Emily encounters life-altering questions on her walk from the train station to her hostel.
“No, no you did not, Emily. You just had to decide whether to turn right, left, or go straight.”
“It was so much more than that, I.d.”
“Sigh. Continue.”
By this point after landing in Oslo, I’ve spent my entire morning trying to get to my hostel while simultaneously getting lost on public transit riding the T-bane line 5 train. This is the last leg of my journey. For the final test, I must walk from the train station to my hostel. Jetlag be damned!
“Okay, from the T-bane stop at Sinsen it looks like it’s a seven minute walk to my hostel, HI Oslo Haraldsheim. I just need to walk there. Can’t be that complicated, it looks pretty straightforward on the Ruter map,” I think to myself as I start walking through the underpass at the train station towards the exit. When I get to the other side of the underpass I find myself under a highway bridge. There’s highway to my left. There’s more highway to my right.
“This is a lot of highway,” my mind mutters as I look around.
“I thought I had to walk around some kind of park to get to my hostel. Oh, is that a park over there to my right, on the other side of the highway? Okay, I’ll go that way, towards the park I think I see.” This is already requiring a little more brain power than I anticipated. If you thought things were bad before (check out my last Oslo blog post), just wait for the rest of my walk from the train station to the hostel. I think I blew out more of my brain cells trying to decide if I should walk through or around this park than I had trying to figure out the entire T-bane system.
I cross the highway to my right and I make it to the edge of the park. Here’s where I start to get really confused. I know my hostel is somewhere on the other side of the park, but it looks like I can cut left through the park on a path that leads up an immediate hill (I don’t know, the hill had urgency issues), cut right through the park on a path that leads through a soccer field and that might lead to another hill (this hill wasn’t in a rush), or just go around the outside of the park that also takes me to a hill—possibly the same hill as the second path to the right (why are there so many f****** hills!?).
I can’t tell which way is further, or which one actually leads to my hostel. I’m totally exhausted. I decide to cut through the park. Okay, around the park is out. But now I have to choose—is it left or right? Do I take the path to the left, or do I take this other path to the right? This has become a crucial life decision and I’m standing there, in the middle of Oslo, in front of some park, trying to decide my immediate fate.
“You’re exaggerating, Emily.”
“No, I.d., I’m serious, it was agonizing!”
“Yea, for you, but no one else.”
Internal dialogue expertly dismissed due to the lack of thought-processing capabilities, I decided to take the path on the left that lead to the more immediate hill. I start dragging myself, and my check-on size luggage, into the park and towards the hill. It’s kind of icy – icier than I thought. What is even at the top of this hill? Little houses? Are they hostel houses? Does my hostel have more than one building!? I’m not sure I made the right decision anymore. I start to look around, perhaps somewhat wildly, perhaps not, who can say? I was the only one there. Except for this woman, who starts to cut through the park behind me. I turn around and go back to her to ask her wtf I’m doing. As if she should know the answer to this question.
“Hi, I’m trying to get to my hostel, do you know how I get there from here?”
She responds, “um, well, not that way you were going, there is too much ice. You should go the other way, over there.”
“Okay, so should I go around the park or can I cut through?”
“I think you can cut through the park that way, on the path to the right.”
“Okay, should I go around the soccer field, or that other way through the soccer field?” Now I realize there are more right or left options. Great. I look at this woman intently, hoping she has the answers to life about right and left. It must have been all over my face because this poor woman was not at all sure what to say. Of course, it didn’t help that I wasn’t really sure what I was asking. Questions and answers aside, she didn’t. Have the answer that is.
“Um, I think either one is okay?” It’s understandable. I wouldn’t know how to make someone else’s right or left decisions for them either.
I’m out of bandwidth for processing confused thoughts, so I just start walking directly to my hostel towards the soccer field. I don’t care if it’s over, under, around or through the soccer field. Just let’s get there already. Somehow, I ended up going directly through the soccer field. Right or left becomes irrelevant. Thankfully for confused people everywhere who have issues with their right and their left, it works! But the most direct route isn’t always the best route, as my trip has so far proven.
The soccer field was even icier than the hill to the left had been, and I was struggling to stay on my feet.
“It’s okay, I’m still excited to be here,” I think, “and I’m really almost there now!” I make it across the soccer field and I find this gravel path. It leads up that other hill without an immediate agenda. From far away, it hadn’t looked that steep, but when I got directly in front of it I could see it was icy and steep and long.
“That’s okay, I can do this, I’ve made it all the way here. I’m in Norway and everything is better in Norway, even the ice!” Luckily, most of the hill is easily navigable, even with my large, rollerboard bag behind me, but the ice gets thick towards the top of the hill and it’s steeper there than anywhere else. I think to myself, “I hope I don’t slip and kill myself on this hill. I hope my rolly bag doesn’t slip and kill me on this hill. Maybe my rolly bag wants to kill me, I don’t know. I really hope this is my hostel up here.”
The last two feet of the hill are the worst. Bumps covered in ice with no salt, which may have been a good thing. The salt in Norway is the size of small hail, like an actual rock. It got stuck in the wheels of my suitcase and caused quite a bit of consternation, I must say. Regardless, I’m still not entirely sure how I didn’t kill myself, but I made it over the last of this seemingly chill but totally smug hill up to my hostel. You know, reflecting back, I think it’s all in how you climb the hill. You gotta believe in yourself. Have confidence in your feet. And maybe your shoes, get good footwear don’t do this in heels. But I wasn’t wearing heels so it was okay. I just put one foot in front of the other and bam! I got up the hill.
“Emily, that’s how everyone climbs up hills.”
“Oh, hi again I.d.! I didn’t know you were making another appearance in this blog post.”
“Yea, for most of Oslo your brain was too devoid of any rational thought for me to share space in your conscious mind. Don’t worry though, I make a splashy come back in Bodø.”
“Cool. So are you talking to me right now, or when I was climbing the hill? Wait, am I still climbing the hill?” “. . .”