OCEANS AWAY

Meeting a friend in Oslo

Filed under Travel

In late September of 2010, one month into my stay in Sweden, I went on a 5-day trip to Norway; Sweden’s even more beautiful and rugged, even more expensive, even emptier Western neighbor. It was a trip organized by my Swedish university. We went glacier hiking and canoeing and spent two nights without running water or electricity in wooden huts on some remote campsite in the snow-covered Norwegian mountains. It was absolutely amazing and I will most certainly talk about all that sometime soon.

The last part of our trip was a stop in Norway’s capital, Oslo. Our organizers had messed up big time, over and over again, which eventually led to our stay in the city being cut short to just two hours. From 8.30 to 10.30, at night. As you can imagine, this was super frustrating because – what can you do in a large city you have never been to when all shops and tourist attractions are already closed?

Well. Luckily, I had had different plans, anyway. And even though they, too, had to be changed considerably, my time in Oslo still turned out to be a highlight of the trip! My friend Linn – another exchange student I had met in Kentucky in 2005 – lives and works and studies in Oslo and this was our chance to finally meet again.

While our bus full of anxious students was making its way through the vast and beautiful countryside outside the capital, hours behind schedule, Linn kept texting me about the day’s program: shopping in some of the best-kept-secret vintage shops, touring the capital’s attractions that normal tourists wouldn’t know about, dinner at her favorite seafood restaurant, ending the night at an exclusive skybar that overlooks the entire city and only people who know someone who knows someone have access to.

None of that ever happened because of a douchebag bus driver and two drunk student organizers with an obnoxious devil-may-care attitude. But in retrospect, Linn’s plan B was probably even better: grab Chinese take-out at Oslo main station, walk over to the Oslo Opera, and hang out and talk while over-looking the harbor and the skyscrapers in the distance. The opera is a pretty cool building, and whoever made the decision to make its roof a walk-on thing is a true genius.

Some day I need to go back to Oslo to actually see the city. But eating Chinese on top of a fancy opera building at night with a loved and long-lost friend pretty much beats any other city trip I’ve ever done!