I took an overnight train from Stavanger to Oslo. My stay in Norway is over.
It’s been 5 months. And even through I sometimes I complained about the weather, or the fact that a kilo of cherries costs 18 Euros in average supermarkets (imagine!!), it has been a great semester.
May was the most beautiful month in Stavanger. The city transformed into a fairy-tale. It’s all green, with countless flowers, breathtaking lakes and houses every single one of which makes you want to live in it.
I am often asked “What do you think about Norwegians?”. Haha. They know that the foreigners perceive them as rather cold people who prefer to keep distance from others. You know what I think? I think they are great. I haven’t really established close ties with Norwegian students - having only met them at the student bar, usually after 5-6 beers have successfully arrived to their stomachs. And that’s when they are all chatty and loud.
It’s another question if you go to a bar or a club. There is one in the city centre (called Cementen) that we always used to go to. The doorman never used to let us in at first, so we had to fight our way in. So, what happened is that we were always with a pretty large group of international students. And every time the doorman chose not to let one of us in because of not having, what he thought, a legitimate ID. Our student ID had our date of birth on it - but no, wasn’t enough. So we had to show valid IDs. Turns out, permanent residency from Germany wasn’t one. Neither was permanent residency provided by Norway. Every time we had to go through the same angry conversation over and over again. At some point - we realised that it wasn’t about the ID’s. The doorman just didn’t like us very much.
One of the things that I have learned here is that not only I am not a grown-up (which I actually thought I was, haha), I am not even on the way. I am stuck in the childish period naively blinking my eyes to life. At least now I know how a grown-up looks like.
Alcohol in Norway is extremely overpriced: to drink a bottle of beer in a bar is 10 Euros. I can’t explain my paradoxical behaviour - I really don’t know how it happened that I was drinking more in Stavanger than in Germany, where beer is 1,5 Euro.
What I have learned is that champaign (with all it’s bubbles and stuff) makes me waaaay more drunk than vodka. It gives me a smile as well, while vodka makes me woohoo.
While this train is taking me to Oslo, I am taking one final moment to think about how much I will miss Stavanger. I know that sometimes I complained about that city, or said that I didn't like it, but maybe I was being a little too harsh on the city that so kindly hosted me for unbelievably nice 5 months of my life...
