Tallinn to Oslo

As a warning this blog, which has been a long time in coming, is over 11 000 words, so maybe read a bit and then take a break and come back. I'm sure some parts are more interesting than others too, so there is your fair warning.

I left the story of my trip in Tallinn, Estonia where I took a nice break from walking around in the cold by the day and partying at night to eat well, relax, be warm and recuperate in the hostel for a full day. After this I felt healthier and I spent the next day wandering around Tallinn, a very nice city. To get to the hostel from the buss station the first day I walked through the skyscraper downtown and then got disoriented in the beautiful medieval part which was a neat mix of scene, but I didn't appreciate it because of being so sick, but two days later I was able to explore in better health and Tallinn became one of my favourites. The historical, medeival part of the city is smaller in Tallinn, but it was more attractive than a few other medieval tourist hubs. Apparently the big church in Tallinn was at one point in history the tallest in the world. Another thing that set Tallinn apart was that it is on the sea. I think that the ocean or the sea infuses life into any city.

The following day I left early for the ferry so that I could spend the better part of two days in Helsinki with only paying for one night of hostel. I was (maybe too) fascinated with the fact that the ferry was cruising through slushy icebergs, but it was the first time in a long while that I had been on a boat on salt water and I have never seen salt water slush. One thing that I noticed on the ferry is that lots of people were bringing beer back to Finland from Estonia. Kaisa told me that the story here is that Finland had high alcohol taxes and there was a big problem with everyone buying their alcohol in Estonia for a fraction of the price. So the government lowered the taxes to keep more alcohol sales within the country. The result was that people still go to Estonia where it is still cheaper, but the lower cost of alcohol has aggravated the alcoholism problem. You can't win. But a little more foresight on the government's behalf would go a long way.

I got off the ferry and grabbed a free touristy map and walked around Helsinki until I got to the hostel. It was supposedly the only hostel in Helsinki, a Hostelling International member, and in my opinion tied for the worst hostel that I have stayed at. It was clean and quiet and well organized but it didn't have a shred of life. It was very well lit, 'intoxicants' were expressly forbidden, there were lots of rules, a flat screen tv, a study… I don't know. I wasn't that it was much different than the other hostels that I had stayed at in principal, but in the other hostels you felt like you were coming home to an apartment with a lot of room mates and one of the hosts would friendly remind you that someone was trying to sleep in the other room, or they would let you know what was happening in the city or even take you out with them. In this hostel if you wanted to know something you were to go to the information desk and ask the polite middle aged man. Ok it wasn't worth writing this much about it, its just that is was the sort of place you could bring a 4 year old to. And it was expensive, but that's Scandinavia.

I dumped my bag and continued to explore Helsinki. It was a nice city. Chilly and beautiful… the sea was frozen near the edges. I walked around a little island and it was sooo peaceful. The sort of cold silence where the hollow crunchy noise that your boots make on the snowy ice becomes engaging and hypnotic.

Helsinki was friendly and clean, I heard a lot of people describe it as sterile. If any significant graffiti showed up, I got he feeling that it would be cleaned off within the week. I only saw two or three punks and freaks. It was a nice city, and pretty, but not somewhere I would live, not enough life or something.

I took the buss to Turku to meet up with Kaisa because I didn't want to end up trying to hitchhike and getting dropped off in the wrong place then stand her up.

The story with Kaisa is that she was a foreign exchange student at a high school that a lot of my friends went to and we dated briefly and became good friends. We ended up staying in touch all the way from grade 11 (I think) to the present and she said that if I ever was in Europe I could crash at her place for a bit. So I took her up on it and now the ball is in her court: Kaisa and Andi have to come and stay with me in Canada when I get a place.

We were a bit nervous about whether we would recognise each other, and after I smiled goofily at someone who turned out definitely not to be Kaisa, I was cautious about running up to her for a high five. There was no mistaking me for anyone else even though I look quite different than in high school so we met up without any problems.

That evening we walked her dog Tokka on a frozen channel and looked at the cottages with saunas on their docks. We definitely have to get in on that dock-sauna action in Canada! In the evening I met Kaisa's fiancé Andi, who is a really cool guy (I am certain that this isn't how you spell his name, it doesn't really even sound like his name as I heard it, but it is the best I could figure). I played chess with Kaisa and Andi. The chess was accompanied by some beverages and Finnish candies. I don't really like Canadian candy. I mean I won't deny that most of the time intense sweetness is more of a good flavour than a bad one, but I just don't really get a kick out of it. But these Finnish candies each had an actual distinct flavour and put North American 'candy' to shame. The salted black liquorish (appropriately in the shape of a skull) was very powerful!

The next day, a Saturday, was Kaisa's birthday. But none the less she graciously got her friends together and took me to the Turku castle. It was really old and had a lot of interesting history. I got a kick out of the list of medieval punishments for random crimes. There were a bunch of goofy ones: if you sold rotten produce you would be locked up in public to be humiliated, I thought that was funny, and if you fell out of a tree and landed on someone's head, killing them, you were not guilty of a crime. Fair enough, but was that worth legislating? Did medieval Finnish people often fall out of trees onto passers by? Another interesting thing about the castle is that it started off being on a small island and as the continent rose out of the sea over the centuries the island got bigger and bigger until it
became part of the mainland.

That night Kaisa's friends came over and we had a clothing optional sauna party. The girls were bent on staying in longer than me because I wasn’t Finnish and apparently women have a sort of genetic advantage in sauna going because female fat insulates against the heat, so I was doublly handicapped. I held my own as far as heat tolerance goes, but I needed to make frequent trips into the room temperature to restock with Finnish vodka in Russian mix. Another highlight was the Yagermister chess with Andi, but the thing that did me in was when we all left Kaisa's flat (apartment*, I'm starting to think in British-speak) and went to a Tequila party. Later we found our way to a night club which was overcrowded and… well… reminded me of The Standard if that tells you anything.

Kaisa's promises of an epic Finnish party were more than fulfilled.

I'm not really sure why I didn't take many pictures of Turku, maybe because the focus for me was hanging out with Kaisa and Andi and friends and the setting: Turku, was just another pretty European city. The next day we went to a shopping mall and then visited Kaisa's mom. She lives close to Turku but I can't remember the name of the town. Apparently there is a simply animated Finnish cartoon set on an island there which became very popular in Japan. So in the summer busloads of Japanese tourists come to visit the real life equivalent of where the cartoon characters would live. This sounds pretty strange… and it is, but at the same time it is a really pretty spot, so it would make a nice summer vacation cartoon or none. I would love to sail a cruiser around the islands there in the summer... sure there aren’t to many places where cruising in the summer would suck, but I hadn't realised how beautiful this part of the world is along the coasts of Scandinavia and particularly in between Turku and Stockholm, its really special.

That night Kaisa and Andi dropped me off at the ferry to Stockholm. These Finland-Sweden ferries are a party. But saying that doesn't really sum it up. Let me put it this way: for cheaper than a ticket for the 12 hour Helsinki-Stockholm and another separate trip back, you can get a ticket to stay on the ferry for 24 hours and complete the round trip; just so that you can party and have fun for a full day.

The ferry has 7 levels, although that includes the café at the top that was shut because it was a Sunday night and the sleeping and parking levels at the bottom. There were three dance floors: one where older people were waltzing to a live singer and pianist, another where a classic rock cover band was rockin' out for the 25-40 age range, and another where a mediocre DJ was spinning for the 16-25 age range.

Kaisa had told me about an all you can eat buffet thing that I was excited about, but I ended up going to the wrong restaurant. Who knew that there were three proper restaurants: buffet, pay by weight and fancy one. I made it to the buffet in the morning though.

I missed out on the ferry’s sauna because I have managed to lose both pairs of shorts through a strategy of leaving them to dry at a hostel and then leaving the hostel.

I busted a few moves on the dance floor and met a 40 yr old lady whose 13 year old daughter had supposedly told her to ask me to dance. That was good for a laugh. Another thing I busted on the dance floor was the strap on my rubber sandal-arg. After listening to all these eurodance stations in my rides’ cars and at cheesy dance clubs I think I will need to get some sort of euromix 2007 cd just for nostalgia.

I wasn't drinking because it was quite pricey and I was about to soberly call it a night when I met a couple of Finnish guys who were really into hockey. We talked about Jussi Markanen and Jarri Curry. They dared me to think up any Finnish-Canadian crossover hockey trivia that they couldn’t answer, but I was too worried that I would accidentally mention a Swedish player. And I like hockey but I am no hockey buff.

I had been having fun with the dance floor because the ferry had gotten to a part of the rout that wasn’t sheltered by islands and the ferry was gently rocking side to side. Most of the people were drunk so they would stumble back and forth to the downward side of the dance floor. By trying to always be climbing up the dance floor I got this strange feeling of being continually against the flow, like in those music videos where the singer is walking the wrong way on a crowded New York sidewalk.

We decided that the dance floor was lame and they invited me to their cabin to play cards and drink. Their cabin was nicer than mine and we played poker and talked about travelling and our countries and the world. They were great guys and were pretty jealous of my trip when I told them that I didn’t know exactly where I was going or when I had to get there by. They had a tentative plan/dream to come to North America and see LA and Miami and New York. But it was one of those things that is always pushed into the future, but I invited them to come and stay with me once I come back from South America. I’ll go to an Oilers game with them and take them to the mountains. And if they insist I guess I’ll go to West Ed, but I would sooner take them to the Muttart or the Fringe. YA! I should get them to plan their trip to hit the Fringe.

I got the feeling that they are two guys who just need to let loose and do something that doesn’t make much sense and might not be affordable or sage, something that challenge themselves through travel. It doesn’t need to be ridiculous and scary but it needs to be in and out of their comfort zone. I hope that having a friend and a base in Edmonton will push their trip from a fun escape to think about, to a reality that they make happen.

I had a good talk with them and then got confused with the time change and the 4 hours of sleep I was going to grab turned into 2 and then 1 and I ended up pulling an all-nighter.

Before I move onto Sweden there are a couple of other things that I wanted to mention about Finland. There are two drinking ages, 18 for beer etc and 20 for stronger stuff like vodka, which I think is a clever way of doing it. Another thing is that everyone that I met my age was surprised or impressed when I told them that I had just finished a degree. This is because universities in Finland don’t really look at your high school grades; they have super intense entrance exams that people will take two years off to work and study for. So if you are crazy smart you can go straight in to uni but I wouldn’t recommend it-type of thing. So most people my age were in second or third year. Also people have asked me about the tempereture. Finland was about the same temperature as Edmonton although it is quite a bit further north… ok now on to Sweden.

Once again I got off the ferry and grabbed a touristy map and started exploring at six or seven in the morning. I had heard that Stockholm is the most beautiful city in the world… and that seems like a huge claim, but I can’t say that I would immediately disagree. It was foggy and grey when I was there but it was a very very beautiful city. Stockholm is on an archipelago with tall bridges linking all of the islands together so that traffic can get around and ships can still move in between. I was walking on one of these bridges and thinking to myself: "man these bridges are sketchy, they sway whenever big trucks drive by." Then I thought about it and the bridges were made out of solid concrete. I was still walking on my sea legs from the swaying ferry dancefloor. Other things that make Stockholm beautiful are lots of parks, usually on top of hills where you can see a nice view and young people can toboggan, and there are bike and pedestrian trails around almost all of the islands. Also there are shear rock cliffs sticking out all over the place often with ice clinging scenically to them. These are picturesque but also make for great viewpoints. I don't remember any skyscrapers at all where I was, and I did a bit of exploring. Instead there are nice old buildings and towers all over the place, but they have mostly been heavily renovated for a very modern feal unlike Budapest for example. The city is clean and friendly and the pedestrian streets were bustling, though not too many buskers or hippies. Despite the fealing of cleanliness there is still a fair bit of graffiti, though it is often funny comments or illegible tags. Although I would call it a ‘nice’ city I also know that there is some really full on protest punk, death metal and crazy avant-gard madness that comes out of Sweden and I would say that that doesn’t surprise me as much as would have thought just from wandering arond. I would definitely live in Stockholm. I got a really good feeling from it… though I can’t comment on the nightlife because I was taking it easy after Finland and I didn’t meet any partiers at the hostel. The hostel that I stayed in was tied with The Stadion in Helsinki for the worst hostel that I have stayed in but for different reasons.

I was attracted to it because it was cheaper than some of the other Stockholm hostels and it was a boat! It was an old boat from industry that had been converted into a hostel and was floating chained to the side of the island. That concept was cool, but the first day it reeked almost unbearably and the second day the steam from the showers set off the fire alarm in the morning. The showers were so hot that they were actually unbearable. I burnt my skin red and couldn’t stay in long enough to wash myself. If you turned the cold on it was so cold it hurt. You could also stay in for about three seconds before going hypothermic and it was impossible to mix the streams (or hang up clothes). There was no lockup it and lacked the friendly touch of most of the other hostels too. When I first came in to the room I was really excited because one of the people had a backpack with a Canadian flag on it that said Edmonton underneath and there were girly sandals. Sweet, I’m going to randomly meet a girl from my hometown half way around the world! Unfortunately she turned out to be the least cool person that I have met on my entire trip.

She told me that she was on an exchange and asked what I was doing. I told her that I had just graduated and that I was doing some travelling before I think of settling down. She asked me what I had graduated from and I winced and told her engineering. She said: “I thought so” and completely dismissed me. I said: “How did you guess, there aren’t too many engineers with long hair.” She said “Engineers don’t like to travel, but those that do have long hair.” I said “fair enough.” She said “I know because I worked in the foreign exchange placement office and I have seen all kinds of people. That’s how I have managed to go on two student exchanges in my [Kinesiology] degree.” Life must be very boring when you know everything about everyone through the wonderful medium of stereotypes.

I felt discriminated against. Granted it wasn’t serious, its not like I had been rejected a job because I was a minority or beaten up because I was gay, but it was a sickening feeling. In her mind she knew everything about me and in her presence I was trapped. It wasn’t like it was worth my time to prove that I was something different or to subvert a stereotype, in fact in most ways I couldn’t care less what she thought, I just wanted to be as far away from her as possible. Everyone uses assumptions about groups of people in order to simplify life, but what bothered me about this example is that she wasn’t open to exceptions to the silly rules. If you pigeon-hole people they hate it and people are boring, but if you recognise the stereotypes and then explore the ways that people you meet differ from the norm, I think that you end up meeting the same people but they turn out to me much more interesting than otherwise and you connect a lot more with them because they get to show you their true identity.

Its not like I’m not guilty of stereotyping now and then, but this experience made me more committed to being aware about the seemingly innocent stereotypes and genealiztions that I make, and I was hoping to pass that on a bit.

There was a more open and more interesting character in my room. He was forty-something and he had an interesting life story. He was born in the states, then moved to Vancouver and then became certified as an optometrist, then he couldn’t get work and somehow ended up racking in money working for IBM in Winnipeg. Then IBM sent him to Venezuela where he worked for a few years and then he left because of Chavez and ended up in Sweden a lot tighter on cash. He is now working as a cook and is working on a nutrition degree. It sounded a bit strange and I never found out why he was in the hostel. Who knows how much of it is true but it was mentioned only as background to the stories he would tell. It sounded like there was a lot more going on, maybe he works for the CIA. He criticized Vancover for being all about coffee and socialism, whereas in Alberta people really get things done. He told me that having lived and traveled in South America he could say with confidence that I will get robbed at some point. He also told me about some of his experiences in Southern Asia. Once he watched two prostitutes con a very drunk businessman out of all of his money and his bank number right in front of, his brother, the bar tender and him as they looked on incredulously. However he followed this story with a story to humanize prostitutes. He said that while he was living in Manitoba making money he would regularly eat at a very expensive restaurant. He had a friend who was a prostitute and she was a native lady with a tough childhood and she would join him at this restaurant from time to time and would insist on paying. She told him that he was the only man that she had ever had just as a friend and it made her feel great just to talk and be friendly and for it to be her treat so that it wasn’t sympathy or charity.

In his view, which I don’t agree with, Swedish people are not friendly and he said that Sweden is not the utopia that everyone thinks it is. He dislikes socialism and was growing tired with Sweden. Fortunately he was not the last Swedish person that I met and talked with.

I wandered a few of Stockholm’s islands and went to the museum for the Vasa, which is a half-century old sunken boat that had been recently recovered and preserved. The Vasa was to be the flagship of the Swedish Navy and crush the Polish fleet for control of the Baltic in a time when Sweden was one of the more important players on the Northern European scene. The Vasa was to be the first warship that the boat builders knew of with two rows of cannons upon request for the king. The physics for this hadn’t been figured out properly by the ship designers yet, but the King put a strict deadline on the project, so when they found that the ship wasn’t as stable as it should be, they didn’t go back to the drawing board but finished it up nicely on deadline. With about 500 people on board the ship set sail and then in very light wind, she healed over and her lower gun ports filled with water and she sank in the harbour. Somehow only about 50 people died. The top of her mast was sticking out of the water even when she was resting on the seabed, but there was no way of raising her. They managed to salvage most of her cannons and some other things by lowered people down with their head and shoulders in a huge bell. In the winter they could stand 15 minutes in the bell, and in the summer they could take half an hour. Yikes.

After the second night in the boat hostel, I set out to hitchhike westward although I had still no experience with hitchhiking in Scandinavia. The weather was mild, dropping to zero only in the middle of the night, but this made everything slushy and wet. It is hard to hitch out of a large city so I took the train to Sodertalje. I hiked to the outskirts and started hitching.

After over 45 minutes I was picked up by a really, really cool guy (who spoke perfect English). He was a skydiver with the Swedish national team. He was interested to hear about laser sailing in the same way that I was interested to hear about his skydiving. He said that he was growing too old for it, but he was ripped with muscle and only 36. I said that I doubted that he was actually ageing out, but he said that he can still do everything that a 22 year old can, its just that it now takes him a lot longer to recover and he has to treat his body a lot better. I asked if skydiving was very physical and he said that in general it isn’t, even the skydiving that the Special Forces do isn’t too physical, but it gets a lot tougher when you pass each other round and interact in freefall. That is what the sky diving team does. He explained that he was stiff because he had just been at a sky diving wind tunnel. He said that while a full day of skydiving in an aeroplane could give you 12 drops, a day at the wind tunnel could get you an equivalent of 120 drops. You might have heard about the world record breaking international sky diving thing that happened a few years aback in the States where they got the most people ever together in one drop. He was in on that.

He is basically the Peter McDougal (executive director with a common touch) of Swedish sky diving. He is an active diver and drives around from club to club talking to them about their finances and plans for the future and remaining connected to the team. I asked him how Swedish Skydiving supports itself. He said that they are a voluntary military organization. They get funds from the clubs and from the Swedish equivalent of the Alberta Fish and Wildlife Foundation or whatever gives Alberta Sailing its funds, but they also get a chunk of funds by teaching their special forces how to parachute. That’s right; I got a ride from a skydiving instructor for the Swedish Special Forces. Just as the Navy Cadets don’t have a clue how to sail and the seasoned competitive sailors are the experts, the Swedish skydiving team is better at skydiving than the Special Forces. So they put together a package for the government, feeding them, housing them and teaching them to skydive and the Swedish Military pays the Skydiving association well. I thought maybe the Alberta Sailing Association could put together something to teach the Cadets how to really sail in exchange for some of the money that grows from their trees, but I am sure someone has already thought of that and dismissed it. He told me that in these sorts of things most ideas are old, but if you find the right situation, rediscovering an old idea can be a great step forward, so who knows. He warned though that at least in Sweden the military will pay very well for a well organised, complete package with food and shelter and everything, but it it isn’t organized enough the military aren’t interested.

It turned out that one of the reasons he picked me up was because when he was my age, just out of school, he hitchhiked all around Sweden with a bag of clothes and skydiving gear and got rides to all sorts of sky diving clubs across the country.

Another crazy parallel between us was that he was also a Mechanical Engineer. He had worked for nine years for Nokia and another big company like that on designing the assembly line for the new cellphones that were coming out. I said “cool” because that is pretty intense, but he said: "Ya its pretty cool when you have enough time to be creative and find really good solutions to the problems-" but the way his job worked is that some people would design a new cellphone and then the powers in the company would want it on the shelves yesterday, so there were never enough time or resources to do anything but the standard solutions to any problems. That is exactly how I feel about my engineering degree and engineering in general, and it is the reason why I am probably not going to end up as an engineer.

He had been working a little for the skydiving association, but now he had left his engineering job to work there full time. He is super-employable because of his nine years of engineering experience, so he is in a good place right now in case the head-of-skydiving job doesn’t work out. I asked him if there is a lot of work for engineers in Sweden at the moment (because everyone who found out that I have an eng degree tells me that there is a lot of opportunities in their country because that is what the media says, but I wanted to hear it from an actual engineer). He told me that the military companies are hot in Sweden at the moment but the demand for engineers is a demand for 25 year olds with 12 years of experience. This was the same sort absurd expectation that I ran into looking at Alberta engineering jobs. He also has a project he is working on to design a plane with a different smoother mechanism for changing wing profile which sounded exciting.

The other sweet thing that this guy does is surfing. Sometimes he drives way up north to some friends near Umea I think? Then they fly northwest to some exposed islands on the north-west coast of Norway. He says there is never anyone there and the surfing is excellent. They gear themselves up in the latest stretchiest, warmest 5 or 6 mm neoprene full body suits (less thick on the arms) and they have neoprene hoods too. He says they are totally covered in neoprene except for a circle around the face. They zip across the shoulders so it is impossible to pee while out on the water. He says it is a 45 minute ordeal to go all the way in to pee. I told him about sailors peeing off the back of their boats before the start of a sailing race and warned him that if you pees in your wetsuit you will end up like Eric Tulk, who has a small bladder and was always peeing his wetsuit during a day of racing against everyone’s advice. Then at the Western Canada Games he came down with a rash all around the important bits.

He dropped me at the turn off for the airport outside of Orebro. On the side of the road I was grinning from the cool connection I had made and maybe it was that or maybe it was the flood of evening traffic, but I got another cool ride really quickly. This one was from a trucker with no load. He was a fifty-something man who didn’t seem very excited about life. Not to say that he was grumpy or sad or depressed, although he might have been hiding something like that, it was more like he had been through a lot and now was content to flow subtly through life and take lifes ups and downs and just carry on. He had a daughter that he loved and that he was working hard to send money to. I asked if she was gong to school and he said no, just that she was having trouble making ends meet. He chain smoked but tried to get the worst of the smoke out of the cab. It turned out that he had just come back from sick leave. He had accidentally sliced his finger quite badly and this was his first day back on the job and in a truck that he wasn’t used to. He said that the scar had come from being clumsy. I think that a lot of people would have found a way to blame someone or something else. I mentioned that I thought Stockolm was a beautiful city and he said that he agreed, that he had had some break time there and he had had some beers in a pub with a nice view. He didn’t live there but he thought it was a nice place. I asked him what he does for fun, he said "nothing really." He is usually working and when he has some time off he just relaxes, has a beer or two. We were talking about money and he said that he didn’t have anything saved up despite his age. He said that whether he makes 15000 kr or 30000kr he still ends up spending it by the end of the month. 15000kr is about 2500 Canadian. Its not that he thought it was a good situation, but he seemed to have resigned himself to accepting that that is just the way it was going to be.

He drove me right into his trucking base hoping to find someone going on toward Oslo, but there was nobody. He gave me some coffee and was very friendly and warm to me in a distant sort of way. We didn’t have much conversation or super warm body language, but he gave off a sort of air of comfort. He was friendly in a sort of 55 year, old tired of life sort of way. He spilt most of his coffee after setting it down in the cup holder and then jerking the truck around struggling to connect it's traiolr, but he didn't mention it. The trouble getting the trailor on took up most of his break time and he had four more hours of driving left in the day (it was about eight o’clock). In Sweden truckers aren’t allowed to drive for more than 4 hours straight and then they must have a 30 minute break (I don’t know that rule might be pretty standard?). That was what the coffee stop was about.

He could have left me at the base or brought me to the highway that he was going to, but instead he backtracked for me to get me to the right place an then gave me money for a hot meal at McDonalds. I had heard that McDonalds Sweden was a lot more socially and environmentally responsible organization than other countries’ McDonalds (McDonalds Sweden shows the power that educated consumerism and good legislation has over corporations) and so I did try a Swedish McDonalds, partially to prove to myself and anyone watching (ya right) that my fairly consistent boycott of McDonalds was based on their practices and if they straightened out, like McDonalds Sweden then I would support them. The meal was good in that I was famished and the tasty unhealthy fat hit the spot, but it was bad in that the fries were a bit cold and it was still just a gross chain fast food restaurant, but mostly it was depressing to see people feed their little children this crap.

I made camp in the forest outside of Karlstad and pushed on the next morning. I had to wait for half an hour once I found a good spot, but a ride did come. He was a big businessman in a luxury SUV and told me “Canada, yes I have an associate who owns a factory in Canada, near Toronto. I might be going to visit him later in the year.” He owns a factory 20 km down the road and another one somewhere else that I can’t remember. He sounded like more of a tycoon than a businessman. He told me that in Sweden they say that you aren’t supposed to pick up hitchhikers because of the eastern gangs that have moved in. He said that five years ago you could go to the store with your car running and keys in the ignition and come back and your car would definitely still be there, but now gangs have moved in from the east and everyone has to be very careful. (By the east I think he means Russia). In Sweden there is no real reason for a person to be hitchhiking, why don’t they have a car? But he said “I don’ listen, I pick hitchhikers up whenever I see them.”

This seemed to be the general wisdom in Sweden and Norway, that noboy picks hitchhikers up excpt for me. Of course I wouldn’t have met anyone who actually doesn’t pick up hitchhikers, but while the wait times were almost double those of eastern Europe, they were still acceptable, and this was at the absolute wrong time of the year.

The tycoon drove me 12 km out of his way to get me to the junction with the highway that would take me to Oslo rather than Goteborg. I said “don’t do it if it will make you late” and he replied “they will wait for me” and smiled. He wished me good luck on my trip and in life and went on his way.

The junction that I had managed to get to turned from a great idea and a bonus from a generous guy, to a problematic mistake. There was a town within walking distance, I had made sure of that, but walking distance was a long way. It was 14 km if I went to the next town on the way to Oslo and 20 km if I went to the next town on the way to Goteborg. I really wanted to see Norway because every Swedish person that I met talked it up and my mom has always wanted to go there etc. But there were VERY few cars going westward, while there were three or four times as many going to Goteborg, still not a steady flow. I had heard that most of the flow of traffic is north-south not east to west in Scandinavia and I later discovered that there is not much incentive for Swedish people to travel regularly to Norway because it is quite a bit more expensive there, while Norwegians will venture into Sweden to spend their oil money, as one ride put it. So I was really trying to hitchhike upstream. If I left the decent hitchhiking spot to walk for the next town along the road to Oslo, I could make it there and buy food and have the option of warm shelter, but I would still be on this 3 car per minute road and the walk would be miserable. If I went to Goteborg, I would be more likely to be able to snag a ride, but I would probably go on to Denmark rather than Norway. I have been to Denmark before, my dad had a conference that we turned into a family holiday when I was 8. We visited the little mermaid and saw some windmills and stayed in a rural bed and breakfast and of course visited LEGOLAND. But that is no reason not to go back now that I have grown up a bit and I am looking for different sorts of things, and maybe Stefan and Karina might be able to give me some tips on what is fun to da and see from their trips home. I figured that staying on the road to Oslo was being stubborn and wasting days travelling slowly and painfully towards Norway that could be spent in over-stimulating adventure in Denmark and beyond. I worked out how long it would take me to walk to the town towards Goteborg, aimed to be there soon after night fall and then figured out how long I could wait for a ride westward.

I stayed at that abandoned intersection over an our and a quarter and was just about to start walking/hitching towards Goteborg when I was picked up by a Swedish man on is way west to visit his mother in the town 14 km away towards Oslo. “How did you get stuck in this place?” he asked. I told him about the junction and my plans to go to Oslo which were almost replaced with plans of exploring Denmark. When I mentioned the town that we were going to he corrected me and called it a hamlet. It was where he had grown up and if anyone who had gone to school there with him was still living there he didn’t know them and didn’t particularly want to. He was going to visit his mother. He told me that there was a grocery store, but it was hard to find and a couple km away from the highway. He was early for his visit with mom and so he drove me to the supermarket, which was camouflaged with it’s back to the road and I think it was privately owned and run, so no big signs. The locals knew where it was and nobody else went there. He helped me read some Swedish labels and then drove me back out to the highway. The distance was short but without him I might have hiked the 14km and then not found the grocery store.

Soon after I set up back on the highway with a new stock of food, I was picked up by the first female who was alone in her car since my very first ride in Slovenia when a girl my age drove me 10 km to Pr‘ Tatko Hostel. This lady worked in a hospital for mentally disabled people in a town 30 km from the Norway border. She lived in a town that I had thought of going out of my way to visit because it was right on the big lake Vanern. She told me that her town was indeed very pretty, but there was nothing much to do there. She said you can go fishing. I gather that fishing is very popular in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. I do like spending time quietly in nature and I do like being out on the water and I do like beer, and I like tasty fish, but I tend to get my fixes of each of those things through different means, I've never been much of a fisher. I asked her if she sailed and she said “only in my dreams.” She told me that we passed a place where Bush’s grandfather’s grandfather lived. I almost asked her George Bush? But I stopped myself because that was pretty obvious. I think. Does Bush have Swedish ancestors? We talked about Swedish politics and she told me that at the moment there is a more right wing government in power and the social services are suffering. She was a very friendly and warm lady, especially once she decided that I wasn’t a threat. She gave me a commentary on the views as we passed them. Some day I want to go back and see Sweden in the summer, I wish it were as well, as that simple.

She dropped me off and I hiked out of the town to a new spot just beyond a turnoff for an Edmonton Ski club sized ski hill. I was picked up in under half an hour by a very interesting character who drove me to the border town where he worked.

He worked in a plastic bag factory, but he used to be a cheese maker until the industry collapsed upon Sweden’s entry into the EU. He didn’t sound as bitter about it as I would have expected though. He used to made a local cheese and then a fancy cheeze that he exported to the US. He said that in the last years before he lost his business the US was just ridiculous with import regulations after 911. He said that each cheese had to be numbered as to where it had been placed in the crate and that they couldn’t accept the crate if any of the cheese had been moved around. He said there was a prank he had always wanted to play with putting a red mark on one of the cheeses and see their reaction. I didn’t really understand that bit, but I gathered that it was comical how seriously the US took the Al Qaeda Swedish cheese threat. He drove me past his factory to a better hitching spot and pointed out the factory next to it. It made stereo components or something, but he said that the very first job that he had ever had was in that factory and now nearer the end of his life, the very last job that he would have after his life as a cheese maker, would be in the factory next door to it. When we were talking about jobs he mentioned that he had three daughters and that the biggest raise he ever got was when his daughters moved out.

The reason he knew the good hitchhiking spot was that when he was my age he did a lot of hitchhiking and often went to Oslo. He told me that he was a big hippy and had longer hair than I do, which was hard to imagine because he was maybe 60 and had short dark hair, looking like anyone else on the street. He told me that he had been drafted into the military and I asked him if they made him cut his hair. He said that he resisted it but got a lot of grief. He said that his superior took exception to him and would constantly harass him and would physically abuse him. He said that he had really tough time until this man went away for service in the gulf war. There he stepped on a mine and died and as far as my ride was concerned, a sort of justice was served. After he left the military he cut his hair.

We talked about the politics in each of our countries and I told him that in Canada we have a conservative government that had been voted in after a less conservative government had been found to be corrupt, so the Canadian government is more right wing at the moment than it might otherwise be and that as far as I am concerned social and environmental issues are being widely overlooked. (not that the liberals were really any better, could that change with Stefan Dion?). After I had gone on my speal he said that it is the exact same situation in Sweden. Now I don’t know how exact ‘exact’ is but it was interesting that his perception of Swedish politics overlapped a lot with my perception of Canadian Politics, given that socialists in Canada often see Sweden as the ultimate political model. His political beef at the moment is that they keep on bumping up the age for retirement or pension eligibility or something and that now there is talk of moving the age up to 75. He said “they want us to die before we get our pension!” I mentioned that there is a similar problem in Canada because as the baby boomers come to retirement age the system cant afford to pay out that much anymore. He replied that it was the same deal in Sweden but that it is ridiculous that they couldn’t have seen that coming and that it has been the baby boomers who have been supporting the pensions for the current older generation and now they are being told that nobody will pay it for them in turn. Also he said that providing care for the elderly is a good make work project, providing jobs and there was another positive spin-off that he mentioned (that I have forgotten-arg), on top of the ethical requirement that we have to take care of our elderly.

The point of my TRAVEL blog isn’t to get all political, but I thought that I would emphasize Swedish politics because it is something that Canadians often think about when Sweden is mentioned. Maybe this is because in high school we learn about Sweden and the US as examples of democratic models of governing with Canada sitting somewhere in the middle.

My ride dropped me at a gas station and gave me an energy bar. He gave me instructions as to where there is a better hitching spot that he couldn’t drive me to without being late for work. But I didn’t want to catch a ride and then have to make the new ride worry about crossing the border with a hitchhiker, so I just walked across the border as I had done all through Eastern Europe.

I walked and walked, and walked, all the time with my passport in my hand ready for the booth around each bend, but no booth came. There were a lot of signs and a money exchange place, but nowhere to show your passport. I was expecting significant security because Norway is not in the EU and Sweden is, but there was no passport control at all between the two countries, unless I accidentally snuck through without noticing and nobody caught me. It seemed more likely that Sweden, Norway and Finland allow their people to move freely across their borders, because come to think of it, I only gave my passport to the lady at the ferry booth in Turku voluntarily when she needed ID to prove that I had the name on the ticked that I had bought (with Kaisa’s help) on the internet. Does anybody know about scandinavian borders? am I right?

I started hitchhiking again at the spot where I took the picture titled Norway! I got a ride soon enough but it was just for 5 km into the next town. I unknowingly dropped a bar of chocolate in his van that I had bought with the Swedish change that couldn’t be turned to Norwegian money. I am sure he appreciated it, but I wasn’t happy that I had given a present to the shortest ride that I got and nothing to all of other wonderful people that I had met. Oh well, that’s the sort of randomness that I have gotten used to.

It was getting towards dusk but there was still time for another ride and if I was lucky it might take me the 96 km I had left to Oslo now that I wasn’t hitchhiking upstream so to speak. It is usually fairly easy to hitch into a large city and arduous to hitch out.

I was walking along the highway to find the next pull-off but it was a bit sketchy as people were picking up their speed pulling out of town and even though stereotypes are just stereotypes, I had gnawing at the back of my mind that Swedish people supposedly think that Norwegians are particularly bad drivers. So I found a side road which joined up with the highway a little way down and decided to walk down the scenic lakeside side road until I got to that junction and then I would hitch from there. I must have gotten sidetracked by the beauty of the lake and forests and rolling farm landscape because I missed the turnoff and ended up walking 5 km down a so-called bike trail, which was actually a full scale side road, before I called it a day and pitched my tent/hammock in a patch of trees on a side-hill that didn’t look like it belonged to anybody (fences, signs etc).

The next morning I had a decision to make. Backtrack the 5 km to the last connection to the highway or hike on 10 km to the next connection. I decided to press onwards and got hiking. It was along way but through the pretty forest (like in the mountains and foothills of Canada) and I was thinking hard about an email that Chris had sent me in response to my question of whether I could ethically justify working as a sailcoach/skipatrol while asserting that there are terrible problems in the world that need resolving and that I could make some small difference if I committed myself to helping out in one of those areas. Chris replied with an interesting philosophy-style argument didn’t sit well with me, but I was having trouble taking it apart. I thought and walked and walked and thought and came up with a clever counter argument and wrote a long email back to him, as the argument was typed out it became long and complicated and I blame that email for my tardiness in getting this blog done. So if any of you are interested or have something to add to the discussion I'ed love to hear what you have to say as long as it isn't too too long like things I seem to write. So what i'm asking is:
Specifically with regard to choice of job; to what extent are we ethically obligated to go out of our way to work against systems which we percieve to be dangerous, destructive or opressive? For example (in no order):
-IMF policies which systematically destroy poor countries through structural readjustment loans
-The system by which some men in Africa have been taught that raping a virgin will rid them of aids
-The marketing system which allows companies to create markets for themselves that are unsustainable, like car companies telling us how great their biggest luxury SUVs are.
-The foster home systems that have and enormous range of effectiveness from healthy happy homes to hell holes that churn out violent offenders and emotionally scarred adicts
-The capitalist systems which protect sociopathic corporations with the same rights as conciencious citizens
-Systems which cause racism and bigotry to spread and flourish
-The political system that prevents politicians from planning further ahead than 4 years
-Sorry I always get carried away with this sort of thing

Eventually I made it to the highway, my head bursting with ideas and was picked up soon enough by a guy in a sketchy car towing a small trailer with a strange piece of (farm?) equipment strapped to it. He took me a couple of towns down and we had a very similar conversation to my Swedish drivers about how nobody hitchhikes and nobody picks up hitchhikers in Norway, except for me. He was friendly but I can’t really remember what we talked about.

He dropped me in an un-amazing town and I hiked out. I got my first rays of sunshine in a long, long time with the wind gently flowing past my face, blowing my hair back letting the sun heat my skin. It was so bright that I could barely see, but I had a huge, genuine ear-to-ear grin and I was feeling on top of the world. I was actually in a pretty poor hitching spot. If a car wanted to pick me up it could take the turnoff onto a side road 20m down, and then I would scurry down to it while it waited for me. Then it would have to figure out a way to do a U-turn and get back onto the highway, but none of this mattered while the sun was shining. I glanced behind me and a car was pulling onto the side road and waving to me. It had come from the wrong direction, so I just waved back. Then they gestured for me to come. So I came closer and they said that they had driven past and then turned around. “Oh wow, thank you very much” I said. They were going all the way to Oslo. The driver was a 26ish year old man and in the passenger seat was his mother. Both of them were very friendly and we had some great conversations.

The lady did most of the talking. She was Norwegian born but they had moved to Sweden. She said that Norway is a very rich country but it’s people aren’t very rich so the high cost of living makes it very difficult for a lot of people. This is why in the small Swedish border town there has a massive shopping complex, so that Norwegians can drive across the border and get more affordably priced Swedish goods with the strong Norwegian currency. She said that it is all because of the offshore oil they have. She said that the government keeps saving and lending money and strengthening the economy instead of investing in social programs and infrastructure (although I think those are farely good to start off with in Norway?). They said that they have lots of problems with immigrants coming in to the country for long enough to qualify for whatever social benefits they can, and then most of their family will move back home and they will stop contributing to the society in a lot of ways and just send the social payments back to their home country. Another thing they mentioned is that It is apparently easy to get a job in Norway because of the oil industry’s drain on workers, and you will make plenty of money, but that you would spend all of that money on your rent and basic necessities.

The mother had worked as a secretary on the oil platform and was the first woman to be employed by this large American oil company and they were very sceptical about it, but she showed them what for and enjoyed being around a whole bunch of rugged boys.

The really interesting thing about these two is that they are a mother-son psychic, paranormal investigator, duo with the mission of helping people in all sorts of ways. One of the things that they have done is to help a cancer patient with his pain for example. Now before you go “ok sure they did” I want to offer up my opinion. I have heard a few talks about chronic pain and apparently it isn’t well understood and conventionally medicine and wisdom tends to miss the boat. A lot of the pain and suffering is psychological, though no less real to the sufferer and often much more difficult to alleviate. For this reason people who may or may not have soothing psychic powers could concievably be very effective at relieving people the pain of sufferers who believe in the psychics or are willing to give them a chance.

Another example of the sort of thing that they do has to be preceded by a horrible story. The son’s paternal grandparents were from Hungary and they grew old and were being looked after by a nurse. If I understood right, the way the home nursing works in Hungary (and I find it hard to believe that there could be such an obvious conflict of interest widely institutionalized, so take this with a grain of salt) is that, at least for this family, the nurse gets the house and significant inheritance for nursing the aged until death. The son has ample evidence that while the grandfather was lying on the bed, drugged out of his mind, the nurse smothered, or had someone else smother the grandmother to death. They were planning on doing the same thing to the grandfather, but somehow he one murder proved to be enough to get all the property and money.

This was obviously a very emotional story for them to be telling me so I wasn’t about to press for details and clarification so you’ll have to bear with me, but when the Norwegian family took the nurse to court with a lawyer and a solid case with plenty of evidence, the nurse or whoever they were suing bought off the lawyer and the judge, and at a critical part of the trial their lawyer just walked out. The proceedings were happening in Hungarian obviously so there was nothing that they could do and they lost the case. They don’t know what else to do and still have the evidence but no way to get around the apparent corruption on all sides.

These two talked of Hungary as a much poorer more desperate place than I had witnessed, but I didn’t go everywhere and really didn’t interact with people beyond mostly nonverbal hitchhiking conversations, and the hostel part. Maybe I didn’t get the whole story of Hungary?

In any case, being in the house where his grandmother had been murdered was an extremely difficult thing and they said that they were attacked by the grandmother’s ghost, but they managed to use their skills and powers to reconcile with her ghost and memory and put it to rest, giving them both much better closure. From a sceptic’s view, whatever did or didn’t happen, the experience of being in that house went from being traumatic to being peaceful and giving them closure. If they can guide other people through that same difficult journey, all the power to them.

They are interested to come to Canada and stay with me once I have some sort of place and even when I told them that Edmonton isn’t a super exceptional city compared with some of the cultural and aesthetic beauties that I had recently been to, they didn’t mind at all. They are interested in meeting all sorts of people and helping them in as many ways as they can and I think that that is a wonderful way to be and to travel.

They dropped me off at the centre of Oslo near the ferry, buss and train station, certainly well out of the way. And so I left another two great people who I hope desperately that I see again.

Oslo was a beautiful city on the beautiful sea, lots of skyscrapers and older buildings, but to my surprise there were desperate-looking beggars on the street. In an oil-rich country next door to Finland and Sweden with apparently no homelessness at all, I wondered what the deal is. They looked like they might possibly be a slightly different ethnicity, maybe they were illegal immigrants? I don’t know.

The psychics told me about some riots in Copenhagen over the emptying of a social centre. The social centre was considered a squat because they were not paying rent or property tax or whatever, but the squats in Europe, at least the well established ones, are a lot more than an illegal place where homeless people sleep. These squats will have spaces for artists to work, places for troubled youth to come off the street, sometimes they even have cafes set up to support the social events that are often planned and coordinated there. When my sister was touring Europe with Submission Hold they even played a gig in a squat. In Copenhagen the second most established of these organizations was evicted by military police with helicopters, tear gas and violence. There was such a public outcry at the eviction that there were riots in Copenhagen and sympathy riots and demonstrations in other major European cities, one of them apparently being Oslo.

On the internet I looked for information on the story and on these squats and found that there was a well established squat in Oslo called Hausmania. Wikipedia says: “Hausmania is a Norwegian cultural collective for underground artists based on collectivist ideology. It is located in Hausmannsgate 34 in Oslo and is a fertile ground for avant-garde art. The theatre Grusomhetens Teater is located within its perimeters.” According to another article, Hausmannsgate 34 was scheduled for eviction for the 14th of March unless there was some obstructive action. I don’t know what form this action takes, but I hope it happened because I visited this centre and it was a vibrant beautiful anarchic hive of creativity. The walls of the buildings were covered in murals and graffiti; there were sculptures here and there and a giant chandelier hanging in between two buildings. In the windows you could see half-finished art projects and decorations. I heard a band in rehearsal and sat to listen to it outside the open window for a while. When I went exploring around a bit more I heard some very polished music coming out of a building. I was sure it was a CD and there was some sort of party going on, but after the song there was a long pause. I listened more closely and heard a couple people talking and it was definitely another rehearsal. There were a few park benches kicking around and I sat down on one just taking in the sights and sounds of the place. There was a creek running through the middle and there were trees and random tables and odds and ends kicking round. At one point I heard three bands practicing from different buildings around the area at the same time. What an exciting place.

Other things I saw in oslo were Henrik Ibsen and Edvard Munch (and many other famous Norwegians') graveyard and the sculpture park. This park is full of beautifully carved anatomically correct nude statues expressing through their body language all of the human emotions in all of the stages of life. It is a celebration of life without religious overtones. I took my time and several tour groups flew past me "you have three minutes here and then we have to go to the buss on the other side of that hill." But I got to hear the commentary of a few different tour guides as I took my time absorbing it all. While I was checking out the marble human figures, the non-stop tour groups made for even better people watching, frozen in marble they could easily have been statues for the part of the exhibit representing youthfull imaturity, flurtation and social strains. There was the girl who slipped in the snow and 5 of her counterparts were pointing and laughing, there were the two american guys, one taking a picture of the other cupping the balls of a statue, there was the guy trying to get the attention of a girl he liked by throwing a snowball at her and the girly group of girls being girly, five meters away from the statue of a group of marble girly girls being girly. I thought that was great, but no matter how much they were stuck in a bubble of social silliness and ignorance, they managed to make me feel a bit lonely.

After the statue park and a bit more Oslo exploring, I left on a train for the west coast because I was realising that my current hitching pace wasn't fast enough. I needed to get to Brighton, England in time to meet up with my Dad who was going to be visiting on a short trip from Canada for a huge reunion party with frinds he hadn't seen in 40 years. So the next blog will be about the beautiful west coast of Norway and some of my time in England back with family.

Thanks, friends and family, for spending all this time with me reading my blog. Unfortunately the communication is a bit one way, so send me an email to tell me what’s new for you. I hope these words served as high quality procrastination for whatever you should really be doing.

Lots of love,
Ian

Oh ya and my plans for the future are to stay in Brighton making trips to visit extended family until the 5th of April, when I will catch a ride as a child watching, driving roadie to my sister's band on a tour of Switzerland. I plan to catch up with my aunt there and see at least one of my sister's shows, do some hiking, then move on to France then Spain.

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