nawl

The super-friendly woman at the airport check-in line recognized me from last time. We chatted a bit. She told me she was a cardiologist until she got tired of watching old people die, so she got a job loading cargo onto planes which she loved until she had an accident. After the accident the airline put her upstairs. I told her I hoped it got better. She pulled up her sleeve to show me a wire cage around her wrist and said "Oh, it's permanent."

I watched the sun rise in the Amsterdam airport. Some people stopped to take pictures of a pretty spectacularly pink sky, most kept going on their way without looking out the windows. In the airport there are many nice areas with ideal sleeping chairs set facing the windows. My favorite is by the D wing.

In Bergen something amazing happened: the clouds cleared for the better part of a week. The lake froze over and everything was hoary with frost. I was hoping it would get solid enough for skating, but it never did.

Blue skies! Such a novelty.

Morten took me on a long walk at night, down the blasted out path of an old train line to Grieg's (the composer) house, which sits alone on a small peninsula surrounded by water and hills. It would have been nicer a hundred years ago, he said, when there were no other houses to destroy the view, but at night the lights glittered on the water and I didn't think it was that bad. Then we wound back around, unexpectedly up through Jan's parents' backyard, past the stave church again, and home.

It seems incredible to me to live within walking distance of your family, your friends, and the schools you attended from elementary through graduate school, and in a place where buying a beautiful flat of your very own is not only the reasonable but apparently expected thing to do on a grad student salary.

One afternoon I walked to the aquarium. At the end of the peninsula is a totem pole, a gift from the city of Seattle, an appropriately rainy sister city relation. On the way back, I discovered that the best place to get a nice picture of the harbor and Ulriken looking snowy in the backround seems to be a parking lot.

I got a bike from the used bike shop next to the math department. It's an appropriately funky place. The guy who showed us bikes told us "Here the customer is always wrong." and when we were on our way out he launched into a 15-minute sermon on how modern medicine is death and how diseases were actually just psychological disturbances. You could actually tick off the fallacies as he talked: "Most great ideas face some resistance when they're new, and we're certainly getting a lot of resistance, so we must be on the right track." "The doctor asked a whole bunch of cancer patients if they had experienced a 'loss' in their life, and all of them had. Cancer is actually an expression of this 'loss'."