February: Chapter 2 of 12

30/01/16

Sleeping on planes is just a mission. So I was grateful when I woke up and Susan had told me I’d been asleep for four hours. We had a one-hour stop in Singapore, before another seven-hour flight to Dubai. The Dubai stop was what I was dreading the most. I feel as if there’s a negative stigma surrounding the UAE, and I will admit those opinions made me feel some reservation at having such a long stay there. It didn’t exactly help when the men at the airport customs desk didn’t even look Susan and I in the eye. The second we arrived at our hotel, it was a completely different story. Everyone was so kind and incredibly helpful. As I mentioned before, Emirates was putting us up and feeding us for our time in Dubai. 100% would recommend. The hotel was great, having a shower was great, sleeping in a bed was great, and touring around Dubai was great.

31/01/16

Whenever I’m on long flights I really love listening to Michael Jackson. He’s my go-to artist to lose myself in. Do not envy Susan for sitting next to me. She had to deal with me lip-syncing hard to Dirty Diana. That is sleep deprivation for you.

I’ve had some pretty odd experiences when it comes to airport security, none quite as strange as the Norwegian system. The second you get off the plane you meet a person in a booth. My person was a woman that asked me why I was coming to Norway, I gave her my very weak answer, and she stamped my passport and told me to have a great day. In comparison to Australia, that was insane. Here I was all prepared with everywhere I’d be, addresses, numbers, dates, and flight bookings. Nothing. We collected our luggage and entered Norway.

Because we were only staying a night in Oslo, I booked accommodation as close to the train station as possible, which in hindsight I am so grateful I did. We were met with -4C weather and I did not feel up to thinking about anything other than a shower and a bed.

Fun fact about Norwegian bathrooms: they don’t have a hot/cold tap. They have two taps. One to control the temperature of the hot water, and the other was to control the pressure. Practicality on point.

01/02/16

I made the mistake of letting Susan convince me to go to bed at 5pm. We were exhausted, and I was weak. I put up very little protest about jetlag, and trying to get a normal pattern going. So when we both woke up at 3am I was not surprised in the slightest.

Our train to Bergen was 7 hours and I honestly thought I would spend that time writing or reading. But no, I spent it gawking out the window because of how spectacular the entire journey was. I also apparently took two photos of the entire journey – the rest was video footage. Typical.

02/02/16

Grocery shopping is more of a journey than you’d think in Norway. Especially when the roads are covered in ice and you’re dating the clumsiest (but also the most graceful) person on earth. We had managed to get all the way to the store, buy a million potatoes, and were on the home stretch. Susan was walking behind me because I was eager to get home, and also the guinea pig for how slippery the roads were. Apparently I’m immune to the dangers of icy roads, because Susan fell over 1.5 times in the space of 5 minutes. I say 1.5, because she did have one semi-serious fall. Bloody hands, stained knees, kind of fall. The .5 was because after that, I held on to her while we walked. She tripped again, but I /insert muscle emoji/ semi caught her. She didn’t reach the ground, but it was still a fall-turned-stubble.

03/02/16

The rain had passed, and in its place was sunshine and snow! We decided to walk/hike into the city to make the most of the beautiful weather. What was supposed to be a 20-minute walk, turned into almost 2 hours, because we kept stopping to take photos and look at the views. Bergen, you are such a hidden gem. Now out of the 200 photos I took today, I’m sharing this one, because seeing this sweet kitty made my day.

04/02/16

I requested that we not go out for a few days. I hadn’t yet had an opportunity to play ‘tortured artist’, and I was looking for a chance to organize a day for that. Yep. Didn't happened. I ended up working all day.

05/02/16

Those days when you’re supposed to work, but other things just seemly get in the way. Yeah, today was one of those days. In my defense, it was a miserable outside so mustering motivation was like getting blood out of a stone. 

I ended up watching Downton Abbey and reading slightly dubious literature. Half of which is working, right?

06/02/16

This morning I started writing a weak excuse as to why my entries have been average lately. This was my first mistake. It was as if I was asking the universe to throw a spanner at me. Now let me tell you why.

It was looking overcast outside and we needed to pick up some more groceries. Susan suggested we leave now and beat the rain before it hit. The store is only about a 15 minute walk away, and we were going to come straight back, so we didn’t put on thermals or any other gear because we didn’t think we would be out very long. Got to the store, picked up way more food than we probably needed and hiked back up the mountain to our apartment. If I don’t come back to Australia as a more ripped and pale version of myself, I will be disappointed.

A little bit more information about our apartment is needed here. There are two doors to get into it. The first puts you into a ‘wet-room’ entry, where you take off your coat and boots etc. before entering the house. The second door is to enter the actual house. They are both keypad entry points. No keys, but each different pin codes. Up until this point we had been leaving the second door unlocked because, Norway, safest country in the world (actually I looked it up, it’s the 8^th safest country in the world!). But for whatever reason Susan locked the second door last night before we went to bed.

So we got to the first door, entered the code, it unlocks, get to the second door, try to open it, it’s locked. We enter the same pin as the front door and it doesn’t work. Crap. Susan thinks I’m joking about not knowing the second pin, because I always joke about locking ourselves out of our house back in Australia. But I’m not. I don’t know it. I buzz the people that live above us, our landlords. They’re not home. We search for any way of contacting them, we sent about a thousand emails, called a thousand times more, and then sat and ate a banana we got at the store. We decide to wait another hour, and if they didn’t come home in that time, we’d go back into town and get a coffee and wait it out. An hour later and they weren’t home. I needed to pee and Susan was sick of eating bananas. We left our groceries at our front door, left a note on their door asking for them to call us when they got home, and headed to the bus.

We wait at the café for 3 hours, constantly checking our emails for a reply. My phone battery was at 2% when we decide to head back and hope they’ve just unlocked the door without bothering to call us.

I all but ran up the million flights of stairs to see if their car was parked in the driveway. My heart sunk out of my feet when I was greeted with a blank park. I turned to Susan and shook my head. The sun was about to set and we had no way of getting inside. I climbed up to our balcony to try and break into the window, with no avail. We were freezing, I was hungry and grumpy, and Susan was swimming in her guilt.

She suggested we go to the neighbor below us and ask if they could help us. For the record when I’m in a bad mood nobody can pull me out of it except me, so I told her to go on her own. I know, bad girlfriend. And I regretted it the second I saw her walk into the complete strangers house and close the door. I sat on the stairs imagining how I just let my partner walk into a house alone and get brutally murdered. Sure, Susan is 5’10” and has a good set of lungs on her, but when it comes to physical strength I have the upper hand (I did just challenge her to an arm wrestle to be certain [I won]). I looked at my winter boots and wondered if I could kick in a door if I had to. Probably not, but I could kick a window in. I was so deep in my imaginary heroic adventure I almost didn’t notice her walking out with a smile spread across her face.

“They were the most beautiful couple I had ever met.” She said, taking the stairs two at a time to get to me, “and I’ve got the code!”

“Yeah?!” I beamed, happier about her being alive than the code.

It is safe to say I’ve learnt my lesson. Never slack on my blog posts, otherwise my significant other could get killed by our friendly neighbours.