Thirsty Thursday: Volume XI - Ostracized In Oslo

This is just a story. It doesn’t have any phrases like, “…and then I thought to myself…” nor does it have, “…and it made me feel like…” It is just one of the more interesting stories (sans the overt retrospective commentary) that I lived through while traipsing around Europe.

If you have studied abroad then you probably know what it is like approaching a weekend. For those of us in Denmark around Wednesday it was like, “Which country do you want to go to this weekend? Well, I went to Sweden last weekend and I think we are doing Oktoberfest in Germany the following weekend, so why don’t we go to Norway and visit our friends there. Okay? Okay.”

Oregon State University has two study abroad programs in Scandinavia. The first being in Århus, Denmark (20 of us were there) and the other is located in Kristiansand, Norway (I think they had 10 students). Prior to these weekend adventures there were a lot of big talkers. People always said they were going to go, but not until the meeting point early in the morning at the train station was anybody really sure who was going to be a part of the journey. When the heads were tallied that morning in late September of 2001, there were seven girls and myself. The majority of the boys decided to go to Oktoberfest despite hearing it was the Italian weekend (whatever that means).

So eight of us embarked on an adventure that none would easily forget.

From Århus to Hirtshals (the port town on the northwest tip of Jutland, Denmark) it was a two-hour train ride. Hirtshals to Kristiansand (the coastal town on the southern tip of Norway) was a mere five-hour ferry ride across the North Sea. I’ve been on ferries before. The ones my friends and I took to Greece from Italy were more like barges yet they were complete with bars and dance floors.

This was a nicer one complete with a lounge, dance floor, as well as a casino. Apparently the Norwegians hop aboard and ride back and forth for the fun of it while gambling and buying the less expensive booze in Denmark. (On a side note, I heard people from Denmark go to Germany for cheaper alcohol. I wonder where the Germans go? Oktoberfest!) Our underdressed, female-dominated group of large backpack wielding travelers found ourselves in a first class cabin and created a home. I settled in just waiting to be kicked out. But it never came. Listening to my cd player and less than halfway to Kristiansand I realized that I was sort of getting seasick. From what I heard, the part of the North Sea that we were passing through is where several bodies of water collide before going into the open sea. This translated into a bit of a rough ride. Some of us were feeling it. I had to take a fresh air break outside on the windy deck in order not to lose my lunch.

Queasy and staggering, we made it to port. The ride was over and I was glad that we wouldn’t be taking the ferry home but instead going the long way around through Sweden by train.

Our American counterparts, each with a bike, met us straight off the ferry and we exchanged stories of our different universities, respective cultures, and traveling. It was resoundingly clear that those of us in the Danish program had life much easier.

The Kristiansand students had, by far, a more rigorous study, project/paper, and test schedule. They were unfortunate for a couple of reasons: they actually had to spend serious amounts of time studying; they didn’t have a lot of time to travel; and if they did have the time to travel they had to either go by ferry to Denmark and south to wherever they wanted to go or they had to fly. Both options were expensive and time consuming. We were just thankful that we could take so much time off to travel (I left for 10 days in the late part of the semester and didn’t miss a thing) as well as being thankful that our friends could take a study break to show us their town. Naturally, as Americans we found the all-you-can-eat Mongolian grill and stuffed ourselves to capacity. Later on we made it to a local club. It seemed just like any other club in the states, just that everything was in a different language.

Most of us slept in the community study room on uncomfortable couches that we would have loved to have slept in the next night. We took our time getting ready in the morning and said our goodbyes as we made our way to the train station in the rain. It was a five-hour train ride to Oslo through some of the most beautiful countryside I have ever seen. Lakes, rivers, mountains, trees. But our impression of Norway would soon be changed. Our plan was to find somewhere to have dinner, stay out late roaming around Oslo, get a few hours of sleep in the train station, wake up early and do more of the town, then catch the early train back home. Our plan mostly worked, aside from a crucial bit of information that we were not privy to: the Oslo train station closes from 1:30 to 4:30 in the morning.

We found Punjab, a curry house not too far from the train station and dominated it. Well, as much as a group of seven girls and me could do. Some of the girls were tired so they went back to the train station to sleep while the rest of us took advantage of the short time we had there. We guessed which trolley might take us to take to the famous park of naked statues. The guess was the right one and we found ourselves at the gates of Vigeland Park.

Life-sized statues lined the walkway in different positions like man holding baby, kid riding on man’s shoulders, woman pulling her hair, and loads of other ones. We posed in similar fashion next to them and took pictures hoping they would turn out because it was midnight and dark. Walking around in the middle of the night in unfamiliarity was odd, but we were having so much fun. At the center of the park there was a huge statue. The Lonely Planet describes it as a “monolith of writhing bodies.” That is exactly what it is—people standing, crawling, and climbing to get to the top, but they are all frozen in time. Now our time had come to get some sleep.

Back at the train station we settled in the corner to sleep. Not long after, the boot I was waiting for in the ferry came. It wasn’t just a relocation boot, but a complete kick out of the entire station in the middle of the night in a sketchy area of town. So eight of us bundled up and headed for the cold streets. Some older guy who also got kicked out followed us everywhere and didn’t say a word until much later.

After stumbling around we found an accommodating park bench and made it home for a while. That is, before it started to drizzle. This is the point in the story when we said, “Someday we will laugh at this.” And we did then too. Our next haven was a breezeway where we huddled together to keep warm. Our faces went numb with the cold air and our butts went numb from the hard concrete. While we attempted to sleep some locals came up to us and spoke in Norwegian. When they realized we didn’t, they asked in perfect English if we had any needles to inject narcotics. We told them, “Sorry, we were fresh out.” Dismayed, they walked away.

At 4:00am the older straggler who had been following us made his one and only comment, “It’s four o’clock. We should probably get back to the station.” We said, “Sure, why not” and wondered back through town and into the first place we saw that was open. It was a little fast food place that we thought might have some hot chocolate or coffee to warm us up. Some of the girls wrapped their blankets around themselves inadvertently resembling Muslim women. This piqued the interest of some guys we found out later were from Saudi Arabia. They started talking to us and it began friendly, but became uncomfortable as they followed us out the door. A welcome and familiar site was just down the road, a 7-Eleven. We took shelter among the aisles of chips, chocolate, and other impulse buying items. The two Saudi guys appeared to be under the influence of something other than Allah. A couple of Norwegian girls who were in line buying food mocked them and they got all defensive and threatened the girls and the store. When the men working the 7-Eleven kicked out the Saudis they threatened us with bombings and murders. And in a post-9/11 world, that was pretty serious. The eight plus one of us backed our way into the store and waited to see if the guys would just leave. Pride aside, I wasn’t about to mess with these people in a foreign county. But I would have to protect my girls. The police eventually came and seemed to mellow things out a bit.

We got our coffee and our wits and walked down to the train station just as it was opening. Trying to get a few winks of sleep by stretching out on some wooden benches was futile for me. So I just kept a lookout as people meandered by. We had reservations to leave at 1:30pm for Århus. Some of us couldn’t see straight so we opted for the early 7:30am train. It took over 12 hours to get to Århus. I thought. I napped. I thought some more. And when I got home, a soft bed never felt so good.

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

Samuel Johnson