36 hours in Norway

I receive a text message from Catherine saying flights to Oslo, Norway, are fifty euros round trip.  "I'm booking right now so tell me immediately," the next message says .

"I'm in."

Fast forward a month and we're on our way to the Paris Beauvais airport 4 and a half hours before our flight leaves.  We knew it took a while to get that airport (55 miles from Paris) so we wanted extra time.  Just before the RER (commuter rail) stop where we get off for school, Catherine realizes she forgot her phone charger.  We turn back and are on our way again 20 minutes later.

We're doing fine on time; we just don't have time to stop at Chipotle on the way.  Two stops before we have to switch trains, the train slows as stops for a few minutes on the tracks.  This happens all the time on the rail, but we're running low on time now.  Our bus to the airport leaves in 20 minutes.  At the transfer station we sprint from the RER to the metro, our over stuffed backpacks swinging from side to side on our backs.  There's a train there waiting for us.  We jump on it before even thinking about how good that timing was.  Three stops later, where we need to hop on the bus; we sprint through the station to the airport buses, our bus leaves in five minutes.

We reach the bus station, panting.  We made it in time, but our bus in full.  Our only chance is the next bus, which leaves 15-20 minutes later.  We should still make it in time.  Well, that's what we thought.

The bus sits in traffic for an hour, doubling the ride to the airport.  We finally make it to the airport 45 minutes before our flight leaves.  We have to get our visas checked at the Ryanair desk and that desk closes in 5 minutes.  We make it the desk, but they're not letting us check in.  They tell us our flight is in the other terminal.  Our boarding passes don't even say anything about a gate or terminal.

The other terminal is about a quarter mile away.  We take off running as fast as we possibly can in our bulky shoes, large jackets, and backpacks; shin splints flaring up.  We make it to the desk 2 minutes before it closes, but there's a line.  "Excusez-moi, notre vol part en trente minutes.  Pouvons-nous aller avant vous?"  We manage to skip to the front of the line and get our visas checked.  Flight leaves in 30 minutes, boarding begins now.

There's no line at security.  Somehow, I manage to set off the metal detector, which warrants a full pat down.  We're panicking about making our flight now.  Getting out of security we see our gate is right there and the line is moving at a snail's pace.  We are ravenous, it's 7:35 pm and we haven't eaten since noon.  By the grace of some benevolent higher power, we have time to get a sandwich before getting on our flight.  

Two hours later, we land in Oslo...well, Moss, a suburb of Oslo.  At 10 pm, it looks like a nice dusk outside, still plenty of light to see.  We reach our airbnb at midnight, barely able to keep our eyes open.

The next morning our minds are blown.  Oslo is the most beautiful place we have ever seen.  We wander the city, exploring fortresses, museums, restaurants, and palaces.  Everyone speaks English.  Everyone is nice and happy to help us.  Everything is expensive.  For lunch I get a glass of house prosecco and a bowl of pumpkin soup, which costs 188 Norwegian Krone. That was about $26 or about 22 euros.  One tram ticket was 50NOK, or nearly 5 euros.

We decide to cook dinner ourselves back at the airbnb.  Figuring out prices and goods in a grocery store in a truly foreign language is no easy task.  Our dinner was some adulteration of fusilli carbonara; it was cheap and easy to cook with pasta, cream, onion, bacon, salt, and pepper.  

After dinner, we decide to go out, despite our alarm being set for 8 am to make it to our 9:50 airport shuttle in time.  We go to trendy little wine bar around the corner from the apartment where we're staying.  The entire 12 page wine list is in Norwegian.  I manage to pick something out that we're both happy with.  This gives me hope for the wine tasting course I'm taking next year.  We then try to go to a club we read about on Yelp.  However, it was a 150NOK cover, nearly 18 euros.  We turned around and go to another bar with free entry and bumping top 40 dance remixes.  Everything there is still pretty darn expensive.  Sitting at a table a few guys come up and ask if they can sit with us.  At least they said it again in English after I said I didn't speak Norwegian.  They were very nice.  Students our age.  One of them, William, was doing an exchange semester at the University of Virginia in the fall.  After talking to them for a bit they leave to dance and meet some girls.  Another group of older Norwegians, older than the students but still seemingly in their late 20s or early 30s, sit down at our table and start talking to us.  They're a teacher, a software designer, and a financier.  Before they leave  they tell us about supposedly the best view in Oslo.  "It's about 300NOK each way, not bad at all."  Right.  That's about 36 euros each way.  We go to McDonald's for a 3 am snack instead.

Our heads hit the pillow around 4 am and the alarm goes off 4 hours later.  We're too exhausted to even open our eyes, but we drag ourselves out of bed and to the bus terminal.  9 hours later we're back in Cergy, unable to believe that we just spent an unforgettable 36 hours in Oslo.

Our room in the airbnb was perfect for the two of us

The national theater

Some cute little walk through with shops

Nobel Peace Museum.  I didn't get any pictures inside.

Making dinner to save money

End result of our adulterated fusilli carbonara

Successfully navigated the Norwegian wine list

The royal palace

The palace guards

The palace from the grounds

Oslo from the palace

The harbor

The fortress in Oslo

Our lunch

Catherine enjoying our one nice meal in Oslo

Panorama view of Oslo from the top of the fortress

Statue of FDR in a park

The tulips were in full bloom

This was the sky at 11 pm

Flying in

Parisian Stereotypes

Debunking French and Parisian stereotypes has been done many times on various blogs, but I've wanted to write a similar post from my own experience.  Here are 7 stereotypes about Parisians and the French in general evaluated from my life here so far.

1) The French are extraordinarily rude.

The French are like people everywhere else.  They're rude to you if you're rude to them.  If a tourist saunters in to a boulangerie (bread shop), screams at the top of his or her lungs, ignores the cashier, then demands to be spoken to in English, said cashier has every right to be a little curt.

2) The French hate to speak English.

This is not true at all.  When I'm out in Paris I speak French as much as I possibly can to everyone I meet.  If I don't understand their reply because they spoke too quickly or with lots of slang (which I'm still working on), I'll politely ask them to repeat themselves and they'll more than happily switch to English.  Only in Cergy do I encounter people who don't speak English.  If you're going to Paris and don't speak any French, simply learn the phrase "est-ce que vous parlez anglais (ess-ke voo parlay onglay)?" and Parisians will switch to English without any arguments.

3) The French are all super stylish.

Ok this one is true so far.  The French know how to dress.

4) They're smelly and hairy.

This is not true.  The French I've encountered are no smellier or hairier than in any other big city.  Yes some people on the metro haven't appeared to have discovered deodorant, but I've encountered that problem in New York, DC, and even Columbia.

5) They're lazy and don't want to work.

This stereotype is debunked by my school alone.  ESSEC requires years of hard work and studying to even apply to.  If the French were lazy, Champagne, these business schools, half the luxury goods in the world, and some of the most amazing wine would never have been created.

6) They hate Americans.

Typically, those who experienced any sort of anti-American sentiment in France were the loudmouthed, annoying, ethnocentric people at the boulangerie I spoke of earlier.  As soon as someone learns I'm American they're instantly fascinated and ask me questions about where I'm from, how I learned French, and more.

7) Paris is the city of love.

Paris is the city of lights, pee smelling metro stations, amazing food, and strikes.  Not as much love here as you would think.  However, I still wouldn't trade it for anything.

Doing My Own Thing

There's something oddly tranquil about wandering Paris alone.

My friend, Shannon, came to visit this past weekend.  Sunday afternoon I went with her to the airport to catch her flight back to Rome then I had the rest of Sunday already in Paris.  I had no idea what to do.  I made plans to hang out with a guy who lives in my building, Anton, in Paris but it would be several hours before he got there.  I decided to explore the city on my own for a bit.

My parents and my aunt and uncle are coming to visit in mid-July.  My aunt has rented us an apartment in the 17th arrondissement (district/ward) wanted me to check it out before everyone arrived.  I started off my afternoon alone by taking the metro up to the apartment.  It took about 30 minutes by metro.  On one of the trains had a street performer playing reggaeton on the accordion.  

I checked out the apartment location and neighborhood.  It's in a really quiet, cute area just north of l'Arc de Triomphe.  After looking at the apartment I had another hour to kill so I decided to do something I had never done before.  I went to a cafe alone, sat down, and had afternoon coffee.  This seems fairly innocuous, people in Paris do it all the time, but it's something I had never before fathomed doing.  To my surprise, it was actually very enjoyable.

It was about 4:30 pm so the cafe was mostly empty.  The servers were really nice to me and it was very relaxing to just sit alone and sip my cafe au lait.  

I sat at the cafe for about an hour and then met up with Anton who's from Russia.  Neither of us had a plan so we just wondered the parts of Paris we had never seen before while talking about school, life, and the cultural and political differences between the USA and Russia (What can we say? We're international business nerds).  

While exploring we found ourselves in Parc Monceau in the 8th.  It was a very cute neighborhood park with almost no tourists.  We felt like we were finally seeing the real Paris, not just the tourist attractions around the Seine.  

We walked around northern Paris for a couple hours and then determined it was time to find some semblance of dinner.  We decided to get a little group together so I sent out a few texts.  About an hour later we were seated in a park on the left bank of the Seine with some more international friends in our program eating bread, cheese, and drinking cheap French wine (cost about 7 euros, so it would have been about $50 back in the states).  

All in all it was a day of doing n'importe quoi avec n'importe qui (whatever with whoever).  There was no agenda and there were no time limits.  It was possibly one of my most interesting and fun days since arriving here in France.

This coming weekend will be the exact opposite.  Tomorrow evening (Thursday, April 8) I leave for Rome.  It will be my first time in any European country besides France.  I love how travel is so cheap and easy over here.