Day light savings saves my life

October has come and passed and the days have gotten so short that when the sun starts to set in the early afternoon i laugh to myself and say in a southern accent, in my head of course, i worked hard from sun up to sun down. whaha. that's only like seven hours! the sun was starting to set a little bit before five when the hour increment came out of the bureaucratic brilliance of some calendar nerd's silly head. it used to be exciting because, i don't know it meant that you felt like you got an extra hour of sleep. maybe you could trick yourself into going to bed a little earlier. here its like a greenwich angel come to save your sanity from the grips of a dark lunch.

but its been a crazy month. i've made some new pals, got in on a film festival, toured the nobel peace center (twice), watched all the leaves turn yellow and then all the trees strip down, felt the weather go from nippy at night to cold in the afternoon, got to watch the debates with the democrats abroad in norway, got offered speed at the train station...in norwegian!...went to a guzzillion thrift stores in one day, missed the last train home, walked across town because i missed the last train home, got my insurance coverage (what, what? take that hmo's), but the best thing, and the hardest to explain -- all of the sudden one morning i woke up and i felt like i was at home. taking the bus into town seeing little blond boys and arab women and hipsters and old men on bicycles and junkies wedged up between three hundred year old walls, two hundred year old cobblestone and fifty year old trash cans. street vendors selling bright colored fruit that you know had to be shipped in from somewhere oceans away from here. last names that mean wolf man in old norsk. slicked back hair that somehow floats in place, perfect, crazily arian. crazy sunsets on aker brygge with views of the castle and islands off shore. near misses with the trikk plowing along the tracks in streets so narrow you can tell they were never meant for cars, until cars showed up.

i really like it here, and i'm not so surprised when i turn every corner. i can predict things now and laugh at things that i didn't realize were ironic before. i'm starting to get these norwegians i think. and i like them. i'm not sure if i can hang with the weather changes, but it hasn't started to snow yet and when it does, i'm sure it will be so stunning that i won't be stressing about the cold.

Montebello

I think I'm finally starting to really settle in in Oslo. The sun is setting earlier and earlier, which has stopped evoking morbid fears of depressing darkness and is instead has brought with it the great feelings of fall. The leaves are changing into great splotches of yellow and orange, and the hills surrounding the city are exploding. Last night I had what could have been a miserable mass transit mishap - heading home from a party I got on the wrong line that headed out of the city ring instead of into it. I ended up in the pouring rain at Montebello station on the outskirts of Oslo. I was thankful that there was one more train headed back into the city, but I waited for twenty five minutes. Standing in the rain can be a fun and self-important time and luckily that's what this experience was. I had one of those, this wouldn't be bad if I were a character in a movie, so I guess I'll be a character in a movie. I had headphones for a soundtrack and waited in the cold in a trenchcoat for the train to come. Which it did. I got back to the subway stop thats a km from my apartment, but the buses had stopped running so I walked home in the rain. It was actually really nice.
This week I went on a road trip to central Norway with a friend who wanted to go look at a schoolhouse built in the 1850's. He was considering buying it and developing an artist collective out in the hills. It was foggy and humid but the hill outside of Oslo deliver everything majestic that you think about Norway. And this time of year, before the real cold, and naked trees, the views are perfect. We drove through Lillehammer, which still boasts of being the host of the 94 winter olympics. The drive was perfect, as I've been itching to get out of the city.
And a few nights ago I got to see a Yemeni scholar speak about internet censorship in the Arab world. He set up a site that aggregates all of the news stories about Yemen and puts them in one place. After a year of operation, the government, who owns the only internet service provider in Yemen, blocked his site and he has since been crusading with technological skills to get around internet censorship. After the meeting I met up with a couchsurfer from South Africa, a friend of hers from Norway, and a smattering of kids from all over the world for drinks. I stayed out way past my bed time and barely made it to the last bus. It's my first time having to crawl out of bed and intravenously inject caffeine into my system to get to class. I was almost late, almost sick, almost an idiot, and hope that I formed full sentences when talking to my classmates (something makes me doubt that).
Which catches me up to last night. I went to this posh apartment in the Vigeland park neighborhood (google it. its amazing) to a couchsurfing party and mingled with a pack of really great kids, made some friends, got some phone numbers, and will hopefully be seeing some of them again. And then I got on the wrong subway. And came home drenched and cold, but having made peace with the impending winter.

Gausdal