Disneyland

I go to the grocery store to make dinner because the restaurants are all closing and a little far away. I hold the elevator for a girl in my building. And she follows me into the grocery store and begins her shopping. I approach and ask if she speaks English. I tell her it’s my first day in Norway, and ask what Norwegian people eat normally. She jumps with enthusiasm.

Here’s our famous brown cheese, she says. Norwegian people eat a lot of frozen pizza. You can try these chocolates, they’re only available here.

A quick introduction to her country, and my cart fills up as we wheel around the store.

And then when I say thank you she goes away and she doesn’t linger. Which is very classic Norwegian. Respectful. Happy to be helpful.

I cook myself a real dinner when I get to the Airbnb. Roasted carrots and potatoes, Israeli salad with cucumber and tomato, and a roast beef grilled cheese sandwich, kind of a patty melt using their famous brown cheese, on good Icelandic bread. I cook all of it for myself, but I wish I had invited her over for dinner.

Then I go to sleep and wake up two hours later.

I finish the Kevin Mitnick book, Ghost in the Wires. He does a lot of social engineering. He’ll call up a company and say, hi, I’m Kevin from engineering, I need to speak to the manager, and then he’ll tell the manager, hey, we’re compiling a database of all the officers, do you want your officers on our list? And they say yes of course. And he says great, can you give me all the officers’ names and their passwords. And they do. Half of it works because they don’t have caller ID. It’s kind of silly.

Then I call Eva. She tells me she’s back with her ex but they’re just fucking, and that she wants to indulge all my fantasies.

Then I cannot sleep at all.

I finally go down at seven in the morning, and at ten a man starts doing roof work on the other side of the wall, inches from my head in the lofted bedroom. I blast the Studio Ghibli soundtrack to drown out the noise. Then I go down from the loft to a pull out couch that is very similar to the couch I have at home and sleep, which is not ideal.

I get up at noon and I don’t really know what I’m going to do. Unplanned day, and I walk outside.

There’s a design school here down the street from my Airbnb, and they have AI hate posted everywhere and all these rules. Stop wasting paper. The earth is already plagued. It’s very dramatic.

But they have a beautiful library that’s open to the public with books on Art Nouveau, and all the furniture I love from Guimard is in there. I love furniture, but any man who loves furniture would fuck with this.

They have a room of cardboard horse hooves. Horse legs in motion, made out of papier mâché and cardboard, the way they build the monsters for the parade at home. Trotting, standing, galloping, and the one where they’re up on two legs, I don’t know what that’s called. The level of detail on the hooves is unbelievable. One full room of them.

And an African screen printer carving into wood to make prints. Amazing carving. He did these great Afros.

I take the tram down to the city center. I pay for it, it’s five dollars, but nobody is monitoring it. High trust society. It’s so fun that you can just get on and no one checks. New York could never. And it’s so much easier when you don’t have to build a giant station. The stations are small because the trains are small because the ridership is small because the city is small. Bergen is only 300,000 people.

I get off and it looks like Main Street USA at Disneyland. Colorful, manicured gardens, a military band playing classic tunes in full uniform. There’s no graffiti, no gum spots, and everything looks bright and cheery in the rare Norwegian sun. I’m going to sit on a bench but someone sits on the bench I wanted, so I sit on the grass and do some yoga.

Then I go shopping, which is what I do with most of that day.

Rich white girl day. Yoga and shopping. My Therapy!

I find a store called ARKET that makes a very nice heavyweight plain white shirt. I don’t buy the white one because I’d ruin it with an animalistic bite gone messy. The navy one makes no sense because it’s too hot to wear in the summer but sleeveless so unrealistic in the winter. But it’s nice to feel a good heavyweight shirt. Then I look it up and ARKET is a new concept by H&M to offer better quality and more sustainability. I am torn on whether the ownership story or the product offering matters more. Like fuck H&M fast fashion, but this is quality clothing at reasonable prices.

Earlier at the university I picked up a copy of the student paper. Thumbing through it, the only article in English was about a clothing swap, and it named three thrift stores. I go to the best reviewed one, UFF (which I later found out is a small chain). They have thirty percent off and literally nothing is good. Nothing fits. Nothing looks cool. It’s all garbage.

But I’m in that store wanting to buy something, which is never good.

There’s a classic white and navy Norwegian wool sweater that’s very normal looking. A hot cool girl in the store tells me, with a sneer, that it’s the kind of thing her dad would wear.

So I buy the other one. Red and green with an Aztec pattern, like an ugly Christmas sweater. $100, maybe $80. Doesn’t fit me well. I don’t think anyone likes it on me. Another woman in there says it looks good with my skin color and I’m not sure about that.

And then I find out that they still make these sweaters in Norway by hand, and I could have bought a new one, a beautiful one, artistic, thoughtful, contemporary, for $240.

That’s my loss for the day. It annoys me more than it should. I have plenty of money. I’ve wasted $100 on many things. But the sweater made it back to America, where my sister complimented it. I wore it for most of the trip and it kept me warm. Stylish, vintage, and practical.

Lunch is a fish restaurant that got famous on TikTok, and you can tell, because it’s crowded and expensive. Most people are getting a $40 platter of three soups and some fish cake. I point at the tomato soup and the guy asks big or small and I say small, and he brings me the fish soup, the famous one.

Here’s the thing. I ordered the tomato one because I looked around and that’s what people were actually eating. Everyone finishes the tomato to the last drop. Nobody finishes the fish soup.

The fish cakes are not good. One of them is shaped like a heart. It’s very cute. A fish cake is very ugly and does not taste good.

After lunch I walk along the touristy port and stop for a baby ice cream that they dip in a chocolate fountain and it is so fucking good. My first ice cream in Scandinavia. I theorize that the colder a country is the better their ice cream is. American ice cream is better than Mexican and Canadian is better than American, so of course the ice cream here is great.

I walk through the old German trading post in Bergen. The history is absurd. Back in the day, resident traders weren’t allowed to bring fire inside so it was unheated, because they didn’t want the whole thing to burn down. They also weren’t allowed to bring women inside so the men had to cuddle for warmth. They were unmarried and they sat there being merchants in a port. All the cooking happened in a separate building. Sounds like a miserable life. Bergen has burned down about three times, the last one around 1904, so they don’t fuck with wood anymore.

The stairs inside the trading post are slanted so badly from years of age that walking downstairs makes me feel drunk as I reach to steady myself with the walls. My joke is that it was the original carpenter who was drunk.

I steal another fridge magnet for my collection back home.

I take the funicular up Fløyen, the mountain that boxes in the city. At the top there’s a beautiful view and a very nice bougie restaurant. They need a reservation and I don’t have one. And the bar has no table service, you have to go up and order and stand there, and I don’t want to lose my chair. So I sit there, and I use their wifi, and I use their bathroom, and I sit in all of their chairs, and I pay for nothing.

I am very tired by now. I just really want to lie flat. I smoke a cigarette.

I had worried Bergen was going to be cold and gray and miserable. I do not get that at all. I got so lucky, weather wise. It’s beautiful and sunny.

Coming down the mountain I decide to try an e-scooter app, think Lime scooter, and it routes me through a tiny forest trail. A direct but unorthodox route to the closest available scooter. The forest is green, lush, and grassy like the home of the Keebler elves who make the cookies in the commercial.

Part of the forest has been cut and cleared. Hundred year old trees, real hardwood, lying there horizontal on the ground like a massacre. I wonder what they’re going to do with all of the space and wood. It’s a sad thing to be looking at.

There’s a cabin in the forest that looks like a hobbit hole. Round entryway, the door is a hole. It’s designed by the architecture school and it’s for families from the city. You apply, and if you have a family, you can stay there a few days for free. They try hard to promote family here.

The scooters top out at 20 kilometers an hour, which is 12 miles, and they auto brake you even going downhill, which is scary, because I don’t like auto braking anything. I’m playing music from my phone. People are mean mugging the fuck out of me. They do not like scooter riders here. Or maybe it’s that I’m going the wrong way down a one way, which I am definitely doing, but I think you can do that on a bicycle, and nobody tells me to stop. They just look at me like I’m an asshole and they don’t wave back when I wave.

Whatever.

Heading to the floating sauna I’m exhausted, so I stop by the docks for a rest. There’s a classical composer from Bergen, Edvard Grieg. I put him on, and it fits the water here, which is so still, in this bay where the boats are quiet and there’s no tugboats and no horns. Even the people walking past me are quieter than normal. I fall asleep outside so peacefully.

The sauna is a small box floating off the dock, and you cook in the sauna, jump off the dock into the bay, and then go back into the sauna.

For a while at the beginning, I’m very quiet.

A group of three guys are speaking Norwegian loudly.

I introduce myself and ask the two American girls next to me about their trip. They don’t ask about me.

The guys invite the girls to go out with them. They don’t invite me.

And I feel really bad about it, honestly. I really just wish someone was here to hang out with me.

By the end everyone is friends including me. It’s totally fine.

The bay is so dark it’s black. It’s deep, and it’s cold, and the water isn’t as salty as it should be for something so close to the ocean, it’s a little sweet. Brackish, maybe because it comes from glacial runoff, which is normally clean. And the best part isn’t the sauna, and it isn’t the water, it’s after jumping in the water, climbing onto the dock and standing in the breeze with the sun on my body.

Then I ride an e-scooter back to the Airbnb shivering and make a frozen pizza, because apparently that’s what people do here, and I don’t cook the crust enough so it’s pretty bad.

And then I watch Norwegian television, which to me feels like interdimensional cable. Everything is unintelligible and it looks crazy.

Their version of Cops is unbelievable. A cop is trying to arrest a guy, and the guy takes off his shirt and squats, and the cop just sort of walks towards him. The guy is walking away, and the cop radios for backup, and two cars come, and one of them completely drives past him. And the other one is a hot blonde cop who gets in front of him and arrests him and he doesn’t resist at all. I think he was moving twenty kilos of coke.

Then there’s a show with a bunch of kids in full firefighter and woodworking outfits but also stupid fedoras like an 18th century German cobbler, screaming at each other in the woods. I’m pretty sure they’re all special needs.

I doom scroll for a bit. Then I say okay, let’s just go to sleep. Time for bed.

I fall asleep fast.