Reasons to freeze to death

The year is coming to end, soon I will leave country. I will escape, like the house rat running away from those long days confined under a shoebox that is being pressed down by the foot that is language awkwardness that has finally been lifted. Okay, so enough for the utterly wretched attempts at analogies. I have rediscovered a love a music, not really rediscovered I just found a fast and simple way to get full albums that I've been wanting to hear for a long time. I've also discovered the wonder that is Richard Dawkins. While never actually reading any of his books, I have watched a shit load of You Tube clips of him. While never the type of person to take one man's opinion as fact in the world, I have always at least made a simple attempt to half-assedly read some things that reinforce my viewpoints of the world. But I'm also a skeptic, whatever that means, but not when it comes to evidence. Evidence is the one thing in this world that gives me a solid opinion on certain subject matters. The lack of evidence is where I become a skeptic. The End.

I'm at home for my Easter Break. I've been extremely bored for like the last two days during the day because I have no means of transportation. And the lack of a reliable public transit system makes the availibility to get out minimal. I like being at home for the time being. I miss Norway to say the least. But for now I'm enjoying being home and only two hours away from my most loved one.

So, it's of course been a while. I was supposed to go to London, but I didn't. I ended up in Cologne, Germany instead. It was a fun time. One of the best weekends I've had in a while. Went to clubs and a good German resturant. Tried to get into a German Football game but it was sold out. So, now I've been keeping bust with finding new music, which I've been finding a lot of. And listening to and watching some of the Twins spring training games.

So, I didn't even realize that the last time I posted here it was my birthday. I'm not one for birthdays, I don't ever really tell people when my birthday just because I really don't feel like it. I'll tell someone if they ask since I dont lie, but if people don't feel nescessary than I don't bother telling them. But I've gotten a bunch of packages and am extremely appreciative of those who've sent them to me. And, I just finished doing my taxes, so hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be a little bit richer.

In two weeks from today I will be in London. Everything came pretty cheap so I'm happy about that. I wanted to escape this weekend and go to Copenhagen with these cheap bus tickets, but I was unable to find anything. So, I'm staying here this weekend again. I'm going to Oslo Tuesday night for a concert and staying with a friend I met back at Mankato. Everything else has been fairly boring, it's Bø, so what else should I expect.

So, yeah I went to Amsterdam after my exciting New Years here in Norway. New Years was spent with great food and relaxation. Amsterdam consisted of lots of walking and seeing things and being lonely. So, there's my synopsis of Amsterdam and New Years.

Now I'm back at school, re-establishing a workout routine and sleeping late everyday. That's what my life consists of now, kinda exciting.

So lots has happened since the last time I wrote in this thing. I finished off my first semester of Norwegian school with a great experience that involved taking long writing lests in a large gymnasium with lots of other people that I didn't even know. That went swimmingly of course. The weekend that followed a group of us American's went to the neighboring Twin City metropolis consisting of Skien and Porsgrunn, the latter being the city we went to. We walked around a gigantic (by small town Norwegian standards) shopping mall, went to a famous porcelain factory store across the river from the mall. Then went back to the mall, wherein we participated in eating horribly over-priced pizza. After that we tried to make the early bus, but it didn't actually run at that time so we had to wait until 2 hours later for the bus, we killed the time by sitting in a shopping centre wherein the only open store was a Kiwi, we also walked across the street to see a Catholic Church building built to resemble a Stave Church.

A few days later I went to the airport and picked up my woman, actually I think I did that before finals along with the Porsgrunn trip. We hung around my place and watched tv and ate food and waited until I finished my exams. After that was all finished, we stopped off in Oslo for a couple of nights to stay with my cousins. We went shopping and went out to dinner one night, and took lots of public transportation. After that we got on a bus bound for Västerås via Örebrö. Once we got to Västerås we were supposed to be picked up by an old friend of Karinäs, but he never showed up, we would later find out why though. We ended up taking a taxi to their house, were they sat and caught up on things and I sat and drank Whiskey. Never having drunk straight whiskey before I came to enjoy it and had several glass because i was under the impression that we were going right to the place where we were staying and going to sleep after some coffee or tea. But no, we ended up having beer (7.5%) and cider and talking for a few more hours, I got a little drunk and felt kinda dumb because I had never these people before. But they gave me food and did not seem to mind my half-drunken stupor. The next day was walk around Västerås day, where I ended up buying a new pair of shoes and some beer. That night we ate dinner at a traditional Swedish Julebörd Restaurang that was situated in a converted horse stable. After that we changed into normal clothes and went back to hanging out with Karin's old friend. It was a pretty fun time. The next day we took the train up to Storvik with a quick switch in Fagersta. We stayed with Karin's cousins and their two young kids (2yo and 7mo) and three extremely friendly dogs and the world's laziest cat. This is where I spent my first Christmas season away from home, ever. Everyone here made me feel so much at home the whole time I was there. The Christmas dinners that we had were amazingly delightful and filling. I ate the best smoked lamb meat I've ever eaten, actually I've never eaten smoked Lamb meat before but this meat had the flavor that I've been looking in every piece of meat i've ever eaten. I ate a whole bunch of Sild too (pickled herring), it was delicious especially since it was homeflavorcured. On one the days around Christmas Karin and I took the bus up to Gävle where we visited her old host father from when she lived here. The people we stayed with in Västerås the mom was her host mother but the two of them divorced. He ended up living in a small development in the little town of Älvkarleby where we went to. We walked to this large dam complex called Vattenfall, a gigantic area where once a large waterfall flowed brashly over and around millions of large rocks. After walking around that we went back and ate some traditional Swedish pizza, I got the national specialty Kebab. Well, that's all I have the energy to write about now, stay tuned for a hopefully more coherent, detailed part 2 featuring my exciting New Years Eve celebration and my unending walking around Amsterdam...

I really don't have too much else to talk about right now. So, I'll talk about that one special thing that I care the most about in the world. 'Tis three weeks from today that I get to go into Oslo. Ah, yes, Oslo. It's been awhile and I am fairly excited to go. But, I actually won't be doing anything there in Oslo actually, because I am going to meeting some strange and mysterious person at the airport. I have not yet met this person. Nor do I know anything about how sexy she is, or about how sexy she'll be after a nice long plane ride. Until then I am just going to fill up my time with random trips to town to purchase a hot dog or a bar of Fruktnott Sjokolade. I need new music too, but fuck paying for it. End of randomness part one....

Its been over a month, and just under a month to go. I will go travelling around Northern Europe with my love. The original plan was to go to Spain for a week. But after really thinking it through, it will be too expensive. Tickets and a hostel weren't too bad of prices, but factoring in things like food and attractions, it will become too expensive. So, it'll be off to Sweden and going around and visiting my love's Swedish friends. I feel a little less stressed now that I have decided not to go, not that I was completely stressed out before, I was just kinda on the fence about the whole entire situation. So to reward my seemingly flawless decision making, I bought a new winter coat. A lovely black, woolen skippers coat. It fits nicely, isn't as big as the pea coat I had before, something that I like. That's all for now I guess, I'm happy with the election results as with most people that I know. Another week gone by.....

Boredom has once again began to gnaw at my every minute. The last few weeks have gone by fairly quickly and smoothly. But now, it's like every other is punctuated by a long comma, things are beginning to crawl and I don't like it. I still have music, I still have my computer, I still have everything else that I've had these past few weeks, but now I just want to get out and go somewhere, Novosibirsk - anywhere right about now would be good. If I could maybe fall asleep earlier in the night I could save myself some pain and pass more time that way. But I'm sort of an insomniac I suppose.

This whole school thing doesn't help either. It's not that I find school boring, it's just that I really don't have the time intensive structure that I had in the states. That is what made time a precious factor back then, between school and work it seemed like I didn't have an exhorbitant amount of time. Looking back on it I guess I did, but that pales in comparison to how much free time I have now. Only 37 more days and I'll have something worthwhile that I want to do.

Have you ever been lost in the woods? Miles from where you should actually be? Well, as of yesterday I was. We had a hike on Lifjell, a local mountain. Everthing was going swimmingly, until after we ate lunch. The lunch break was awesome and well needed. But once we set out from there, it went all downhill, because about 70% was down a hill of some sort. At one point we came across a river our teacher thought to be uncrossable, so we ascended up the mountain thinking that we were going over on our side of the river instead of on the other side, this wasn't true. She was just looking for a safe place to cross. She found none so we were forced to go back down the mountain in the direction we just came from. She said that we would stick to the river, which we did for about 20 minutes. Then we tried to go through the woods. This was not just any normal forest, it was these end-of-the-treeline trees that grew in such deformed ways because of the lack of oxygen at such altitudes. On the way through that I slipped alot, jammed an ankle, twisted a knee, and al most felt like I broke my left heel. A tree branch almost took my eye out. It seemed like this forest would never end. Eventually we got low enough where it did, and low and behold our teacher found us a real walking trail, something that we had not seen for an hour. So she told me and the girl that I was walking with to pick it up and she woul wait for the others. After a bit, she came running up to us with her car keys saying that because we were so far ahead that we should get her car keys up to the parking lot so that one of the people in the other group waiting there for us would not miss his train. So we take the keys and press on, she tells of a path that goes to the lef that we should take. Eventually we find this path, but its not a path but a dirt road. But it goes to the left, so we take it. We end up walking, and walking, and walking, and walking on this seemingly unending winding road. After about 3.5-4 km of walking, we come to a taxi waiting at the block off entrance. After we exchange a few awkward words in Norwegian, we find out he is here to take us up to the parking lot where we first started out. So we get in, after a solid 5-10 minutes of driving time we finally get to the pakring lot where the Dane was waiting by the teachers car. We get into the car and drive back down to where we just were. As it turns out, the teacher told us to take the completely wrong path, the same path that she told us to take. She never admitted to being lost. Because we really weren't, we were just on the wrong part of the map. After the end of this ordeal it felt good to sit for once in hours, it felt even better to get off my unending layers of wet clothing.

Now I sit here having to write a few papers for the first time in a while. And I am very reluctant to do so. There are other things I would like to do of course. I used to like writing papers, the process and the knowledge gained in doing semi-large research papers. But not so much anymore, thankfully it is my last year in college, I don't know if I'll continue after this year. But one good thing I learned today that I am excited about, is that I have a relatively famous black metal musican in one of my class, seems wierd but its true.

After just having the best 10 day stretch that I have had in a long time, I have returned to Bø. My trip started out with me waking up at 3 in the morning so that I could get ready and make it to the train station by 5 AM. I couldn't sleep on the train because I was too energetic, I guess that's the purpose of energy drinks right. It of course was raining on the walk down to the train station so I was soaked by the time I got there. Long lines at the airports, expensive beer at the airports, sometimes I rushed other times I took it easy.

Seattle itself was great, another thing made it even better. That reason surprisingly greeted me on way to baggage claim. I was not startled at all, because after all she was the reason I flew for such a long time. We went out to eat a lot, walked around a lot, rode public transportation. It seems like I just left there.

The plane ride back was rather tumultous in a way. An old guy almost died, I think, on the way from Seattle to Minneapolis so we had to divert to Billings. It was nice to see Montana again, even though it was from an plane. At Minneapolis I talked to my parents and found out that my dog almost died after a fall down the basement steps. He bled a little I guess so he's fine, I hope. On the way back home from Minneapolis I got basically three seats to myself, which kicked ass, and so did having Sominex which helped me not even think about the trip and just sleep. And I guess you can't bring beer onto flights, they frown upon that I guess. But oh well, the rather effeminate male flight attendant let me finish it. But now I'm back, tired and full after just eating some food.

So I'm sitting here at MSP International Airport wating for my next flight to leave with some reflections on the last few hours. Oslo to Amsterdam wasn't bad, I read for a bit and then slept for the rest of it, it basically flew by. The next and longest leg from Amsterdam to Minneapolis/STP I thought was going to be hell with wings. Three fucking couples on the plane had a baby at least around or under one year old. But I had earplugs in so it ended up being good all around. Maybe the parents drugged there children before they got on. But that flight was also OPTH, or Old-People-Turist-Heaven. Whether they were coming back from Milan or Germany, they were all old, all of them. But no harm done to me, and now I'm waiting to board my flight to Seattle. And I'm drinking...

Last night we got back from Risøya. The weekend involved sailing, rowing, getting rained on, not sleeping, chopping wood, getting rained on, and taking a lot of pictures. The whole trip started and ended in the same way. When we were on out way the weather was foggy and crappy and then we got there and it was beautifil with the coulds parting the winds dying down and the temp hovering in the mid sixties. I want to live in that area at some point in my life. Not nescessarily in a tent.

We had beautiful rowing weather on the trek out to Bukkhl when we got there, guess what, it started to rain. The rain pretty much continued on and off for most of the afternoon and into the evening. My pillow and other sleeping amenities got fairly wet so most of the evening was spent in front of the campfire trying to dry them out.

The next day consisted of freeing crab from their confines of a net that was out during the night. After about an hour of everyone doing that we split into our groups and set off. That was my day for sailing. It was quite enjoyable actually. I have never been sailing before so today was a good to get started. The rain quit for a long time throughout the day and only came back in brief spurts. We saw the most well preserved village-fishing village in all of Europe, or so they say. Lyngør was quite beautiful in the inauspicious gloom of the day. Saw some locals and stopped into the store and people bought some food and snacks. I bought an ice-cream cone, an odd choice for the occuring day. We then went into Gjerving so that our captain could get some fuel for his stove so that we could cook on it. But that did not happen. So when we got back we proceeded with building a campfire to heat some kettles over to make some stew that included the crab and cod caught in the net during the night.

After dinner it was time to walk back to Risøya to catch the bus back. Either we were early or the bus was late, no one really knows. But we got to hang ut in front of the Folkhøgskole and have one last group lecture before we took off. The weather while we were waiting was beautiful, the sun came out and clouds danced around each other before the sun set over the archiepelago. That put a coda on the trip.

Tomorrow morning I leave on an expedition to see the sea and go out into the sea and see things that are around the sea and stuff...yeah. I've changed my mind on 7th Saga too, it gets ungodly hard, but I'm saying fuck Game Genie and DRTin' it. My flavor of today is Brunswick Worlds Players Tournament. I'm a better cyber bowler I guess.

It is for Super Nintendo (SNES), and it goes by the name of the "7th Saga". I believe it too be relatively unknown. But it is really addicting and simple. It is a fantasy RPG. The gameplay of it is exactly like every other RPG I've loved, but simpler. There are few things in it that I don't like, but for the most part I enjoy playing it thoroughly. That being said......

Don't know why but I do. Something about walking long distances and doing some so benign as taking pictures in the dark can really lift a down-mans spirit. Why use a flash in the dark anyway? The dark is meant to hide things. Attempting to reveal detail in the dark is difficult in many ways. It requires a steady hand, or a tri-pod. I have neither, so I just use gravestones to steady my shots.

A bunch of meaningless online quizzes just told me the following things about myself:
- My inner-European is Dutch
- I should be learning Swedish
- My kissing technique is perfect
- I failed 8th grade history
- I passed 8th grade Geography
- I'm an Atheist
- I'm a Mermaid
- I'm 75% Socialist, 25% Capitalist
- I am New York City
- 80% Passionate, 20% Compassionate
- I'm 30% Brutally Honest
- My German name is Ewald Florian
- My Irish name is Conor Doyle
- My beer personality is Guinness
- I am 30% Amrcan, cuz Amrcans don't like Terrrr

I wish it would have told me something about myself that I didn't know.

I don't know why but lately I have becoming extremely restless, and I don't know why. Lately I have wanted to get out and do things, but on the other hand I have lacked the motivation to do so. Weeknights are not too bad I guess, neither are the weekends for that matter. I just have to keep reminding myself that it is only September, and that I'll be here until next June. That leaves me plenty of time to get out, slowly, and being to do things. I usually take a couple of months when the school season starts to really get into any groove of any kind. Whether it's study patterns or physical fitness habits. Maybe in a couple of weeks I will begin to settle down a little bit more.

It is hard to adjust to a place that is in some ways radically different and frighteningly similar to where I come from. I'm beginning to not like the language, I still want to learn it but nothing about is beginning to make sense and I'm even trying to understand it the best that I can. When my teacher handed me back my most recent writing exercise and told me that she didn't know what I was trying to say in a certain part of the paper, and then doesn't leave any suggestions at all really doesn't help me at all. And she told me I can rewrite it, but without any thing to change it to I'm fucked because what I wrote was the extent of what I know considering that I completely utilize my resources. So, that's probably why I'm in a restless mood.