The Shape of Love

I only came inside to get out of the rain. I swear. There’s nothing else that would tempt me to come in here. Not the coffee, nor the atmosphere, nor the music (which is, admittedly, jazzy and nice enough). Nevertheless, I have ended up sitting on a bar chair in front of the window, overlooking the harbour. I take a sip from my overpriced coffee, which came in a plain white mug without the overly famous logo that everyone knows, without a double-nicaragua-espresso shot, without any pumpkin spice. On the street in front of me I see people packed in raincoats, defiantly fighting against the loss of their umbrellas (most of them having given up this endeavour). I look around. To my right, a group of English speaking folks on some cosy armchairs. I feel a slight chill from the sudden breeze that resulted from the door being opened and I turn my head. Outside, the street lamps, which hang on wires that are stretched over the roads shake alarmingly. The flags that tower over some of the buildings dance wildly in the wind.

Beware, people of Midgard, Thor has come.

The clocks strike twelve.

Universities close, the government has advised people to leave work early. Little school children are fetched by their worried parents. Do not be outside unless you have a good reason.

As for me I certainly do not. The short walk from my new home to the coffee shop has been enough for today. My trousers are still wet.

So, really, I only came inside to get out of the rain. And you might well have done the same. The door closes behind you and the breeze dies. You stand there for a second, squint, and remove your hood. Your hair is a mess. But something about your face leaves me looking a little longer than one ought to. Don’t I know you? You catch my eye and I quickly avert my eyes, back to the screen, unable to hide a slight smile. In the corner of my eye I can see you going to the counter, placing your order. I search for a name, an event, a possible encounter. A lecture at university? A concert? Strolling through the bathroom section in Ikea? I subtly shake my head. Imagination. 

Outside, the storm has grown stronger. A cyclist, desperately trying to make it safely through the gusts of wind. A car driving through a puddle, ruining the dress of a woman, Carry Bradshaw style. A sudden wind blow sends restaurant advertisement signs flying through the air. People hold on to railings. One thing was sure: There was no going out in the next hour, maybe longer. Thor was raging over the city, punishing the ones who did not heed the weather warnings. Trapped. I feel a certain relief that I brought two books, a laptop cable and a bottle of water. I could survive in here for quite some time.

The screeching sound of a chair being moved to my left . Your messy hair bent over a cup of tea. You look as if you had taken a bath and had forgotten to dry yourself afterwards. Or forgotten to take your clothes off, for that matter. Your shoes certainly have seen their last day. You shiver, warm your hands on your beverage, stirring from time to time.

A sudden thought comes to my mind.

Who needs the sun… and why would anyone wish for summer? I don’t want to leave this coffee shop. I don’t want the rain to stop. I could sit in here forever, with you only two chairs away, drinking your tea, whilst outside the world is going through a rehearsal of ragnarökr. 

I wouldn’t mind.

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This text was inspired by Tor, the storm that hit Bergen today, and The Shape of Love, a great song by Passenger (Seriously, Check it Out!).

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To the Idiot Family who took my Sofa in my favourite Café

I know, one is actually not allowed to write things like that. But sometimes, you’re cooking inside, whilst everybody (i.e. society) around you expects you to be calm and “fine with it”. But frankly, I’m not.

I hadn’t been in my favourite café in 4 weeks or so, and I really looked forward to spend a nice cold afternoon curled up on my favourite sofa in my favourite café, with my favourite coffee and my favourite cake. Everything was fine.

‘Till you came along.

You, meaning a family of way too much people, maybe 7, who stepped into the café, finding it occupied, apart from a few chairs here and there. You saw me sitting there all alone on the sofa, with my studying book in front of me. Naturally, I understand your thoughts: she is alone, she is studying, she fits on that tiny table in the corner, directly next to the loudspeaker. We don’t. We are 7 and have 3 children with us. We will consume so much more than she can in a whole day. It is our right to sit there.

So you, the man of the family asked me, whether I could move. I understand the reasoning. And it makes perfect sense. You were not even asking rudely, but polite.

But, to hell with that: Dishonor on you. DIshonor on your cow. Dishonor on your whole family.

For a moment I was sitting there, perplexed, and on the verge of saying something rude. But, of course, I am not that kind of person. And they must have smelled that from the moment they opened the door. “Oh she looks like a nice girl, she wears a woollen Sweater, she must be polite”. 

Of course I moved. I said “sure”, packed my stuff and moved. I didn’t even get a thank you.

Oh, how I hated you.

I had the Book of Norse Philology an my knees, reading about runes and in my imagination I read those runes allowed, cursing your family for all eternity, cursing you to get diarrhoea from that cake you were eating. I cast a (in my imagination, maybe it was much nicer than I wanted it to be) evil look to the one woman, who surely would not have had the guts to ask me to change place.

From that moment I did not as much as glimpse into your direction; I read my book, changing from a look so sour it could make every lemon dry up in envy, to a sad one, hoping to make the impression of being very depressed and making you regret sending me away from my spot. But of course you did not notice any of this, whilst you were playing scrabble, drinking Chai Latte, and laughing in perfect happiness.

Ooo, how I hated you.

I planned to stay at least as long as to jump back to the sofa, the moment you as much as touch your bags. I was determined to get my spot back in my possession.

But when the moment came and you did indeed rise and slip into your coats there were two girls coming in and – seeing the imminent departure – standing right next to the sofa, ready to take over.

Oooh, How I hated you.

Especially when you turned out to be two blond, selfie-taking Norwegian Girls, who both wore the same jeans and almost the same white sweater and showed no sign of any individuality. Your faces were hidden under a ton of make-up, who made you look like Barbie-dolls that landed in, well, a pot of make-up. You took pictures of your coffee, your cakes, yourselves with coffee, yourselves with cake, but not yourselves eating the cake or drinking the coffee, because that would have prevented you from smiling mechanically into the camera.

I decided to comfort myself with a slice of Apple Pie and the promise that I would come here everyday next week. While you probably have to be at school or at work or look after hyperactive children.

Aaah, I love my life.  (but I still hate you a little bit)

Things You learn when Studying Abroad, Part 1

1. being sick on your own is NOT cool

Spending a semester or two abroad, you will most certainly come into a situation like this: 

One morning you will wake up and your throat will kind of hurt. You think about how you sat through that concert the day before and how the window was constantly open, allowing cold air to move through your clothes and make you shiver. You did cough a few times, but did not think about it any longer. Afterwards you walked home through a mixture of a cold icy breeze and vertical rain. Your feet got soaking wet because you have not bothered to buy some Bergen-proof shoes yet. And so you went to bed, to your warm bed, with the window open, because you need some fresh air and you like how the smell of rain slowly fills your whole room, your whole head, your dreams.

But the next morning, you wake up and you realize that something is wrong. At first you don’t realize exactly what it is. Until you swallow and feel it – a sharp pain where the walls of your throat touch eathother, behind your tongue. You deny the significance of it, drink some tea, wrap a scarf around your neck. It’s just a cold, it will disappear soon. Thanks to your wide-sighted mind, you buy 3 yogi tea packages in the biological shop in the centre. Your intake of ayurvedic ginger-lemon tea  raises into unknown heights, because it is almost the only thing that you can do to make swallowing less painful. 

But so far, you feel fine if it weren’t for that. The next morning, you wake up and the pain is still there – and with it a strange, dizzy feeling in the head. There is no way you can concentrate on that presentation you actually have to do, instead you just float through the day, without really being there mentally. It’s no help that at the same time, the university sends an information e-mail around, warning students of an imminent mumps epidemic. "I got a vaccine, right?", you reflect, whilst you wonder whether your throat has grown any thicker than usual. You go to bed earlier, with a bad feeling and you are afraid of waking up, because you can feel how this is gonna end.

The next morning you wake up and immediately know it’s true. You have become ill. You’re sweating like hell, your nose is blocked and you are so light-sensitive that you are actually happy that the skies are covered with a think layer of grey clouds all day long. You can summon as much energy as to get up and make yourself a tea, before you sink into the sheets again. Sleep.

The bad news is that you don’t have the energy to make yourself some food. The good news is that you are not actually hungry and could not stand an avocado-bacon-egg sandwich if you were forced to. You drift in and out of sleep whilst your “Sleep Well” playlist on your computer plays for the 4^th time. You thank your former self for buying that much tea at once and the only mental activity you undertake is reading the positive notes hanging on the other end of the teabags.

Than, sometime in the evening, the skies already have become dark and the rain is still constantly knocking on your window, asking to get in, because it's quite crowded out there, you get a bit of an appetite. You remember that there is still some instant soup in the cupboard. The way to your kitchen, the length of which you in the past always assumed to be to short, stretches into an almost unscalable distance. But finally you arrive and and indeed manage to put the pan with some water and the contents of the bag on the stove. 

You risk a short view into the mirror, but regret it the moment your see your greasy hair hanging on both sides of a head,  which definitely would scare the shit out of any kids knocking on he door asking for trick or treat. Luckily you live in a student house and there’s no such thing going on here. You stir the boiling soup some times. A knock on the door. For god’s sake, that can’t be true. 

You calm down, almost expect a party of friends standing outside, shouting “surpriiiise” and pack you in a blanket, whilst serving you Zwieback and cleaning your dishes. You open the door. Outside, two girls, whom you have never seen before in your life. Your are on the verge of throwing some Chocolate at them and slam the door, but they don’t look like Witches or Zombies and you keep my cool.

“Hey, I am Greta.” “And I am Silje” “We have this magazine with us, and yes, it says here that God is dead. What do you think, is god dead?” Don’t throw chocolate at them and slam the door. It's considered rude.

Instead, you explain them that you are sick and that you are definitely not in the mood of talking. So they go their way. You eat your soup, the taste of which you don’t really experience, either because your taste-buds are paralyzed or because the soup simply tastes of nothing.

You climb into bed.

Shortly before you dose off, you wonder whether you could and should have convinced the two girls to wash your dishes and make you Zwieback. 

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Talking Politics

This will be my first and last contribution to politics, probably in my whole life, because, admittedly, I am "but a young girl and know little of the ways of war" (Game of Thrones Reference, yay!).

When I was younger, I never cared about politics.

Maybe because I grew up in a family where political discussions very often would trigger major lengthy arguments at the dinner table. Arguments that a 7-year-old would consider boring and attacking family peace (which they strictly speaking were, but never mind).

Maybe it was also because I never thought that I would continue to live in Switzerland for much longer. I mean sure, it has some pretty nice perks to it, like 200 different kinds of chocolate to choose form, the best bread in the world, all kinds of weather, beautiful mountains (dammit, Norwegians, it’s not a mountain when it’s only 700 metres high...) and the charm of the underdog-team in a cup-league game (everyone likes the underdog-team in a cup-league game). But then again, people are too stressed, there is no larger part of land without someone already living there and finally, our language was never made for poetic masterpieces – nor for flirting for that matter.

However, my opinion on politics changed. I do care now. And it’s awful. Because caring about politics is nothing but stressful and all you do is get annoyed.

I did change my mind, partly because I realised that living abroad would not magically make the political discussions that are happening around me, disappear. It would change them slightly, but all in all it would still be the same: there is a specific problem, politicians talk about it, people appreciate that politicians talk about it, people elect politicians who talked best about problem.

When you are thrown into a new environment, a new country, you learn pretty fast, what the every-day concerns are for the people there. (Here it is the Vegetarian-Day in the Canteen (how dare they prescribe us when we should eat meat and when not?) and whether the light-rail should be going over Bryggen...).
And, schwups, the magical problem-free zone that you had imagined while you were still sitting at home looking at pictures of beautiful mountains and stunning fjords and cute polar bears, disappears.

What’s left is a country that has the same discussions going on, the same arguments, the same problems that need fixing and the same parties that promise to fix them, which you were never aware of before. Of course, people who don’t live there only get the end-result, if they do indeed get something of it at all (no covering of Swiss national election in Norway, I’m afraid). It’s like with a sports team. As an outsider you see the teams win and lose, if you care to check the results, but for somebody on the inside, that last forward pass in the 59^th minute of the game that decided everything, is shown in slow motion on national TV a hundred times.

So my imagination that it was better “anywhere but here” (because “here” that’s where all the problems are) vanished with experiencing the same thing happening outside of Switzerland as well. And I realised that if I wanted  to be able to have an opinion about the future of the country I am living in, then I need to a) know what’s  actually going on and b) contribute. (48 percent of people were voting on sunday. that is just sad.). But I have to say that I was probably a happier person, when I did not follow the election. There’s just to much stupidity connected with it.

For example, I can’t stand politicians who say that the Fukushima catastrophe helped them gain strength in the last election; that they were being “lucky”.

When you follow a green policy (as much as I support green politics) then you should not self-satisfied smile when something like that in Japan happens, whispering “I told you so” to everyone nearby, hoping that they feel guilty and have a bad conscience.

Nor should you be happy when this is what makes people vote you. Those are the votes that follow the “long absent, soon forgotten” rule: your voters are going to forget you as well, as soon as the event has grown grey hair and a new problem has appeared within their visual field.

On the other hand it's the people who base their votes only on contemporary problems, instead of general values and common sense, and are as easily changed as the weather (literally) who should maybe just for a moment go on to think outside the box; think bigger than “what happened in Fukushima is bad, therefore AKWs are bad and therefore I have to vote Green”, and instead think about why Fukushima could happen at all: what is at the bottom of making energy with a super dangerous side-effect called nuclear waste (sorry, no chemistry student here).

And instead of they being afraid that refugees take over the country and as a reaction selfishly aiming to close the borders, they should think of how lucky they are to have been born and raised in a country where peace has ever since prevailed and that they never had to fight in a war.

But thus, they jealously protect their country whilst thinking that living in it is their personal right: that they miraculously were chosen and are better than everyone else, just because they possess a red passport. And just for one moment they should imagine themselves being forced to leave their home, pursued by bombs and gunfire. Maybe then they would stop believing that it’s purely free choice and wish of a better (economic) life that makes people flee form their home country, but consider instead that it might be an unavoidable necessity to do so; because every alternative would even be more life-threatening than putting oneself and one’s wife and children into a boat to cross the Mediterranean. The right wing parties talk about the problem that we cannot accommodate every refugee, that instead, we should try to solve the problem that’s causing the refugees. But it’s not that anyone of them has serious intentions of flying to Syria to try to “solve” the problem. Of course not: it’s madness down there. And who would voluntarily set him or herself in such a danger? (See the irony there?)

That is what I think when I look at the results of the national election. It makes me pretty sad. At the same time I can’t help but look at the bigger picture. I scroll down diverse Norwegian Newspapers. Not a word. I walk along the main street in Bergen. Nothing. The world here is still the same as two days ago. And I wonder what the haughty, pointy-headed and self-satisfied leaders of our (unfortunately) largest party would say to the fact that 1500 kilometers north, and probably in most other places on earth, too, nobody gives as much as a damn about them.  It’s others that will make the difference, others that will make the change, for the good or the bad. To me, at least, that's a slight comfort.