20 Hours in Norway

The Hotel Dining Room

One of the most absurd parts of this semester in Europe will have to be the not quite full day we had to spend in Norway last weekend (or perhaps more precisely outside of the British Isles) to satisfy the immigration requirements of the UK Home Office.  Basically, we couldn't enter the country until a week before starting classes under our student visa, and so we had to leave and come back again to switch to our student visa.  Unfortunately, under the circumstances, we didn't get a chance to see anything of the city of Oslo.  All we really saw of Norway was through the window on the one and a half hour bus ride to our hotel.  It struck me as sort of a European Canada.  The landscape in some places quite rocky, and there were a good deal of pine trees and trees which had already lost their foliage.  The houses had steeply angled roofs and a rather north woods look to them.  However, the commercial buildings all looked quite new and modern.  Everything was quite expensive as well.  You can get about 10 Kroner for a pound, and 6 Kroner for a US dollar, but the 6 minute shuttle ride from the second airport to the hotel cost 60 Kroner, and candy bars sold in the airport for 18+ Kroner.  The redeeming quality of the trip was the posh hotel we were put up in for the night, which had a really nice gym, bar, and dinning room, as well as very up to date rooms.  The breakfast was very nice, although the choices included various questionable looking fish concoctions.  I was struck with how everyone spoke decent English, how hotels and airports had everything written in English underneath, and how familiarity with English that seemed be part of the culture, as evidenced by commerical signs in English (they had such signs in France, but not plastered in huge letters on office buildings).  Perhaps most noteworthy in terms of personal accomplishments is that Norway is both the farthest North and the farthest East I've been to date.  Gardermoen, north of Oslo where our hotel was, is over 60 degrees North and over 11 degrees East.  That's farther north than Juneau, Alaska.  Also, there were plenty of blond haired people there.  It made me feel quite at home.  And I now know two Norewegian words.  I know the word for 'and,' which is 'og,' and the word for 'airport,' which is 'lufthavn.'

Norwegian Countryside (as seen through a bus window)



Now just a couple of public sanity pleas.  The first goes to all the border control agencies of the world: Please don't make people go to Norway just to change their status.  There has got be some easier way.  The second goes out to all the travel agents of the world: When you book your client a hotel near the airport, make sure it's the right airport and not the one over 100km to the north.