Am I dreaming?

Oh my god I just got to my first farm and it´s more beautiful than I ever could have imagined!! It was nearly dark by the time I got here, and then they fed me a delicious dinner and we chatted for a while and I cozied up what will be my bedroom for the next month. So I won´t get a chance to take any photos of the outside until tomorrow, but

here is my cozy bedroom:

It´s bigger than my last Brooklyn bedroom! Sorry, it´s messy.. I just moved in!

And tomorrow myself and Anders (the farm owner) will be heading over to a little island where their sheep were living all summer, and making sure they are all ready to be taken back by a different boat on tuesday morning. We´re staying overnight in a tiny little cabin there too!

They have sheep and horses and two big dogs, and I´m just a little too exhausted right now to even go on further, but let´s just say I feel very much at home already, and it´s just so good to be settled and comfortable and surrounded by such amazing beauty. This landscape is seriously unbelievable!!
Oh and the wife got salmonella poisoning because she ate undercooked duck while attending an organic farming conference in Lithuania!
Ok, goodnight.

Waiting

I'm getting ready to leave for the farm today, but I just got an email from the farmer that his wife is in the hospital with some salmonella poisoning so I have to take the later bus. Is it a bad sign that a farmers wife has salmonella poisoning? Should I be worried?

Last night I had to switch rooms in the hostel and it turned out to be a great move because I ended up with a lovely new roommate from Germany named Annemarie who was exactly my age. We chatted for a while in the room and then she asked me if I had heard anything about the massive metal festival going on in Bergen right now. And it was such an enlightening question, because I was seriously wondering what was going on here that there were so many creepy dudes with long hair and piercings and leather jackets and pantera t-shirts. Here I was thinking that Bergen just had a lot of metal dudes living here year round!! She thought that was hilarious that I didn't realize something was going on and just took it as normal. Ahh well.

Anyways, she was curious to see what it was all about, so she asked me if I wanted to accompany her. I was super psyched because going to a Norwegian metal festival with your hostel bunkmate seems just entirely appropriate, doesn't it? We wandered there, far out in the city like 20 mins from our hostel, and of course when we got there they informed us that it was sold out and had been for quite some time. So we didn't get a chance to see Carcass perform, unfortunately. Aw shucks! Ha. We ended up sitting by the water and watching hideous drunken metalheads stumble around for a while, and had a really lovely conversation. It was sooo refreshing to actually talk to someone for a while, I had been missing it the past couple of days!

photos

Well it took a long time, but I just uploaded all my photos so far onto the computer at this internet cafe where the dudes sit around playing some violent shooting game on their computers and so as I'm writing I hear them cursing at each other and lots of dying noises coming from the game.
Awesome! Boys and their video games. Can't escape them.
Check out my trip!

And now...

Ok so I probably seem like a crazy person, because 2 hours later I am in yet another internet cafe. But first of all, let me just say that time moves VERY slowly when you're alone in a foreign city and trying not to spend tons of money, and secondly... what do you do at night here? I'm facing a little predicament because I don't really feel like going to a bar alone and I've been wandering around the city and people-watching all day (except for the last time I was online, okay okay). I mean, going to a new country didn't change the fact that I am not a huge fan of going to bars alone.

Tomorrow I've decided I'm through with window shopping, so I'm going to splurge and do lots of super touristy things. There's the Hanseatic Museum in Bryggen, Rosencrantz Tower, and then some cable-car trip up a mountain that's supposedly really beautiful. I'm sceptical, because nothing can top that train ride I had today!

I want to upload my photos so badly!!! I'll try to as soon as I can find an available USB port. Blargh.

Overwhelming Beauty

This post has to be super brief, because I think I may be spending my life savings at this internet cafe. It's quite nice and very comfortable, but good god is it expensive to use the internet in Bergen! Or more likely, I just found the most expensive place to do it and I'll round the corner in a few minutes and find a cheaper cuter place. Whatever!

Today I took an 8 hour train ride from Oslo to Bergen. Because I bought the ticket in advance, it only amounted to about $55 dollars, and let me tell you it was worth every penny and more! The train was pretty old (but in a nice way, not a delapidated way) and had these big picture-windows so you could see the scenery as you zoomed by it. I started out ooohing and aahhing with the little dude next to me from Oslo, and snapping pictures every few minutes, but as we went up through the mountains the scenery got more and more beautiful, that by the time we got to the glacier Hardangerjøkulen I was kind of in an amazed stupor. It was STUNNINGLY beautiful. The kind of beautiful that you cannot even capture with a camera. I don't care how schmancy your camera is, you can't document something like that. The train meandered through all these mountain villages and we saw waterfalls and icy lakes and little houses with sod rooves that grass was growing on top of, and green valleys with cows grazing by rushing streams. I tell you, I decided then and there that I am officially not a city girl anymore. We'll see if I change my tune after 2 months of the rugged farm life, but as of right now (Day 2) I want to become a rugged outdoorswomen who cross-country skis and hikes glaciers and whatnot. Maybe I'll make cheese for a living. I don't know. Either way, I guess I'm just trying to say I was really inspired.

Ok before I run out of all my cash at this cafe (it may be too late already), I will end by saying that I feel like I've been gone for a hell of a lot longer than 2 days. Wow! I also feel like I have a lot to say, but every time I sit down to write I just end up rambling on and on.. I think it's because I haven't been speaking very much since I don't know anyone yet, and so all these words are building up and just explode out of me as soon as I start typing! Achh.. more to come later I'm sure.

Oslo

I'm currently sitting in a little internet cafe in Oslo Station, right around the corner from my hotel.
What did it take me to get here.. hmm. Well, I took a car service to Penn Station where I got on the PATH Train to Newark and then transferred to the Air Train to Liberty Airport where I waited for 4 hours and then flew for 7 hours and landed at Oslo Airport where I had to then catch the NSB train to Oslo Station. Easy peasy!
Oh but I lied in my previous post when I said you won't be disappointed. You will. Already. Because guess who was on my flight from Newark to Oslo? 50 Cent. And his 15 dude entourage. And I didn't document it! So whose to say I'm not making it up? His entourage showed up during final boarding call, but 50 rolled in 10 minutes after we were set to depart. Why is he flying Continental Business Class, is what I am wondering. You'd think a dude who is pretentious enough to make a semi-fictional movie based on his life (and star in it) would only fly his private jet.
But enough about mediocre celebrities. Let's discuss what's really important: coffee and sandwiches!! I'm having trouble with the quick currency conversion in my head (Kuki's parting gift of a calculator watch has proved completely necessary!!) and so I believe that I managed to spend $6.50 on an iced americano today. It was so delicious that I don't feel too regretful, but I might not want to get in the habit of doing that.

Then came the search for the perfect sandwich that Hillary and I had been salivating about for months prior to this journey. I had my eye out for a good sandwich shop all day long, but every time the sight of a display case crammed with delciously filled baguettes would lure me in, I would get disappointed because they only had Italian sandwiches. Finally around 5:30, when the hunger was starting to turn to crankiness, I found a beautiful little bakery with a whole display of decidely Norwegian sandwiches. Buttered brown bread, crisp cucumbers, thinly sliced tomatoes, peppery smoked salmon, and hard boiled egg. Oh my dear god, it was exactly what I was looking for. So glad I didn't settle for anything less.

Ok I'm even beginning to bore myself with talk of transportation and sandwiches. I've been here less than 24 hours and I need some sleep! What do you expect?
Tomorrow I have to wake up at 5:30am in order to catch my train to Bergen, where the real adventure begins. 2 days there in a hostel, and then a bus to the first farm!!

I actually am feeling extremely comfortable and not at all nervous.

This city is easier to navigate than New York, it seems. And in all my aimless wandering, I did not get run into ONCE!! Not by a careless elbow, or a bike or car whose way I was probably in. What a satisfying feeling. Seriously.

seems like the appropriate time to start a blog

So in less than 2 weeks I'll be leaving the country. Traveling alone for the first time. Leaving the city for more than a week for the first time in like 5 years.

After 5 years living in Queens and Brooklyn, going to school and working retail and assistant jobs, I decided it was time to really WORK. Get my hands dirty. See some real outcome from hours of hard work, not just numbers or a shortened checklist.
So I found a few organic farms that needed workers on the Southwestern coast of Norway, had a yard-sale to get rid of alot of the crap I'd accumulated over the years, and in the next week I'll be packing my life into a big backpack and flying from the nest.

This seems like a good time to start a blog.

I'll be posting photos of sheep and fjords and updating you on all the exciting new things I'm learning. I'm sure some days I'll just be shoveling manure or looking for rotten potatoes in the root cellar. But I know you're dying to see photos of Norwegian root cellars.
You won't be disappointed.