Scandinavia is a great place to see...alone

i have been to many foreign places before, some for a few days, some for a few months. i have noticed that there are two ways to see a place. one, which is the most common way, is to go for a few days with friends. this way you get to see the place through a window. like a brief glimpse. one that is comfortable because you are surrounded by friends and family. people who are just as amazed as you are, and you get to share that amazement. but then there's the other way. to go for a while and to go alone. strip away the comfort zone, strip away the time limit so the actual place, and how you might live there, presents itself to you. i've been lucky enough to get this a few times in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel, and Scandinavia. places that aren't SO different so as to be isolating when you spend time alone, but are different in a way that show you an alternative life.

I went abroad for my Junior year in college. my sophomore year had been kind of bumpy at the university of Wisconsin, i had lost three friends. one had drowned in one of the two lakes in Madison Wisconsin after a party, one had died in his sleep suddenly from an aneurysm, and another had simply disappeared without a trace. he had disappeared under such suspicious circumstances that there were detectives and police looking for him. probably still are. plus, i was in bumpy standing with my college girlfriend who had just come back from a year abroad, and the unfortunate truth about how faithful either of us had been was out.

So i grabbed the offered opportunity to go abroad and chose Barcelona. best time of my young life, at least it was the most sustained fun and adventure i had ever had to that point. i also got to travel for over 6 months as i planned to stay almost a year, but was only studying in spain for about 5 months. i had many crazy adventures and experiences during that year, many of them i plan on going over here, but one just pooped into my head and i wanted to put it to pen.

I decided around may, that i needed to see Scandinavia, the guys who i had been traveling with at that time wanted to go to amsterdam. i had been there, several times before, so i decided to break off from them. i was a bit worried about traveling for so long alone, but that was trumped by my need to see something new. so i made a plan to meet them in paris in a month and jumped on the first train north out of Basel switzerland.

immediately i realized that everything changes when you are alone. people stop assuming you are from so far away, because they don't hear your accent or dialect and don't see you as part of a group. people are also a LOT more likely to interact with you because i guess you become less intimidating and more like them. i made friends in seconds. i thought i would listen to a lot of music that trip, but i probably listened to less music if i had been with my friends. people never stopped addressing me.

i partied all night on the overnight train with a group of young swedes who got me nice and drunk and told me about an old ship that was converted into a hostel in stockholm. they also swore that i would love chewing tobacco because it clears your thoughts. i took their word for it since they seemed to know so much stuff that i had never heard of. my glorious memory of finally arriving at stockholm in the early morning hours, was with half my body leaning far out of the train compartment window with two swedes holding my legs, while i sprayed vomit all over stockholm's welcoming platform as the train was slowing down. my thoughts really didn't seem all that clear from the tobacco, in retrospect.

i found the ship hostel and got a small cabin with a little round ship window that was half under water so i got both a view of the city across the water and the fish world underneath the surface. after that i made friends with the guys who ran the place and they convinced me to go to several parties with them in the city. they turned out to know everybody and ended up going to several underground parties. things i would have never have gotten to see with a group of fellow Americans. the next day, nursing my hangover, i was in a park in stockholm, eating a budget style bologna sandwich i had made. a group of young people sat down in the grass near me, and beckoned for me to join them for a picnic. they turned out to be a church group. not the kind you might encounter in the US though. they had no interest in pushing there beliefs on me, they were legitimately interested in what i had to say and what things were like in NYC and america. i felt very comfortable with them, and even got a flirtatious vibe from one of the girls in the group. they invited me to a dance that night that their church was having. i showed up and ended up hanging out with them all night, and even doing a little kissy kissy with the girl, whose name was Sif. i swear to god, she even had pigtails.

after a week or so there, i moved on to oslo and then crossed the mountains of norway on one of the highest trains in the continent. it was daylight almost 24 hours a day up there, so i remember it as being always light and inviting, but really rugged and dramatic. one thing that caught my attention was the fact that the train would stop, literally in the middle of nowhere on the side of a snow covered mountain, and some people, including old people, would get off and strap on skis, and just shush off into the wilderness. they were like spartans of the north. the cheer and sunlight around me was constant. although it's probably quit the opposite in january, these were the people who populated wisconsin and minnesota, after all.

then the train slowly started descending into summery green forests and the rocky viking coastline and into Bergen. this small town in Norway wedged between two fjords. it defies all your imagined visions of what this kind of place should look like. it is an ancient viking town, with two dramatic mountains spilling into a rugged coastline. there's an old viking castle out on the water that really has the effect of transporting you back a thousand years to pagan times and norse gods.

when i arrived, i was immediately taken in at the train station by a nice lesbian couple who offered me a bedroom for cheap. they turned out to be great people, and they had a really cool young kid who was hell bent on showing me all the skateboard spots in town. i spent a day with them seeing sights, and then shopping for dinner. at dinner they explained to me how great scandinavia is for people of all lifestyles and how helpful the social services are. it was very interesting stuff for me because i was really into political economics at school.

then on the second day, i was just sitting in the town square. i remember watching in awe, as a crazy festival that marked their Independence day, their school graduation, and also seemed to have something to do with flying, was going on all around me. there was bungee jumping in the town square, while there were dozens of hang gliders flying down from the mountains above and landing in the town fountain. while groups of revelers dressed in blue and red were drinking and laughing everywhere. it was a crazy sight to be in the middle of, alone. i sat at the edge of the fountain looking around for maybe 15 minutes before two girls about my age sat down next to me.

they said something to me in norwegian and i just shrugged and said i was from NYC. that was it. i was in. they immediately took a liking to me. they asked me all about my mix tapes and they introduced me to a large group of their friends who had joined them during the chat. one of them was a guy who wanted to know everything about rap and graffiti. after a few hours of talking, he insisted that i get my stuff from the home i was staying in, and stay with his family because his sister had just moved to sweden and left her bedroom empty. so i ended up spending over a week with him and his family, i found myself a sort of brief romance with one of the two girls that initially spoke to me, and i have this amazing batch of memories, as if there was a lifetime where i was a norwegian. i had a Norwegian family and fiends. we met up around lunch everyday and just trooped around the town and went to various hangouts. it was amazing. i think this was only possible due to my young age, my tendency to not walk away from uncertain opportunity, and the fact that i had chosen to travel alone.

i had made good friends in other places. i lived in Ireland for a whole summer when i was 12, with my mom and sister. we lived in a house in the irish countryside, my mom had home swapped with a poet. the place looked medieval and i spent days trying to catch one of the sheep roving the hillside behind the house. i ended up meeting the local crew of boys my age from the town nearby. we became a close knit crew, we stole candy, we found hide-outs, we terrorized the local girls, we threw rocks at cars on the small road in the area. that happened until we hit the windshield of the local police chief and he chased us through a field with an angry bull in it. that was crazy. we got away, but when i showed up at home, my mom was waiting at the door with a really bad look on her face. i guessed it was a small town.

another thing to note on that summer, was i ended up winning a big break dancing contest in the annual Clifden town festival. i was up against a guy from paris who had a mean windmill and backspin. it was 1985. my best move was the worm and straight electric boogie. i have a picture of me inverted on my head with an audience watching. for realz. (i think i need to get a scanner and digitize some of my old pictures for proof)
anyways, that summer felt like another lifetime too. if you get to really go to a place, to get bored in it, to be alone in it, sometimes you get the chance to REALLY become a part of it. then when you think back to it, you realize you actually LIVED there.