I’m In Such A Good Mood Right Now

I fly to Oslo and get there right on time.

At the airport I get chicken fingers, and they charge $3 for barbecue sauce but ketchup is free. Three dollars for sauce is crazy. But everybody’s got to make their money.

I move seats to a row with an open middle, and sit next to a girl wearing a cross. She doesn’t talk. I don’t talk to her. I read my New Yorker article and the flight is forty minutes and I don’t even finish it. I don’t remember what it was about.

Oslo’s station is confusing. I’m just trying to follow people who look like they know what they’re doing.

I talk to a British guy at the station who came to Norway to climb, but he’s climbing on the eastern side, and the climbing in Bergen is so much better. I’d be disappointed to come to Norway and climb Oslo. I tell him that. I think he’s visiting a friend.

He works in Italy and he’s about to get an Irish passport so he’ll be an EU citizen, because he’s been going back and forth for visa purposes.

He has a big gash on him, a rope burn, and I offer him a bandaid.

No, he says. I’m used to getting cut.

Your body just wants to heal, man, I say. The sooner it heals the better. It’s not like you get better at getting cut up.

I would like to be a climbing guy. My toes can’t handle it.

I call an Uber because I’m exhausted, and the walk is shorter than the ride. He has two different maps open, Google Maps on a tablet and Uber on his phone, and he goes the wrong way. He doesn’t help with my bags. His BMW smells like cologne.

The hostel is a shithole. It is honestly one of the shittiest hostels I have ever stayed in. The bed is unmade. It’s dank and it stinks and the windows don’t open. I ask if I can change rooms and she says no, and a private room is three times the price, which is crazy, because this is already the most expensive hostel I’ve ever stayed in at $70 a night.

She recommends a restaurant and says it’s close, and it’s a twenty minute walk, and everything is closing because it’s nearly ten. Then I try the oldest restaurant in Norway and it’s shut for the day.

So I find a bar that looks popular and go in, and it’s swanky. Red velvet everywhere and Renaissance nudes on the walls. I get a hamburger and a beer so big I can’t finish it.

After the burger I go inside and talk to the bartender, and he owns the bar, and a bunch of other bars. And his wife works in PE.

Like private equity, he says, and starts trying to explain it to me.

He’s friendly. It puts me in a good mood.

And then I walk back toward the hostel and there are two girls sitting outside, and I go up to them.

I don’t even remember what I said. Something like, hey. How are you liking Oslo.

They’re a little off guard.

They’re Lithuanian. My aunt is Lithuanian, so we talk about that for a minute. I show them photos from the mountains I was on earlier today. I sit down.

Then I ask if I can buy them a drink and they say yeah, give us five minutes, we need to get a charger.

We go back to the swanky bar and get cocktails and I try theirs, some vermouth and gin thing.

One of them is small and lives in Norway. The other one is in Lithuania and is a little more punk. They’re friends because they played a video game together. They were e-friends first, and then one day they met, when the Norwegian one was back at her grandmother’s house.

They make a joke about the Drake goth girl meme. Bark bark.

We keep making jokes and we talk for hours.

They both have boyfriends. And they flirt with me zero. It’s purely friendly.

Maybe I needed to flirt with them to get it started. Maybe that’s the vibe they got from me. But they both told me they had boyfriends, so I figure that’s that.

Then I say I’m tired.

And she says, I’m in such a good mood right now.

And she really is. She’s in such a good mood. We’re having a good time.

So we stay out, and we walk around the old king’s castle, which is much more open at night than you would expect.

I don’t remember their names.

The goodbye is in the elevator at the hostel. Good night, good night. We’ll see you again, they say, because we all have to check out tomorrow.

And I stand there knowing I’m going to wake up at a different time than they will, and that I will never see either of them again.

But what am I going to do. Keep in touch with someone I met on vacation?