a sort of matchmaker for those who want to move out to more quiet villages. It would also help you find municipalities that would pay you to move there, old houses with great potential and local communities that compliment your requirements/expectations to the potential residence. She is gravely excited to hopefully launch this service for the people in the nearest future.

Runa concludes that she takes after her parents when it comes to her envisioning of the future and her lifestyle. “I have probably gotten it served through breastmilk”, she laughs, and adds how much she emphasizes creating her own days, and being an active resident in a small community where you create events instead of getting them served on your plate.

A superhuman that never relaxes?
When I ask Runa what she does when she, or if she ever even does, relax, she laughs and replies “never!!”. As I’ve lived with her, I would not have been surprised if she was not joking. She eventually admits that she relaxes the most with a long and good run in the forest or when she creates and crafts something. She does ponder if she might have mild ADHD and hope people don’t take it as bragging when she says that she gets more from creating something, like painting, writing a poem or a song. I feel this summarizes Runa well. You quickly notice how much she likes creating something, whether it’s for the community or for her own relaxation.

Greetings for Runa

Before you arrived, we lived in the gutter when it came to richness of soul and mind. Just three boys rolling around in the mud. A vulgar and unrefined life; nose in earth and arse in air. Then, you stood at the door, flowering and vigorous – and in your luggage, a renaissance. Since then, you have pealed off layers of shit with your womanly radiance and sophisticated demeanor.

Thank you for your sparkling eagerness, which wakes us from our cybernated slumber and pulls us into song, dance and jam. As we were dancing jenka, dead drunk from Åsmunds brew, in front of the fireplace at two in the morning, you had prepared for us a dumpstered roast, marinated in ovenbaked root vegetables. It was an event which is now firmly stuck in the the living room wall. You are our main supplier of rigurous performance art, humbly encased in honest and gleaming cello(and fiddle)phane.

You have left your mark on us, but not just us. Samfunnet i Ås has been steadily powered by your inexaustible realm of ideas. Sprell Festival, tirsdagspåfyll, cafeklubb, Lærke-revue, Flatlusa... the list goes on, but paper is expensive. You are a phenomenal locomotive, working people like marionettes under your regime. And yet, they believe it’s their own babies they are raising. A gift – a formidable tool!

This is a letter of farewell – not just from us students society at Ås in all its shapes, sizes and variances in blood alcohol content – but from us cheeky, Friday-drunk lads, handsomely rewarded with a brief taste of your mystical, sun-shimmering world.

You make the grass greener, also on this side of the fence.

Regards from the Brønnerud Boys
Åsmund G. Tunheim
Benjamin A. Faulkner
Jon Eivin N. Kivle

PS: can you get some munkholm from the shop?

PPS: we appreciate if you tell everyone you meet that we need a new inhabitant the day you leave the nest in april