Nightclub
Ja suggested we go see a band that plays every Sunday night at the local club Blå. The Frank Znort Quartet was a loose group of 15 musicians packed onto a stretched stage in a small room. Fifteen people in a quartet is a little crowded but I think there may be 4 core members and an additional 11 just along for the ride. It didn't seem like they had been playing together for very long. When passing a solo from musician to musician the newbies sometimes hesitated or missed the beat and a few times the guys in front had to shout and wave their arms to get them to stop.
They play at Blå every Sunday night and, as one of the band explained, "We will fuck up your Monday."
The music covers a bunch of genres but the night we saw them, they did mostly lounge music and jazz (not my favorite). Here is a youtube video of the Frank Znort Quartet playing Jerry the Junker
The Blå club (pronounced blue) is set along the dirty Akerselven river that runs through the city. Walking along the water, we went under a bridge flanked by bronze statues of naked people fighting with bulls or stags and Ja mentioned last year after the May 17th celebration one of the bull statues was wearing a condom.
Equally spaced every hundred feet or so along the river African men hung out and sold drugs. They watched us closely as we walked by.
On May 17th as we walked back to the apartment along the river after having been to some concerts at the university, we saw a man on the opposite bank in the bright sunlight taking a piss into the water. Celine saluted him and he shouted back at us drunkenly.
The club is set among a little art enclave. There are weird statues in the trees by the river, a kind of miniature barge floating in the water with a miniature copy of the buildings nearby, and lots of cool graffiti. Getting in was free but they stamped our wrists so we could leave and return later. That evening when we went out onto the patio to get some fresh cigarette-smoke filled air, we saw a long line of people stretched away from the door and around the back of the building.
We met an Italian couple at the club. Emeliano and Louisa were both involved with the CEES program, had a good sense of humor, and shared many of our interests. We spent a lot of time hanging out together during the trip, discussing the cultural differences between Italy, France, Norway, and America.
Here is a table of animal sounds in different languages
| Animal | English | Italian | French | Japanese |
| Cat | meow | miau | miaou | nyaa |
| Dog | woof woof | ouah ouah | bau bau | wan wan |
| Rooster | cock-a-doodle-doo | cocorico | chicchirichí | |
| Cow | moo | meuh | muu | |
| Pig | oink | groin groin | oink | boo boo |
| Chicken | cluck cluck | cotcotcodet | coccodé |
After the club we went back to Ja's small apartment and gathered around their uncomfortably tall coffee table to play a card game called Set. The game involves racing each other to find patterns in a grid of cards placed on the table and I struggled with it in my sleep deprived condition. Despite the simple rules it requires intense concentration and the few times none of us could find a set, the apartment buzzed with focused silence.
