Weekend in Oslo (Part 5...Finale)

By this time I will have finished writing this story, I have been to Brussels, Stockholm, Berlin and London, spent countless hours in front of my computer and had infinitely more memories from my time in Europe.  I don’t know what’s taken me so long to finish story, but here it is, before it’s too late. Here is the final installment of my epic. 

Compared to the rest of this trip, Sunday was quite tame and rather uneventful; basically it was a normal visit to a foreign city.  After my passport debacle the group headed to the Botanical Garden that was close to out hostel.  On the way we spotted a café in the Edvard Munch museum, and in true 7-11 fashion, we stopped for our little nosh.  The boys wanted to stay at the museum and see “The Scream,” while the girls wanted to explore the botanical gardens.  I ended up staying at the museum to see “The Scream,” as well as a charming exhibit entitled “Puberty.”

After viewing more paintings of boobs than I ever care to see, the museum-group headed to the gardens to try to find the girls and enjoy the garden’s beauty of previously splendid, but at that point completely-dead flowers. 

Unfortunately the girls had already left so we head back in to the center of the city, planning to meet up with the girls at the ship when it was time to leave.  In the city center we touristed-it-up, walked around, stopped in souvenir shops, went back to that infamous McDonalds (charming, once again) and walked through an old fort/castle that was right next to the harbor.  The journey onto the boat was essentially smooth sailing (pun intended) and after I picked up my passport, we were officially on our journey home, but first, a night of debauchery similar to our first boat experience. 

The next day, the entire group was absolutely exhausted as we made our way back to the dorm in silent resolution until we could finally fall into our beds and sleep the weekend away.  Let’s just be blunt and call this trip was it was…a SHITSHOW.  I don’t know how I didn’t have a complete mental breakdown at several points that weekend, but at the end, with my passport in hand, I could officially say I had a great time and a trip to Norway for the memory books, well actually for this blog because I don’t know anyone who writes in actual books anymore…

Weekend in Oslo (Part 4)

I awoke from my slumber a new woman.  Refreshed and rested, the girls decided to go to the grocery store and make dinner, as opposed to go out and spend a lot of money at a restaurant.  We strolled across the street to find the closest grocery store and after a bit of hunting, we found our destination and decided to make fajitas for our dinner.  Once the ingredients were purchased, we headed back to the hostel and started to prepare our feast.

Don’t worry; I know what you’re thinking.  Thus far, this story sounds delightful and non-eventful compared to the others, but alas, much like the rest of the trip, we had our hurdles. Our first obstacle came when we almost burned down the hostel.  While I was chopping the onions, unbeknownst to me, someone had turned on the burners and let the pots on empty to sit on them, heating on high for 15 minutes.  When we poured the oil into the hot pan it started burning, sizzling, and smoking, until I screamed to take the pot off of the heat.  Too late. The fire alarm was already blaring overhead as we ran around like chickens with our heads cut off looking for a way to quell the madness and quiet the siren of the alarm.

When it was finally quiet we were able to finish our preparations in peace and we ate our chips and fajitas with the satisfaction of the first home-cooked meal that we had eaten in days.  However, the glee and fulfillment we felt from our meal was short-lived when soon after the meal, the bathroom was frequented by the all but one of the sickened, vomiting girls who had partaken in eating the meal. Once our stomachs had settled we started to get ready to meet the boys so that we could get our night’s festivities underway.

When we finally met up with the boys, we discovered that to our dismay, you can’t buy alcohol (in stores) after 6pm on Saturdays so we were left with the shockingly abysmal quantity of left-over cruise booze to get the party started.  After hanging out we finally (and I say finally because to get a group of 12 out the door is quite the production) left the hostel, walked to the metro and started our journey to the city center, again not knowing exactly where the night would take us.  Literally as soon as we walked out of the metro in the city, we ran into the other half of our CBS group which was fresh from their dinner of classic Norwegian cuisine at TGI Fridays.  What ensued was a long rambling walk of trying to find a bar that let in people under the age of 20 – we had about three in the group who were not yet 20.  Much to our chagrin, our search was futile and we admitted defeat, scurrying back to the metro before it closed so that we wouldn't have to take yet another cab ride back to the hostel.

There is a part of this story that I have purposefully left out thus far, simply because it needs to be told as its own story and it occurs over the course of a day, and because it's the most embarrassing part.  At approximately 9pm while I was getting ready to go out and assemble my belongings in to something that resembles some form of organization and order, I noticed that my passport was nowhere to be found.  Frantically I emptied the contents of my backpack, shaking each item of clothing, looking in every nook and cranny for that elusive document that was proving impossible to locate.  Finally I realized, to my shock and panic that it simply was not there and I had lost my passport.  Me. Emily Hope. As organized as I am; I had lost my passport.  In utter dread, I hoped that I had left in on the cruise, as in no other scenario I could imagine getting it back.  To be honest, I didn't even really need my passport to get back to Copenhagen the next day.  I had my Danish residence permit with me and that would have sufficed for my identification. However, I was going to Brussels that Thursday and I couldn't imagine the hassle and time it would take to have to mess around at the American Embassy in Copenhagen to try to replace the necessary documentation and rectify the titanic (no pun intended) mistake that I had made.

After trying to forget about my quandary Saturday night (after all, there was nothing I could do at 10pm on a Saturday night) I awoke Sunday morning still full of dread as I slinked in shame down to the reception desk where I told the staff that I was having an emergency with my passport and asked if there was a phone I could use.  In the most unsympathetic, heartless and frankly cruel voices they could muster, I was told that I would have to find a payphone and was thence given some haphazard directions to the nearest one. At this point in the chaos I couldn't imagine payphones even existing.  Who needs a payphone in our cell-phone dominated world?  With my friend Kate for support, I headed out in search of a payphone, which was nowhere in sight. Exasperated, I shared my fear of lack-of-payphones to Kate in an almost psychotic voice when she reassured me that there are, in fact, payphones still around and that I just don’t notice them because I never need one.

Finally, after asking the 7-11 attendant where the closest payphone was, we found what we were looking for and I sauntered up to those beautiful machines which beckoned to me with a faint halo and the beautiful, summoning sound of a choir calling me towards it.  My euphoria was quickly hampered as I stood in front of the booth staring at the phone.  I had never used a payphone before and the only ideas on how to use them came with from movies or my mother’s fraught, decade-old explanations on how to use one in the event that I ever got lost.  I eventually, somehow mustered up the wherewithal to call the Oslo office of the cruise line and had the following discussion…

• Cruise-Lady Operator: …Something in Norwegian…
• Me: in a whiny, desperate voice… Do you speak English?
• CLO: Yes, Ma’am. How can I help you?
• Me: I’m calling to inquire (yes, I used those words) about some lost property on the cruise from Copenhagen to Oslo on Friday evening. I believe I lost my passport on board.
• CLO: One moment while I check to see if anything was found. (A minute passes) What is your name please?
• Me: *glimmer of hope* Emily Strickman
• CLO: Yes, your passport was found on board. *my heart falls from in my throat to somewhere slightly closer to where it should be* It is our policy to send passports to their respective embassies. Yours has been sent to the American Embassy.
• Me: The embassy in Oslo or in Copenhagen?
• CLO: In Oslo. *at this point I’m just so relieved that it’s not a big deal to have to go to the embassy just meet up with my friends at the boat later that afternoon* Let me get you the phone number for the embassy. (a few minutes pass) Here is the number, but the embassy is closed today.
• Me: (and this my friends, is my true reaction with the poor lady on the other line)    Screaming…HOW CAN AN AMERICAN EMBASSY BE CLOSED ON A SUNDAY.  WHAT IF I NEEDED POLITICAL ASSYLUM?!? WHAT IF THERE WAS TENSION AND STRIFE BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND NORWAY AND I NEEDED POLITICAL ASSYLUM TODAY? What am I supposed to do? I am going back to Copenhagen this afternoon.
• CLO: Please let me check to see if we still have your passport in our office.  Because it’s the weekend, it might not have been taken over to the embassy…Yes, we do have it in our office, you just need to come to the port office when you depart on the cruise.
• Me: Practically doing a jig at this point Thank you for your help, bye!

How lucky was I?

Weekend in Oslo (Part 3)

We emerged from 7-11 men on a mission.  Piling into our taxis we sped off into downtown Oslo in silence, somberly nursing our hangovers and begrudgingly admitting defeat in the search of that elusive Norwegian metro.   The taxi ride took what seemed like an eternity.  The marathon had shut down roads and forced our confused cabby to take alternate routes.  When we finally arrived at the hostel, we were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the hostel. We were greeted by sleek black and white modern furnishings, a fully stocked bar (at which no one could even muster a good look at that time) and a fully staffed reception desk.  Our brief euphoria was suddenly shattered with the realization that we would not actually be able to check in until 3 hours later, but, as we decided, we would leave our bags locked with the hostel and we would go explore the city that was beckoning to us outside the rain-streaked windows of the hostel lobby.

Once at the metro (yes, we actually found it on the hostel-end) we bought our 24-hour passes and were ready to go. Except we weren’t.  Our group of 12 was like a pack of ADD 9 year olds.  When 10 of us may have been ready, 2 were wandering into the convenience store.  Once those 2 returned and were ready to go, someone wanted to take pictures of the scenic underground metro station. When that was over, someone lost their phone and we all had to join in the search.  FINALLY, we were ready to go and we submerged ourselves in the underground labyrinth that was the path to our far-off metro platform. 

This next segment was the part of the trip that will haunt me most forever.  Walking through the tunnels I remember myself commenting, “I’m surprised how clean these tunnels are. I haven’t seen any puddles of homeless-man piss on the ground, or piles of trash in the corner.”  These words were barely out of my mouth; they had just seen the light of day, fresh from my noggin; they were still hanging in the air when we turned the corner and quite literally stumbled upon the most shockingly horrifying sight I have ever beheld.  There, squatting on the ground, needle in arm, was a man shooting up heroine.  We sprinted past him, some of us close to jumping right over him and hustled through that labyrinth which suddenly became a scary, scary place until we reached the platform and simply stared at each other in utter disbelief of the sight we had just witnessed.

When we managed to regain our composure, we stumbled onto the train and traveled the 3 stops to the city center, whose stop was, guess what, called “city-center.” With no plan and almost three hours to kill we wandered the streets stopping in stores when we felt and taking pictures along the way.  It was actually quite nice coming to an intersection, looking each way and deciding on a whim which direction we thought would prove to be most interesting.  Eventually I found my obligatory elephant (I buy a small elephant figurine in every country I visit) and I could officially call my visit to Norway a success, no matter what was to happen.  We ended up finding an outdoor food market where we each grabbed some samples and a snack and by then it was time to head back to our hostel. 

Back at the hostel, we checked in and each room-group silently retreated into our respective suites and when I say we all took naps I mean we slept as if our lives depended on it, because at that point, we legitimately thought they did.  

Weekend in Oslo (Part 2)

We woke up from our night of shenanery at 8:00am the next morning to the soothing sounds of the captain yelling at us in Norwegian from the intercom system on the ship.  It was our wake-up call and the boat, according to the secondary announcement made in perfect broken English, would be docking at 9:45.  So as to be expected, we slept until about 9:20 when we were all scrambling to clean ourselves up, pack up and leave our cabins for some fresh Norwegian air.  Getting off the boat, we discovered that everyone was either VERY hung-over, or still drunk, (I was the latter) and stepping to the freezing, drizzling Oslo port with nothing but port offices in sight and no idea where to go was the not-so-sobering wake-up call that we should have gotten 2 hours prior. 

What did we do? We did the only thing we could rack our bleary brains to do; we walked.  Each of us following some different person in the group, with no one taking the lead as no one knew where he was going, we miserably walked along the water until we saw what appeared to be the city center.  We walked until barricaded by the finish line of the marathon and then we switched directions and walked some more.  Let me remind you that at this point, it is still raining, it's FREEZING, we have all of our luggage with us and not one person of the 14 in the group with us at this point was in any kind of shape to figure out where we needed to go.  Then we saw it, the sign from heaven.  Hanging above us on the façade of some building which probably housed the 351^st H&M of Oslo perched those beautiful golden arches.  The boys were off, sprinting for some double cheeseburgers and the girls followed into the most beautiful, double-story, waterfront McDonalds that our cloudy eyes had ever beheld. 

We sat in that McDonalds for what must have been an hour and a half.  Falling asleep at our tables, or throwing up in the bathroom (or watching Youtube videos of animals farting, as was the choice for some…) we collected ourselves and prepared for the journey to the hostel of which we knew the address and the metro stop.  Again into the windy, rainy cold we stumbled in search of the Metro. We traipsed downtown Oslo, asking strangers for directions to the metro, until we beheld a second familiar sight: 7-11.  Now, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but there is a 7-11 everywhere in Copenhagen.  It is the convenience store of choice and you’d be hard-pressed not to find one on every-other street corner, or even in the metro stations.  However, also in Copenhagen it is a struggle, especially in a group, to pass this convenience store without someone stopping in whether for a soda, a doughnut, a taquito, or even a chichen kebab (the thought of said “gas-station-meat-stick” made me nauseous until the locals said it was perfectly okay and that everyone eats them).  So we stopped in the 7-11 in Oslo, deemed our Metro search fruitless and decided to take a taxi to the hostel instead.  

Weekend in Oslo (Part 1)

I knew it would happen; I just didn’t know it would be today.  There comes the time where one isn’t sure when sharing no longer becomes caring and the “what-happens-in-Vegas” paradigm should ring true.  Since the moment my weekend started, I’ve been seriously grappling with the idea of NOT sharing the stories of my weekend in Oslo.  “It’s too much,” I thought, “my parents, my family and my not-so uncritical peers will be reading this; judging; disapproving.”  Then I thought, forget it, at least I’ll make a funny story out of it (as you’ll see I say “funny” now because it’s over). So fair warning, what you’re about to read, you may not find pretty, charming, or anything of the sort, but writing this story will be good to remember; who knows, maybe the hindsight-hilarity of it will render it worthy enough of my memoire one day…

This Oslo trip was conceived on the Monday before the Friday that we ended up leaving.  Sitting around in one of the dorm rooms, someone casually mentioned the idea of taking a trip to Norway via the overnight ferry that runs from Copenhagen to Oslo.  Before everyone knew it, the Facebook message had been sent out and 23 of my nearest and dearest friends (24 including me) were completely invested in going on the trip.  The indecision and non-committal nature that seem to plague my generation had simply vanished with the promise of a two-word expression: “Booze Cruise.” The trip was to work as such… for $80 round trip (not including the hostel), we would book rooms of 4 on the overnight ferry.  We were to leave Friday afternoon, arrive in Oslo Saturday morning, spend a night in a hostel Saturday night and take the ferry back to Copenhagen on Sunday afternoon, returning Monday morning.  We had 10 girls and 14 boys going on the trip, and after our rooms of 4 were booked, we booked rooms of 6 at an apartment-style hostel in Oslo. (Private rooms with a kitchen and shower; aka no sharing a dorm room with some creepy old guy from some Soviet-bloc country that is so fresh from independence that no one’s even heard its name)

The plan was great until the hostel was completely booked after only 2 rooms had been filled by our group (we learned later that the Oslo marathon was that weekend and there was an influx of visitors on Saturday) but I was lucky enough to be in the girls’ room that had been booked and the 6 guys who would be staying at our hostel were shaping up to be quite the entertaining group. (the other half of the group found another hostel just outside of the city) But once this little hiccup had been reworked, we were raring to go. It actually ended up being good because being in a group of 24 all weekend would have been miserable.  We woke up Friday morning to a cold, cloudy windy day; clearly the best weather for a 17-hour boat ride. After buying our alcohol, cleverly concealing it in the never-to-be-detected water bottles in our bags, and packing up, the group was on its way to the train/metro stop that is a short 2-block walk from our dorm.  Did we make it there in one group, you may ask? Why NO, of course we didn’t and as half of the group jumped on the train, the other half stood angrily waiting for the few stragglers who decided to take a quick sojourn on the long, demanding voyage of about 400 meters.  

We got off of the train at the Nordhavn (“North Harbor”) stop and walked along what ended up being the Berlin Wall of impassable train tracks until we realized we would have to turn around, back track and go out of our way to get to the only railroad crossing within miles of the stop.  This did, however, give the other group (the ones who had to get on the next train) time to catch up to us and once we successfully crossed the tracks, it was an easy 10-minute walk to the boat.  What was waiting for us, I must say, was quite the surprise.  We were not simply taking a ferry to Oslo, we were taking a cruise.  Slightly smaller than a regular cruise ship, the “Pearl of the Seas” sat beckoning to us with her sweeping promenades, cafes, pool, cinemas, and bars.  Before anyone gets too excited (shout-out to the fam right now…) there was no all you can eat buffet on this cruise because, after all, this my friends is Scandinavia, the land of the $6-dollar tap water and where you have to pay for the bread that they put on your table at the beginning of a meal.  

Because, naturally, we had all booked the same lowest-fare rooms within 15 hours of each other, each room was on the same deck on the ship and after we literally walked on to the zero-security boat (there was a quick passport check just to make sure that your name matched your boarding pass) and put our stuff down, we began to explore just to realize our biggest fear.  Now, to those born before approximately 1986, this may not seem like a big deal, but believe me, to us, not having working cellphones, especially in a group of 24 people, was a logistical nightmare.  However, once we discovered that there was an on-board duty free shop with discounted, readily available alcohol, you can bet your ass that the group met up near the cash registers, smiling with the sweet satisfaction of a well-made purchase and the anticipation of a night to remember…or not remember, as was sort of the plan.