I’ve spent the week in Norway, and not the sensible southern part of Norway. I’ve been way up north, like 12-hours-on-a-train north, and now I’m just spending the night in Oslo at the airport before flying out at 09:00.¹ I’m visiting a friend. And part of the whole reason for traveling around was the opportunity to spend time with friends, and it’s not like I was likely to find the time to visit otherwise. But if spending a week with a friend more-or-less just costs a week off my Schengen visa, and I get to see a corner of the world I otherwise would never see, well, the calculation is different.²

So I spent roughly a week in Leirfjord. If you’re looking at the map it’s only about halfway up the coast.³ On the way in we caught a flight to Trondheim, which cuts the train to six hours. But that 12-hour train ride on the way back south really takes something out of you; I opted for the night train, which left at 01:50 and which I hoped would afford some decent sleep, but the train cars just aren’t set up that way. Even with a vacant seat next to me the only way to really lie down involved folding your legs and jamming them into the wall or the armrest, and the seats weren’t even as comfortable as a mid- range airplane so I couldn’t find a comfortable position to fall asleep sitting up.⁴ So I spent a fitful night at best, and was awake as the sun came up. I’m a bit loopy.

But the week before that was nice. I only really spent one day doing tourist things⁵ with my friend. We zipped around for the day in a small red convertible sports car⁶ and saw the Seven Sisters⁷ and took a couple ferries around to some of the islands and stopped by a couple churches and just generally enjoyed the pleasant weather. I had a waffle on the ferry, which is apparently a crucial part of the Norwegian experience. I visited an unmarked Russian WWII cemetery.⁸

But the real value of the week was just kind of being domestic. I slept in. I did some cooking — a sad rarity these days. I had cats demand my attention. I accomplished very little. This is a rare treat. Not in terms of productivity — I’m heading off for two weeks in Kyiv, where I expect to do approximately squat — but in terms of doing it with someone. The part of Norway I was in was reasonably rural, but it wasn’t like the Hebrides.⁹ You were always a short drive from a well-stocked grocery store,¹⁰ which is kind of my baseline for civilization. But there wasn’t all that much to do, so much of the time was spent puttering around the Internet and discussing politics or cultural differences or just life in general.

Studies suggest it takes over 200 hours of spending time with someone to form a close friendship. I really hope that’s not true — I don’t get much of a chance to spend that much time with anybody. It doesn’t much feel like it’s all that true for me; I still miss people I met once and haven’t seen in years. I worry people have sorted me into some kind of eccentric acquaintance category, engaging more with the idea of traveling around like I am rather than the reality of me actually doing it. But honestly, I’ll take any time with people I can get. At the timescales I’m operating on, a week is luxury. Given the right circumstances, a week can even feel like a lifetime.

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Footnotes

¹ I’ll be back for a bit in Oslo proper in January, so I don’t feel like I’m missing anything this time around.

² I’ve managed to time things so I will literally have one day left on my Schengen visa. Hence my plans to spend two weeks in Ukraine, one week in England, then half a week each in Israel and Turkey before returning to the Schengen zone.

³ Meaning you’d expect to spend another 17 hours driving further north, since the train only runs about 4 hours further, to Bodø.

⁴ The real winning choice was to reserve a seat at one of the tables and hope no one sat across from you, since you could manage to slouch and put your feet up.

⁵ Not that there’s a tremendous amount that counts for that in the area.

⁶ I don’t have a lot of experience driving or riding in convertibles with the top down, so somewhat amusingly by far the lion’s share of the time I’ve spent has been in Norway in mid-September. We chanced upon a lovely day for it — it had rained the previous two — and between the sunshine and running the heat in the car, we were fine.

⁷ The mountains, not the waterfalls

⁸ As my host repeatedly pointed out, the border between Norway and Russia has never had a shooting war across it, making it rather unique given its age. Many of those in northern Norway have more sympathies for their neighbors across the border than they do for America.

⁹ I don’t generally go in for really rural, to be honest. I’ve never stayed anyplace where I couldn’t see at least a couple other houses from my window. Most of the really breathtakingly scenic vistas I’ve taken have been a combination of something like a 20-minute hike and a strategically angled camera.

¹⁰ Even the relentless progress of vegetarian food continues apace. There was a small but diverse selection of vegan meats and cheeses in most of the supermarkets, although the restaurants throughout Norway don’t appear to have gotten the memo yet.