Travel during COVID ranges from the annoying but basically normal, to a moderate hassle but doable, to a massive overload of stress. My travel since July has mostly been in the first two categories. But this particular jaunt has been the third. That’s not because of Norway.¹ It’s because of the United States.

For reasons passing understanding, the United States still bans travelers who can’t present a negative COVID test from the past three days. So I’ve been increasingly nervous about catching it and having my upcoming trip to the United States completely scotched. That would be a disaster; I’ve got my schedule more tightly packed than usual and I’ve got plans booked with friends — complicated plans with hotels booked and travel arranged — nearly the whole time.

The smart thing to do would be to hole up and avoid human contact, but in one of those other weird twists of fate I ended up scheduling a 300+ in-person convention the weekend before I was due to fly. So I sucked it up and did everything anyway. And it worked out — Spoiler Alert: I tested negative and am cleared to travel to the USA in three days — but I’m now wishing I had been able to lean in more. Such is life.

I started by flying from Vienna to Bergen, a medium-sized city on the west coast of Norway, notable historically for its importance to the Hanseatic League — it was one of the four major trading ports used by the league and fabulously wealthy as a result — notable presently for the remnants of that history, mainly through Bryggens. Bryggens was the German enclave of merchants who managed the trade for the league, and a number of the historic wooden buildings survive along the waterfront, long since converted into restaurants or souvenir shops or pricey boutiques for the numerous cruise lines which dock during the summer months.

It remains to this day ridiculously adorable, and you can spend a pleasant 20 minutes or so wandering through the narrow alleyways even if you don’t duck into any of the shops. The district used to be quite a bit larger and spread across the whole of the north of the harbor, but had an alarming tendency to burn down every fifty years or so. Development and disinterest almost took care of the rest² but it managed to hang on, and the tourist boom has guaranteed its survival.³

The city center of Bergen is great to walk around in for a few days, which is good, since a shocking amount of it closed down abruptly at the end of September. The Hanseatic Museum? Closed. The Rosenkrantz Tower? Closed. The Fantolf Stave Church?⁴ Closed. The Fløibanen Funicular? Closed. The Mariakirken? Closed. Some of it was the end of tourist season, some of it was COVID, some of it was construction timed to coincide with one or the other. Even the Bryggens Museum was only open from 11am to 3pm, I had assumed because of COVID restrictions, but apparently that’s just how they roll in Bergen.⁵

I caught the train across the country — there’s a well-known tourist route called “Norway in a Nutshell” between Bergen and Oslo which has you hop off the train and take a ferry through some of the fjords, and it’s well worth the detour — and discovered most of what I wanted to see in Oslo was closed as well.⁶

I was in Oslo for Knutepunkt, and honestly I should have just gone and seen some more fjords until the weekend was over. I was out-of-sorts and alone in Oslo over the weekend, unmotivated to go outside with how much was closed⁷ and with nobody to hang out with. I make this mistake every Knutepunkt; there’s always a “Week in …” series of events planned for the week before KP for those who are arriving early, I’m excited to see people so I plan to spend the week leading up to the convention hanging out, and then I discover the “Week in …” is really the “Monday to Wednesday in …” and there’s nothing going on.

The “Week in …” events started in earnest on Monday, and they offered a first chance to see everybody before the convention officially started. And I did some of them, notably the beer tasting organized for Monday and the Nordic Larp Talks⁸ followed by the pub quiz on Wednesday. So I didn’t experience much that was new in Oslo, but I’ve been here before, and I’ve seen a lot of the city. I’m sure I’ll be back. And we eventually got to Knutepunkt on Thursday.

Knutepunkt is the yearly Nordic larp convention, or it was before COVID forced the cancellation of the 2020 event and slid this year’s iteration from spring to fall. It rotates through the Nordic nations⁹ so completes a circuit every four years. I consider myself lucky to have started coming in 2016, so I managed to attend all four host countries before having my streak broken by the Coronavirus.

And as bad as it was having it cancelled last year — it was literally the place I was flying next when the lockdowns happened, forcing me to reroute to Korea — I can’t imagine what it felt like for people who had been attending for a decade, or two, or longer.¹⁰ And even when they announced this year’s, it always had a lot of uncertainty about it. No one knew what restrictions would be in place, or what kinds of spaces would and wouldn’t be permitted in Oslo. Knutepunkt has a reputation for wild parties¹¹ and drunken revelry up and down the hallways until the wee hours of the night. It’s not the kind of vibe you can sustain with mandatory face masks and two meters of social distancing.

But by the time of the actual event, Norway had dropped all social restrictions. With the notable exception of the American contingent¹² everyone gathered in the same place as always for the same experience as always — hugs and crowded presentations and sweaty drunken dance parties included.

It’s hard to explain how the vibe was different this year. The theme was “Larp is Magic” and as was pointed out repeatedly it was really “This Community is Magic.” Everything was the same as usual, but heightened, all done in the shadow of the year we had lost, the people who couldn’t make it, the hope that we had all turned a corner in the pandemic and the fear that it was yet another false summer before the winter sets in.

It was irrational but easy to imagine, in 2020 and early 2021, that we’d never see each other again. And I forget that while I’ve been traveling for three months now, for many people this was the first time they had set foot on a ferry or airplane and left their country for 18 months. It was incredibly emotional to walk into that hotel and find yourself surrounded by friends you hadn’t seen in forever, to be reminded there was still a world out there filled with people who loved you and missed you in return.

So best KP ever? For a lot of people, maybe, or at least the most necessary one. But not for me. It was good, sometimes even great, but as I’ve mentioned I had that upcoming COVID “fit to fly” test hanging over me the whole time, which limited how comfortable I was in crowded spaces or room parties. And between that and my usual social anxiety and just being horrifically unaccustomed to being around large groups in general, I found myself frequently feeling awkward and out-of-place.

It’s a little sad; I read what I wrote for the last Knudepunkt¹³ in Denmark, when I finally felt like I had it cracked, that I was fully accepted and comfortable dropping in and out of conversations and socializing. I had reached a point where I felt less awkward. I’ve regressed. Maybe that’s just opening night jitters for the first big event, but I’m worried it represents something hard won that’s been lost over the last couple years, burned away in the void of lockdown and isolation. I guess we’ll find out next year, in Sweden.

The real tragedy of Knutepunkt is that it always has to end. So I’m somewhat reluctantly sitting in the Oslo airport, cursing the crap WiFi,¹⁴ waiting for a flight to Italy where I’m spending a couple of nights before flying on to New York City. After all the stress leading up to it getting the fit-to-fly certificate was terribly anticlimactic; I walked over to the clinic an hour early, discovered you needed to wait outside in the rain, killed an hour in the cold, and finally got the nasal swab done. An hour later I got a text with the certification.

I always try to schedule an extra day in the city after a convention or larp ends to give a chance to hang out and decompress from the experience with others who have been through it, but I guess the lack of people traveling longer distances¹⁵ meant most people just hopped in their cars or caught the ferry back immediately. I’m as prone to con drop as the next person, when your body suddenly stops making all the happy chemicals it’s been pumping out in overdrive. It usually hits me by now, though. Maybe it’ll hit me in a day or two, maybe the stress of travel has short-circuited that somehow, maybe everything just put a cap on how happy I was going to be during the convention so there’s less drop to drop. I can’t say I miss it, but it is adding to the sense that I didn’t get something right.

That’s the perennial disappointment of larp, though. You almost always feel there’s something more you could have done, a bolder choice you could have made, an emotional thread you should have pulled on a little harder. But you only get one bite of the apple. There’s always next year.

Next: Milan (MXP) to New York City (JFK)
Prev: Vienna (VIE) to Bergen (BGO)

Footnotes

¹ Or not strictly because of Norway. I did have to present a COVID vaccine passport. And it was a hassle to get one from the Irish bureaucracy. But that was dealt with months ago.

² The German occupation during WWII notably dampening any enthusiasm the locals had towards preserving the historical German enclave in their city center.

³ Although the leftmost set of houses are modern reconstructions, built to hide modern development behind them, so we’ll see whether the ratio of authentic to ersatz holds up in the future.

⁴ The current one is a replica, after the original one was burnt down by a black metal musician whose political philosophy can probably best be summed up as “fascist dipshit.”

⁵ Even during tourist season it’s only open from 10am to 4pm, and less on weekends.

⁶ Notably the Munch Museum and the National Gallery.

⁷ In addition to the museums, I had forgotten there’s a massive number of restaurants in Oslo which are closed on Sunday and Monday. And the incredibly high cost of them means there’s a lot of middling-nice-but-overpriced places and a lot of fast-food-counter-service kind of places, but not a lot in between. Copenhagen has a great restaurant scene. Oslo doesn’t.

⁸ Four days isn’t enough talking about larp for some people, so if you arrive a day early you can spend a evening watching even more people talk about larp.

⁹ Excluding Iceland or — if you prefer — it rotates through the Scandinavian nations, plus Finland

¹⁰ It’s been running since 1997, and there are some attendees who haven’t missed one since those first few years.

¹¹ Well-deserved

¹² Norway required an electronic COVID vaccination certificate to get into the country, and that excluded most of the Americans I know. There were a grand total of five of us in total, all living overseas. There’s a reasonable argument this is a stupid restriction on the part of Norway, and a reasonable argument that there’s no excuse for the US to not have their shit together in the first place. I blame both.

¹³ The spelling changes with the country, natch.

¹⁴ I can connect, and it works, but it kicks me off and I get a prompt to reconnect every 30 seconds.

¹⁵ cough Americans cough