I left Minneapolis on the 20th and arrived in Oslo on the 21st.
I had a few memorable conversations during the journey over; one with a guy on the plane to Amsterdam, and another with with my Airbnb host in Jessheim.
The guy on the plane was on his way to Stockholm to visit his brother, who’s getting a PhD in physics there. His brother ended up in Stockholm cause he married a Swedish girl. The guy next to me, is a ER/Trauma/Pediatrics certified nurse, working on becoming certified to be a flight nurse, and plans on eventually becoming an NP. The two brothers grew up on a goat farm in Missouri, in pretty extreme poverty… literally living on hominy and squirrels, while their dad was struggling with terminal congestive heart failure. It’s pretty interesting to talk to a guy like that.
My Airbnb host is a yoga instructor, and building a career based on helping people make choices that promote healing/health. The long story short is she was hospitalized and mostly bedridden from around 17 to 19 years old due to an autoimmune condition that left her unable to eat anything accept for a list of 11 or 12 specific food items. Since then she’s gradually healed to the point of being completely healthy, but through an arduous process of really disciplined and careful choices about health and fitness… and not just in the nutritional and physiological sense alone, but also mentally and emotionally. Now she’s sharing the lessons she’s learned with other people.
These are good stories… To me they’re inspiring and courageous- there’s real hardship and real crisis- but it’s through that hard stuff that something remarkable and beautiful develops. …Was pretty fun to chat with these folks.
I met up with my friend Sara at the Oslo airport, the morning of the the 22nd. The rest of our time in Norway was a whirlwind. Basically 2 days in Oslo and 2 days in Bergen. A few highlights-
Oslo:
- An incredible salmon salad and seafood soup at a restaurant just outside the Akershus Fortress. (We tried to recreate the salad in Bergen… I think we did pretty good.)
- Wandering around Akershus Fortress for a bit.
- The Oslo Opera House- and watching local kids take what looked like prom pictures there or something. The opera house is a pretty stunning piece of architecture and design. It has the most beautiful urinals in a men’s restroom I’ve ever seen… felt like I was peeing on some installation in a modern art museum. See below. Featured image is of sunset at the opera house.
Bergen:
- The fish market saga. We went to the Bergen fish market, where there’s an excellent range of really fresh seafood. We bought a huge filet of salmon, with the intention of making a feast that same evening: sashimi, some seared salmon, salad, bread, etc. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday, and we had no idea that basically everything is closed on Sundays in Norway… including grocery stores. We walked by probably 8 different closed grocery stores holding a bag of raw salmon and nothing else, while becoming increasingly incredulous and pissed off about the fact that we might not be able to execute the feast plans… and we’d be stuck with a big-ass piece of raw salmon, unaccompanied by anything else, for dinner. Fortunately, thanks to some luck and Sara’s eyeballs, we found one market that remained open. We subsequently had 2 incredible meals. See pics.
- Fløyen. Took the funicular up. It’s nice up there.
- Generally wandering around Bergen. It’s a really charming place- some really interesting galleries. And a yarn shop…
- Grain crackers from the local bakery. There are some really delicious, round whole grain hard bread/cracker type things that we found. One variety was delicious. The other variety… was… pretty extreme. About as extreme as crackers can get. There were so many whole seeds and grains in it, it felt kind of like we were eating one of the cakes of birdseed you hang in a tree or something. Eating them was a little painful and left both of us feeling gastrointestinal weirdness… I’m not entirely sure they were for human consumption. I still think we may have eaten birdseed mix while locals were laughing at us…
- Train rides from Oslo to Bergen and back. The views are stunning… fjords, mountains, streams, snow drifts and complete white out blizzard like conditions.
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