In the Name of Science
Norway is a selfish land that takes all of the prime landscapes for itself, leaving the rest of us with nothing to look at but miles and miles of parking space. Your great-aunt could probably give you a slideshow of it and not bore you.
We took a six-day camping excursion to West Norway and saw the infamous fjords and mountains, glaciers, ravines with all the right characteresistics that I'm lucky I wasn't a bad guy in a Stephen Segal movie, and random little waterfalls that popped up so frequently and arbitrarily that when we'd need water for our cooking we could take a drive till we found some water pouring down onto the road from the rocks above.
This one time on a ferry we were in a lake facing a group of mountains adjacent to a fjord and glacier and a rainbow appeared as I was going to take a picture, but before I could take it a second one appeared and by the time a third appeared I just rolled my eyes. Norway you're nothing but an attention whore.
Scandinavia has laws that let you unpack and pretty much camp anywhere that looks deserted and after September 15 fires are allowed most places. Even so, I half-expected us to make our way through the country's remote forest or mountain roads and onto the front porch of a farmer in full-bodied red underwear and a shotgun.
But no, the campsites were fine. One was on a lichen bed which was fortunate because lying around the campfire was like lying on a giant sponge. Other places were scenic enough that we could've made an L.L. Bean catalog if we had an expensive dog with us.
The first night Richard the Austrian organizer lent me his harmonica. I said he'd regret it but nobody seemed to mind in the end. I think it's because feeling and slight inebriation are just as important as technical skill. I've never heard someone say that a certain musician is a really skilled harmonica player, just that they "like the way they play it."
The German and I found a big red and white mushroom (the inspiration for the Mario Bros. Games) in a forest near a cave and IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE went searching for replicates (the good thing to being with biology students is you can say "in the name of science" in a very grave voice with only a slight sense of shame.) After confirming it wouldn't kill us we found some replicates near the glacier. We needed some controls for the experiments so in the name of science we wouldn't give any to some people. Afterwards, we determined it was only a good sedative and produced creative dreams, though none any better than what the malaria pills could do.
Now, I'm back in Sweden, the land of good-looking people and bad-tasting food. They eat their pasta with ketchup, a moral travesty. They also put everything into a tube. You just squirt out your bacon paste onto a slice of bread and have a snack. Just wrong.
