God tur!

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was about a little town in Norway that is occupied during World War II. The Norwegian government has hidden a large supply of gold from the national treasury in a mountain cave nearby, and they need to get it down to a ship that's waiting in the fjord, so it can be transported to America where the Germans can't steal it. So, they ask the school children of the town to take it down the mountain on sleds.

The book spends a good bit of time describing the sled run these kids go on, and it's really very long. Growing up in a very very flat bit of country, I don't think I could ever quite grasp what it would be like to sled out of town. That is, until yesterday.

If I haven't mentioned it before, Oslo boasts more forest within its city limits than any other capital city in the world. They've designated a huge national forest that you can reach from the city center in 15 minutes by taking the t-bane (subway system). I live a five-minute's walk away from part of this forest. Mostly, the good citizens of Oslo use the forest system for hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. Mostly this skiing is of the cross-country variety, however, because there are so many hills around Oslo, a variety of downhill activites are also possible.

One of these is to take the t-bane 1 line all the way to Frognerseteren (the last stop), rent a sled (or bring your fancy steering-wheel equipped sled with you, if you're Norwegian), and sled all the way down to Midtstuen, another stop on the 1 line. It takes at least 10 minutes to get from Midtstuen to Frognerseteren by t-bane, so, as you can imagine, this is a pretty long sled run.

I can't remember the last time I've been sledding, and, since my dad was an ER doctor for 10 years, I've heard many many sledding horror stories. But, I have to say, other than my initial fears about whether or not I'd be able to steer this thing, I had a ridiculous amount of fun yesterday. I mean, ridiculous. Apparently, there exist video clips of me bouncing down one of these said runs, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it.

This morning, the longest line of children on cross-country skis ever went by my window. Seriously, it just kept going and going and going ...

Some of those kids were really sharp on those skis, too, I was impressed. But all of them fell down about every 6 or 8 swishes, so that was pretty funny. This one girl had no idea what she was doing, clearly, she was basically walking with slabs of wood on her feet.

Finally, I saw the teacher coming out of the trees and felt, to be honest, a little relieved, because I could just see a Norwegian preschool teacher just gliding off in front of her class and when she saw the slowest ones falling behind thinking, "Well, getting eaten by a wolf is how they learn." Norwegians have a very laissez-faire attitude to child-rearing.

So, it's Saturday night, and I don't have much to do. But I remember that my hallmate (the one who never does his dishes and leaves his breadcrumbs all over the counter and whom I had given up trying to like until ... we met on the t-bane and talked about snow and I figured I'd better try to be a nice person ...) was playing bass with his brother's band at some bar downtown. Whenever he's mentioned this band to me, he's cocked his head a little and looked down into my little face (It seems everyone towers over me these days) and said, "It's pretty heavy ... " That is, I think you're a prissy little girl, and you couldn't take it. Or at least, that's how I choose to interpret it.

I don't consider myself easily scared off when it comes to ... less palatable forms of art of any kind, music included. So I was determined to go to his concert and enjoy it. Or, if it was really bad, figure out something nice to say out loud while internally poking vicious fun at him. Either way, it was going to be a good time.

So, we arrive at said bar at about 9:45, because this Norwegian hallmate, let's call him S, says they're going to play at 10. 10 sounds like a safe estimate to me, and I have many times been the victim of the concert that's supposed to start at 8 and starts at 11 or supposed to start at 11 and starts at 1am ... but there's only one band playing, and, anyway, I believe him.

It has been snowing all day, and Silke and I (the German hallmate; she was bored, too) have to make a break for it in order to get to the train station by 9:30. The snow is, as one of the guys from the Blitz has been quoted to say, up to your ass. And my ass is a lot closer to the ground than Silke's, plus she plays basketball four times a week, and I take the occasional brisk walk, so I am trailing behind her by quite a bit and panting. In the cold.

Anyway, we make it to the train in plenty of time (probably because it's running egregiously late due to the snow), and there are a delightful number of people toting their skis along, because the Norwegians have been really chomping at the bit to get out onto the ski trails, and this was our first big snow storm. There are skiers all over downtown as well (Why?). We managed to find the bar, which, at first glance, appeared to me to be the Osloian version of a biker bar. It had a vaguely motorcyclish name and a poster of Ozzy Osbourne on the wall. That's how I could tell. Oh yeah, there were also a lot of haggard looking middle aged men who obviously had nothing better to do than shoot pool at the local fake biker bar and flirt awkwardly with women half their age.

Poor Silke was immediately singled out for this particular humiliation. I don't know why, God bless her, she's so demure. But every one of these guys had to come up to her and put his hand on her knee and say something she couldn't understand. One guy asked how she was doing. Not so bad. The next guy asked if she was Finnish. A little weird. The third guy acted like he needed to sit on her lap in order to make his next shot, and then proceeded to pull a strand of hair out of her head and set it on top of his pool ball ... for luck, apparently? Pulling a girl's hair isn't cool when you're 6, and it doesn't get any cooler when you're 46.

So, S's band didn't go on until 11:40, which wouldn't have been a problem (hey, I'll sleep when I'm dead) except that the last train to our neck of the Oslo woods leaves at about 12:15. I think we averaged out to a cost of $2 per song we actually heard. The short take on the band: I was pleased to see they have a girl singer, because I'm a big proponent of women in rock. No, seriously. And instrumentally they were pretty tight. I'm sure they were completely derivative of some genre of metal that I know nothing about, but S played well, and he's bald and pale, so he looked like Billy Corgan plus 15 pounds, and that amused me. It's too bad we didn't snap a photo, so I could hang it up on the kitchen wall and embarrass him. Because that's what hallmates are for.