A real post is forthcoming. But for now...

Tim goes back to Holland in eight hours. Mike goes back to Minnesota in ten hours.

To briefly borrow Jennifer's words: This... is hard.

:(

Winding down.

All things considered, I'm having a lovely second-to-last week in my adopted home town; my friend Ben is visiting me all the way from Alabama, I'm watching copious amounts of World Cup football and overdosing on Wimbledon when on the internet, and I'm communicating lots with my family in Europe arranging my trips to visit them. It looks like my life will be made easiest if I just wait to book flights to see Sylvie and Eddie until I'm in England with my Uncle Peter; they can better instruct me on how to get from place to place.

I'm feeling listless and a little frightened about my future, which I think is to be expected after spending five years as a student, only to have that identity yanked from you once you've finished your studies. When I remember that come August I won't be returning to UAH for classes in Morton and Roberts Hall, I'm put a bit off-balance, but I think that ultimately this transition away from academia and into the world is good for me. When I was eighteen I had such a clear idea of what I wanted to do once I graduated; grad school was a certainty, not only in pursuit of a masters in English or history, but maybe even a PhD, and a future in a classroom surrounded by maps and textbooks and faculty meetings, etc. It is incredibly ironic to me that now at age twenty-three, with some considerable life experience at my disposal that should have given me more direction, I have less of an idea of what I want to do with my life than when I started out as a kid. I don't have the head for a masters or PhD program in history or literature--at least not right now--and I don't want to spend the rest of my life thinking about paper deadlines, critical book reviews, or whether or not my historical and literary analysis can compete with my colleague's. I don't want to look in the mirror every morning feeling as though my self-worth is entirely dependent on which institution published my dissertation... and more importantly, I'm not sure I have it in me to spend years on just one research subject. The anxiety and pressure of writing just one honors thesis was enough to render me completely immobile mentally; I think going after a dissertation would be an absolute disaster for me.

I guess there are simple things I want to do once I get home. I'd like to learn to garden; I'd like to get better at cooking and expand my spice rack; I'd like to get some serious work done on my writing project; I'd like to get involved in St. Thomas's in Huntsville; I'd like to swim in the Tennessee river, and go down to the Gulf to see if I can help clean up the filth on the beaches where I used to play as a child. I want to do things with my hands that produce a visible, tangible result. I'd like to leave more things to chance.

Just for a little while, I want to live a life without deadlines and less certainty. I think it will be good for me.

Movie recommendation.

På norsk.

SEE IT. NOW.

Breathe, and I'll carry you away.

I guess there's no way to write this entry without acknowledging the facts as they are: My grandfather passed away this morning, around 3.30 my time, and I'm still having a difficult time letting the reality of the situation soak in. Tim, Richard and I watched the Netherlands v. Japan World Cup match this afternoon, which was a good idea for me since it gave me something else to focus on than the inside of my own head, but not even in Olsens Cafe could I really get away from the sadness. (The perpetually windy and rainy weather didn't help matters, either; it feels like London here right now.) My friends are looking forward to getting home to their families, and I'm still grappling with the knowledge that two precious personalities in my life won't be waiting for me in Huntsville. Granddaddy's death has reopened the hurt from Nanny's passing in February, but I feel like I don't have the time to properly grieve right now. I've got company this weekend. I'll have company next week. I've got to pack my belongings and mail some of it home. I've got to finalize all my travel plans while I'm in England and France next month. I've got to think about hunting for jobs. I've got to figure out how to send my UiO transcripts back home.


The week hasn't been all bad. On Tuesday I met up with my father's friend Peter Martin again, this time at his and his family's house in the Sinsen neighborhood outside of city center. He and his wife Hilde have a beautiful home with a very lovely, expansive garden; the massive white irises by the patio, in fact, come from roots nicked from Churchill's garden in the UK, which I thought was impressive. That was the first time in months that I've eaten proper meat not in the form of a kebab or pølse, too.

Tim and I went to the Holocaust museum out on Bygdøy on Wednesday, which turned out to be a bit of a cerebral adventure. It's housed in what used to be Quisling's mansion, something I considered very appropriate personally. Most of the exhibit was historical background information on Nazism in the Third Reich, which I already knew mostly by heart--and if I didn't, I'm sure "Frau" Dr. Johnson would be entirely justified in fussing at me. The information on national socialism in Norway was pretty fascinating as well, though I'm not sure how much of it I understood correctly; the whole exhibit was in Norwegian, with no English translations available. Nonetheless I was pretty impressed by my own ability to understand what I was reading. Apparently I've absorbed more "norsk" than I realized. Here's hoping I don't lose it when I go home.

Thursday I had my last barbecue with my Norwegian classmates Maggie, Corinna, and Taka, along with Corinna's boyfriend Benny and Maggie's classmate Carynn. Taka is staying here through September to work, but Maggie and Carynn went back to Germany with Corinna and Benny yesterday in order to start their epic European; it was a pretty bittersweet departure, but it seems like this whole week has been composed of farewells of one sort or another. Bastian, after our trip to Bergen, has gone back to Germany as well; Ray and Charlotte left this week as well on their own tour of Europe; once Daniel leaves on Monday, I don't know when I'll next see him. And, one of the farewells I'm dreading the most, both Tim and Mike leave next weekend, and I'll be here by myself, essentially, until leaving for England on July 4th.

I'll find ways to stay busy, of course. There are still lots of things I'd like to do here in the city, and if I'm feeling brave, I might take a trip down the fjord by train all by myself, to visit another city. It's not as though I dislike being alone. I tend to keep to myself a lot back in Huntsville.

This entry ended on a much sadder note than I'd intended. Sorry, can't help it right now. Maybe I'll feel better if Denmark defeats Cameroon tonight.

Two entries in one day--unprecedented!

But I felt like my entry on Bergen needed to stand alone, as does this entry about more personal things.

My time here in Norway is winding down to a close, and I'm getting ready to pack up all my things, some of which to mail home, and some of which to take with me across the pond to England for a month before I go back to Alabama. I'm not sure what sort of life is waiting for me back in the states; with my grandmother gone and my grandfather soon to pass away as well, I think that so many of these drastic personal changes will overwhelm me. My mother and uncle have had time to adjust to life in Huntsville without phonecalls from Nanny asking, but to me, she is still sitting in that house in the woods in Madison, or getting up early on Saturday mornings to make breakfast for both of us and Cooper. In my mind, my grandfather can't possibly be hooked up to a ventilator in a hospital in Birmingham, because in February I saw him upright and walking and talking, inviting me to come down and see him when I come home. And all I can think to myself is, "Why didn't I spend more time with them?"

I know it does me absolutely no good to beat myself up over things I can't change, and I know this is precisely what my grandparents wouldn't have wanted me to do, but they were both so important to me, and I have to wonder if they knew how much I loved them and respected them, and how much their opinions mattered to me. And I know I can pray and tell them through my faith all of these things, but it guts me in a way I don't have words for when I realize that they have gone to a place where I can't follow, I'll never hear my grandmother laugh or see my grandfather smile again, and it is inevitable that one day my parents will go like this too, and I'll have this pain again but magnified. When I think that every person in the world today must go through this at some point in their lives, it floors me that the universe has the capacity for so much grief in such a tiny, concentrated area like the Earth's surface. I'm stunned that it doesn't buckle inward from the force of so much unhappiness.

But I guess it must be held afloat by the joy our parents and grandparents give us through our lives. They teach us to speak so we can laugh, tease, joke with and love each other. They teach us to walk so they can show us places to go. They teach us family recipes that will always stay with us; the smell of simmering tomato sauce or the taste of sauteed squash taking me back to Friday nights in the third grade as if I never grew up and learned that anyone could make these things, and that they weren't just the realm of my mother's expertise. They hold us when we've been hurt and want to cry, they give us their shoulders to stand on so we can grasp our dreams and learn to pull ourselves up on our own. They aren't perfect, but then again they are, and we know that isn't a paradox because that is just how life works when you are someone's mother, father, grandmother, or grandfather.

The knowledge of what I don't have waiting for me at home steals my breath from me and makes my chest tight, but I know that this grief exists because of all the happiness I've felt for the past twenty-three years. My grandmother and grandfather loved me, and I continue to love them, and even though this pain seems unbearable to me right now, I know that it is a natural, good pain. It will never go away, but it isn't meant to. I'm not meant to recover from this loss, but to weave it into myself so that it becomes part of me and reminds me of why my dreams are worth realizing. Because they believed in me, and I'll be damned if I ever let them down.

Our trip to Bergen.

Bergen was amazing. Just look at that picture of Bastian basking in the sunlight. I knew it would be, of course, because no city with that much history could be anything less than amazing, but I wasn't prepared for just how much I wanted to see and do while I was there. I don't have the photos up on facebook yet, but as soon as I've sorted out the good from the bad, I'll upload them and then post a link here.

The weather was traditionally Bergen-esque our first two days in the city, with torrential rainfall and howling winds after we checked into our hostel that gave way to a perpetual drizzle that followed us mostly everywhere on our second day. This, of course, did nothing to discourage Tim, Mike, Bastian and I from venturing outdoors; we wandered through the historic area of Bryggen, where the Hanseatic merchants did business until well into the 1700s when they were absorbed by the Bergan merchants, to the very end of the pier, and let the wind and rain thoroughly chill and soak us, and then retired to Dr. Livingstone, an indoor/outdoor English pub, to watch World Cup Football matches. (This, it turns out, is how we ended most of our evenings, since the US, Germany, and the Netherlands were all playing their first matches while we were in Bergen.)

In Copenhagen we flocked to museums, but in Bergen we spent nearly all of our time wandering around outdoors taking photographs of the most inconsequential things, because it was impossible to take three steps in any given direction without discovering a new and exciting angle to experiment with. Bergen is carved out of the mountains around it, so it is very likely that one street will literally wind up the mountainside a good four meters above the road and houses parallel to it. In a way it felt very Greek, just tucked away next to Bunnefjorden instead of the Aegean. We took Fløibanen up to the top of Fløyen mountain in order to get an amazing panoramic view of the whole city (totally blanketed by gray fog, clouds and rain, of course, but still absolutely worth it), then decided to head back down the mountain by foot. Bastian and I decided that if trolls were to live anywhere in Norway, it would be within the lush woods that somehow manage to thrive while clinging to the rockface of the mountains cradling the city.

The weather cleared up by Sunday just in time for our tour of Bunnefjorden by boat, though the wind kept me wearing my windbreaker and scarf for pretty much the whole tour. I knew logically that Bergen was going to be colder than Oslo, but I wasn't prepared for just how much colder I was near constantly; not to the point where I was uncomfortable, mind you, because temperatures near 10 and 11C (look, I understand Celsius now!) are always preferable for me. I like any opportunity to bundle up in warm clothing and drape myself in scarves. There were so many small communities and cozy farm houses lining the fjord waterway. I know that it must get incredibly lonely living in such relative isolation here, but honestly, with a view of a fjord out my window every morning, it might be worth it for me. Maybe one day I'll be rich enough to own a house here. (Probably not, but a girl can dream.)

There aren't many Things That We Did, specifically, to note down. Sure, we took Fløibanen, went on the boat tour, visited the preserved Bergen Kontor that now serves as the Hanseatic Museum in Bryggen, but most of what we did just involved walking wherever our feet carried us, finding grassy patches of sunshine to lay in for hours at a time just soaking in the summer air, and letting Bergen seep into us.

On my first night in the city, I bumped into a particularly chatty Norwegian woman in Dr. Livingstone--yes! a Norwegian who actually wanted to talk to a complete stranger!--who gave me a saying that I feel, in retrospect, is quite apt for this trip: "Oslo may have the capital, but Bergen has the soul of Norway."

I think she's right.

An update with substance!

Finally! It feels like forever since I've had something to write about. The frequency of my blog posts has been steadily declining since last month, but I hope that here in the next few weeks, I'll have lots more exciting posts for you as I wrap up my time living here in Europe.

My lovely friend Vonnie visited me from the 4th of June through yesterday, and I was very sad about having to take her back to Oslo S. ): But I'll be seeing her next month before I fly home to the US, so I'm not too gutted. We had a lot of fun, too, with nearly every evening ending with a barbecue out by Sognsvann... as you can see, judging by the picture to the right. Tim's friends (Claire, Rosa and Dimitri--hello, you three!) were visiting him on holiday from their studies as well, so our little social circle became quite the international hodge-podge.

It's amazing how relaxed summers in Norway are. Everywhere we go, we see Norwegians laying out in the green grass with disposable grills nearby, enjoying the sunshine, the cool breeze, sommerøl, and the company of friends and family. You can pretty much set up a grill wherever you like, too. There are much fewer restrictions here on where grilling is allowed than in, say, the UK or back home in the US. After all, we just set up our grill right beside the lake and chilled out until almost 11pm--and the sky was still blue, with a white horizon.

This Thursday I take my last final exam of my university career, but I'll save the "I am no longer a student, ahhhh" identity crisis post until after Tim, Mike, Bastian and I get back from Bergen. Because, yes, we are headed to Bergen on Friday! When we get back, there's the possibility that we might go straight from Bergen to Trondheim, since that is the only week free for travel I've got left in Norway, but I'll have to sort it out with the boys before we book anything.

So there's your blog post, probably until after I get back from Bergen. Hope you enjoyed it! :)

Hadet bra <3

Yet another quick and inconsequential update.

My silence this time is not due to hours spent studying, but to this:

Vonnie is visiting me until Monday! Thus far we've barbecued down by Sognsvann twice, and have taken tea up at Frognerseteren, which was absolutely brilliant. Today we're going to pilfer kebabs from the kebab shop at Majorstuen, then have a wander around Vigelandsparken. It's going to be grand. :D (Vonnie, stop reading over my shoulder.)

hadet <3