I have returned from my extended journey to Norway. I actually got back yesterday, but was too tired to do anything but go to sleep. It was a great trip and I'm really glad I went. The fjords have a lot of natural beauty with forests and huge jagged mountains rising out of smooth clear waters everywhere. Culturally, Norway has adopted much of the United States tastes as far as things like food and music go, but by the end of my trip I was ready to be back in a country where the native language was english. A detailed account of what I did is in the extended entry.
Now that I've complained about people doing stupid things, I may as well mention two of my own. They announced boarding for seats 37-47, and I got up, thinking I had seat 38E (when in fact I had 32E). However, right as I got up to the boarding area, they called 27-37, so me with my seat 32E was just fine. I still felt somewhat guilty though. The other stupid thing was that I sat myself down in the wrong row. What I thought was row 32 was in fact row 33, and I again succeeded in making an ass of myself.
It was bloody hot in Berkeley today. I think summer finally started the day I leave the country. All the flight attendents speak French, or hard to understand English. We'll see how this goes.
The flight from SFO to Paris went as well as could be hoped, I guess. I got 0 hours of sleep. They showed a couple of crappy chick flicks (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and that one about a crappy honeymoon ruining a new marriage). The first one was significantly better than the second one, which says more about how bad the second was rather than how good the first one was.
I am about 3/4 of the way through my five hour layover in Paris. Yes, this trip has kind of sucked so far. I managed to doze sitting in a chair for an hour or two before getting Pizza Hut pizza. My flight to Oslo leaves at 7:05pm.
Also, I smell and look like a pig, because I haven't showered/shaved in about 24 hours. In addition, I just got a bloody nose to cap it all off.
I'm not sure what we'll be doing tomorrow, but it should be good. Unfortunately, Tiffany has no internet access from her dorm room, so email access will be sketchy until I'm back in the homeland.
After that we were going to visit the university's computer center to check email and stuff, but they closed an hour before we got there. As soon as we got there, though, it started to rain like it had never rained before. So we both got totally soaked walking the 20 minutes back to Tiffany's dorm room.
Dinner (salad, pasta, bread) came after we took our showers to clean up and dry off. Then we played Risk, the game of world domination, with a couple of Tiffany's friends. The day was a good one, even if I cut up my foot and got soaked by rain.
We ended up going to the city of Kongsburg which was about 60km away from Oslo. There was a decent mountain there with a nice river running around it. We studied the trail map for a few minutes before deciding on an 8km trail that seemed nice. It took us about a minute to get completely off the trail. I guess our attempt was to stay with the river, but after toiling off the trail for half an hour, we doubled back and came to a real trail which we followed back in the direction of the base of the trails. There, Tiffany and our two friends went for a swim in the river. Having the experience in the lake that I did yesterday and figuring that a river can only be colder than a lake, I decided not to go in for a swim. I think it was a good move.
Tiffany is going for a run right now, then we're going to get food for an extended trip to the Fjords tomorrow and the next day. After that, we might finally eat dinner.
There isn't a whole lot to say about the trip, other than it took a long time, we stopped once to eat lunch, and another time to eat dinner. I took a dump in the woods after lunch.
Dinner was especially nice, because we got this personal grill thing and had our own little barbecue on the coast with a beautiful view and awesome weather. A couple of burgers, potato chips, and some beer. It was nice.
After dinner we drove to Sogndal, a little town with a hostel that we stayed at. The hostel was nice, but had more space than we needed, and the cost for the night's stay showed it. We went for a walk around town, but everything was closed so it was, well, boring.
Tiffany and I met up in an hour or so and decided to hike right up to the glacier. Oh, it was a fateful decision. I had running shoes on, and the trail was reallly just rocks and slippery slopes with water running in various places. So of course I slipped at one point and started sliding out of control. After not too long I stopped myself and thought everything was ok. However, the next time I tried to turn my camera on, nothing happened. It appears I hit it somehow when I fell and broke the thing. It really put me in a bad mood, which was really unfortunate, because the glacier was majestic and beautiful.
We spent some more time at the glacier, and then drove seven or eight hours straight with a bathroom break or two. we made it back in time to hang out with Tiffany's friends and eat a really god pasta dinner made by Christopher, one of Tiffany's friends. Naturally, there were some beers involved as well. About 1am or so it was time for bed, planning on waking up at 5am and driving to the airport to get there by 6am for my 7:05am departure. Yes, it is stupid to give oneself only an hour bubble for international flights. Worry not, I will learn my lesson.
I arrived at 6:40, exactly 25 minutes before my flight was scheduled to take off. We were a little slow getting out of the dorm room, we took a wrong turn, and the airport turned out to be much farther than we thought it was. But anyway, I got there and was panicking a little bit because it was so close to departure time. However, I found the line for my flight with Air France and thought I was going to be ok. But while I was in line they stopped boarding. I was told to go to the Air France window on the other side of the airport, but no one was there so I hurried back to the place where the Air France ticked line had been. There someone else told me to talk to the airport service agent. Finally I got help, as he tried calling Air France to see if I could board the plane late, (by now it's about 6:50am), but they say no. So he tells me to go back to the Air France window and wait for someone to show up. So I waited for awhile and someone finally came. Then I got the bad news that I could not transfer my ticket at all, and after a lot of searching, I could either get a flight to Paris at 3:45pm and stay overnight before heading to SFO, or wait till July 5 in Oslo and get the same flight plan that I should have had today. I chose to stay in Oslo, since I don't know anyone in France nor come even close to speakign French.
Now, however, I have no way of contacting Tiffany, so I must find my way back to her dorm room and hope she is there. This is definitely an adventure. Too bad it's a miserable one.
Anyway, after I arrived at Tiffany's dorm room, I waited until someone left the door to the building open long enough so I could sneak in. Then I got into her room and watched American Beauty, since for some reason I wasn't too tired. When that finished I finally laid down to get some rest, but Tiffany returned shortly thereafter. so were both apologetic, but eventualy we had to stop worrying about it and just look at it as an extended vacation. However, we had both woken up really early and were very tired. So all we did was laundry and clean her room.
For dinner we went to a picnic with Tiffany's friends. They were nice and king to offer us dinner. Of course there was some teasing but it was all fine. And so that brought an end to one of the longest days I've had in awhile.
We cooked our own dinner tonight, just some pasta and sauce plus salad. It was fine. Sometimes it's nice to make food yourself and eat it. Ok, that sounds really stupid. Nevermind. After dinner we watched Requiem for a Dream, a movie about drug addiction and the bad things that can hapen to you. It was very hard to watch and I don't have much interest in seeing again, although it was not a bad movie.
For dinner we met up with Tiffany's friends and ate nachos (Chrisotpher again cooked). They were really good nachos, complete with meat, beans, cheese, salsa, and jalapenos. We had guacamole too, but it was definitely not the best guacamole I've ever had. It was not fresh at all and tasted like it. Oh well, it was still good. There was also beer and wine.
Since this was the night before my flight out of Norway and I wanted to avoid another fiasco like on the 2nd, I decided that I would wake up at 4am to be ready for the taxi that would take me to the airport express train which would obviously take me to the airport in plenty of time for my flight at 7:05am. However, it was already 2am by the time I was all packed and ready to go, so I decided to just stay up all night and sleep in the airports/on the plane. So I passed the time till 4am playing Hearts on Tiffany's computer. Then at 4:30am I caught the taxi and said goodbye to Tiffany.
Anyway, I got in the taxi and discovered the driver was a real talkative guy. In fact, he mentioned that people in the USA were nice when they talked to you, and then behind your back they would stab you whben you weren't looking. So of course I agreed, because that's what you do with a psycho, right? Well, psycho might be a bit of an exaggeration, but he also said Oslo was a horrible city, and even dropped the f-bomb when describing it. So that was an interesting ride. It was cost about twice what I was expecting to pay. And then I couldn't get a student airport express train ticket, so I paid double what I should have there too (no service windows open till too late). Norway is expensive.
I arrived at the airport in plenty of time thankfully, so I felt good about that. However, I started to feel the effects of no sleep last night begining about 5:00am Norway time, and that feeling has persisted until now. It will be nice to get real sleep. I did manage to sleep a little on the flight from Oslo to Paris. The main prblem was that I was seated next to this couple that bickered in (maybe) Norwegian for the entire flight. This caused the female component of the couple to sob at frequent intervals making sleep more difficult. But I still got some sleep. Then I slogged through a 3 hour layover in the ugly Charles De Gaulle airport and got on my flight to SFO.
That flight was fine except for the movies. They showed some Disney movie which I actually managed to sleep through most of, and this awful awful girl teen power movie (What A Girl Wants) that made me want to puke watching it. Still, I did watch it because I had nothing else to do and it passed the time. Anyway, I got through that, passed through customs, picked up my luggage, and now I'm on BART heading home. I'm tired.