Ja's Apartment
Ja's apartment is on the top floor of a pastel pink building in the ethnic district of town. Though it's only a 15 minute walk from the central station, it would be difficult to give directions without a detailed map. The building is located on a narrow back street and to get to his apartment door you have to unlock the front door to the complex (or ring the tenant), walk up some steps in the foyer, down some steps and back out the back door. The back door leads you to a gated concrete courtyard surrounded by a crumbling cliff and towering apartment buildings. Turn right and head to another door in the same building leading to a metal spiral staircase. Walk up three stories and you've found his one-room apartment.
I'd decided the best way to get over any jet lag and acclimatize myself to the new daylight hours was to go to bed at a normal time. This meant ignoring I'd been awake for more than thirty hours because it was only noon in Oslo. We dropped off my luggage and went on a walk through the city.
There is a lot of sunlight in Oslo during the summer months. At this high northern latitude the sun doesn't go up and down but kind of sulks around the edges all day. That first day we walked to the opera hall and I found myself taking pictures under a clear blue sky at 9:30 at night. Ja mentioned fishing trips in June where they would fish all night and it would never get darker than twilight.
Of course the opposite is true in the winter months, and Norwegians really like sunbathing when the chance appears after a long winter. They sunbathe seriously. Ja described sunny places on the campus littered with mostly nude sunbathers, leaning against buildings or sprawled on the ground like bomb victims.
That first day, fortified with gallons of green tea, I managed to stay up until 10pm. My phone never updated it's clock during my stay in Norway so it was easy to see what time it was in Monterey. Before going to bed that first day I calculated I'd been awake for 46 hours but I could have messed up the calculation, my brain wasn't working too well.
While we walked around the city, Ja texted his friend Anders to stop by the apartment before he left on his long 2-hour commute home.
Anders works as a kind of freelance biologist for CEES, hiring himself out to researchers for odd jobs when their slaves - er, masters students can't handle the field work. Most of the work at CEES is based on modeling rather than field work so people comfortable working outdoors were hard to find.
Anders ordered three infrared triggered game cameras and some sd memory cards on cabelas and amazon and had them sent to my address in Monterey to avoid the terrible markup on Norwegian goods.
In thanks for braving customs with his stuff, he brought some excellent Norwegian chocolate and we spent a few hours chatting. Ja tells me Anders is a stereotypical Norwegian; reserved, polite, and able to speak excellent English. We made a tentative plan to drive out and have dinner with him later in the week.
I wasn't feeling very well that first evening. I figured the sore throat and a runny nose was due to the dry airplane air and fatigue but the symptoms were worse the next day and on the day after my teeth ached from grinding them together to prepare for swallowing. I suppose I had a cold but there was no time to be sick.
I used all of ja's toilet paper blowing my nose and I drank all his tea to stay awake and sooth my sore throat. We had to make a special trip to the grocery store get more.
During my stay I slept on a futon laid out on the living room floor and we ate lunch and dinner at his tall coffee table, sitting on the floor with our plates up at neck level. We had crepes with jam for breakfast, dried meat (saucisson), cheese, and pate for lunch, and something cooked for dinner. One evening ja prepared a reindeer roast.
