The Susanne

It’s way past my bed­time and I’m not sleepy. I’m sit­ting at my desk eating couscous with home made oven dried cherry toma­toes and sip­ping cam­o­mile tea, my mind full to the brim with the impres­sions from this amaz­ing week­end. Last night was my and C’s birth­day party and it was bril­liant! Every­one who came seemed to enjoy them­selves greatly and I cer­tainly did, I got to wear my lovely black dress from London and my shoddy old tiara from H&M which is fall­ing apart and I’d really given it to Furby but I stole it back for the party. I got so many incred­ible birth­day presents from people I’d never thought I’d get some­thing from and I’m so grate­ful for them but really I’m most grate­ful for the party and that so many amaz­ing people showed up and made my party the most per­fect birtday party I could imagine!

I’d made heaps and heaps of pop­corn which was, sadly, not very suc­cess­ful. Instead of going for the boring, reg­u­lar stuff I’d decided to exper­i­ment: I made ten pots of pop­corn which I sprinkled with food col­our­ing to make it look fest­ive and keep with the My little pony theme of the party (yes, we’re 24 and 25, but some­times it’s nice to be five just for an even­ing). It looked cool but I’d failed to real­ise that food col­our­ing does have a fla­vour so it tasted awful. I also made rose­mary pop­corn which reminded people of lamb roast, and wasabi-​sesame pop­corn which every­one just hated. Yeah, massive suc­cess! Good thing we also had the pony cake, the rain­bow cake and the barbie boobie cupcakes!

Since dis­cov­er­ing that my love for Oslo has returned I’ve been noti­cing little things every­where, the little things that are so beau­ti­ful they put a smile on my face even as I’m strug­gling through the cold streets of Oslo laden with shop­ping bags and unable to find a present for my friend and I’m hungry and tired and then… I look up and I see a stun­ning twi­light sky set against the streets of my city and everything is ok, it’s more than ok, it’s wonderful.

And then I find a present and I get on the tube home and there is a free seat and I get off at Nydalen and I notice — per­haps for the first time but I’m not sure, I may have for­got­ten — that the light install­a­tion in the escal­at­ors is actu­ally really cool, it’s not annoy­ing or silly or point­less, it’s bril­liant and I really really like it.

And then I go home and get ready for my party which turns out to be the best party of my life, and after­wards I have a ter­rible hangover which is cured when I hang out at Uglebo with C and O and we have so much silly fun and then we clean up a little and I go home and I sit down and write this, eating couscous with my own home made oven dried toma­toes mixed in with it. Just lovely!

Last night I had a 35 year-​old PhD stu­dent from Pakistan to dinner. Random? Well, yes, but per­haps not so very random after all. At the start of this semester my life was going through some major changes: the rela­tion­ship I’d been in for almost three years ended quite abruptly, I moved to a new flat and I was begin­ning to see the end of my BA degree as I’m going to gradu­ate by Christ­mas. I found myself feel­ing exhil­ar­ated at my new-​found free­dom, I had so much energy I never knew I’d pos­sessed and I felt ridicu­lously happy almost all the time. I wanted to do everything, try everything, exper­i­ence all there is to exper­i­ence. So when I saw a notice in the mail room asking for Nor­we­gian stu­dents to be ‘dinner hosts’ to inter­na­tional quota stu­dents I thought ‘why not’ and I signed up.

Then came the long period of essay writ­ing which I now like to refer to as my ‘dark period’, my oh my was I stressed, I put so much stress on myself I was unable to con­cen­trate on any­thing and went to bed every night feel­ing just awful because I hadn’t gotten my stuff done and every day it got a little bit worse because dead­lines loomed nearer and nearer and I felt more and more des­per­ate. Well, if you’ve read any of my pre­vi­ous posts you already know this of course, and you also know that I made it through, I man­aged to com­plete my essays and in the end the task which I’d built up in my mind to some­thing colossal was really not so impossible to over­come after all!

So, finally, I emailed ‘my’ quota stu­dent and invited him to dinner. I ‘d asked him if he had any pref­er­ences as to what he’d like to eat but he only replied ‘I am not fond of eating’ (which I must admit I found a little dis­turb­ing) so I decided to make a Scand­inavian clas­sic: roas­ted salmon with boiled pota­toes, sour cream and cucum­ber salad. Of course when I got to the market the trout looked much fresher and more deli­cious so I got that instead, and then I felt like some greens so I placed it on a bed of green beans and sliced leek, and as I wanted to ’spice it up’ a little I gave it a good rub with a mix­ture of butter, minced garlic and a wasabi-​sesame spice mix. I went a little crazy with the spice mix and mixed heaps of it into the sour cream too, along with about half a chopped leek and in the end the only things that remained ‘classic’ were the cucum­ber salad (thin slices of cucum­ber in water, vin­egar and sugar) and the boiled pota­toes which I’d peeled (I never peel my pota­toes) and sprinkled with pars­ley, grandma style.

It turned out that ‘my’ quota stu­dent wasn’t weird at all, his Eng­lish just wasn’t very good. He pro­fessed to love the meal and even said the sour cream was ‘just like ours’ (mean­ing just like in Pakistan, I assume).  He returned the invite and I’m quite look­ing for­ward to eating an authen­tic Pakistani meal when he returns from his upcom­ing research trip to Sweden. He’s doing his PhD in fish micro­bi­o­logy and his focus is on bac­teria: essen­tially how fish react to bac­terial infec­tions and how the bac­teria react to anti­bi­ot­ics; how and when muta­tion occurs so they become res­ist­ant and per­haps even how they some­times trans­fer to humans. Very inter­est­ing and very useful! Also he brought me some Pakistani sweets which we had for dessert and they were very good but incred­ibly sweet! Also I tried one which I swear must have been made up only of milk so I didn’t eat it, hope­fully he wasn’t offen­ded — after all we’d just had dinner so who’s to say I wasn’t just very very full? I’ve still got loads of them sit­ting in the fridge, he brought a whole box full and unless they keep very long I’m not so sure I’ll be able to finish them all. Per­haps I’ll have to host a ‘Pakistani sweets party’…

So… No photos this time. I’m at the lib­rary and my tiny little com­puter that I use at uni doesn’t have any of my photos on it. Plus it very rarely man­ages to pick up on the (excel­lent) wifi signal here so today is a very excep­tional day: I’ve not been online for a whole hour straight! Yey!

Now it’s back to the salt mines for me, or rather Hamlet. I’ve spent three days on this damn play now and I’m sick of it already! The intro­duc­tion spent forty pages just on trying to date it. Very boring. I can’t wait to move on the The Winter’s Tale!

I’m fall­ing back in love with Oslo. Grow­ing up I always felt a strong con­nec­tion to Oslo because I was born there and spent the hap­pi­est years of my child­hood there in a flat over­look­ing the cent­ral sta­tion train depot where I’d sit in the window sill and watch the trains and sing train songs. Mum went to uni­ver­sity and I went to the uni­ver­sity day care where I had a friend named Magnus and we would hide together when the other chil­dren fought. Then dad got a job in Eids­voll and we had to move. Both the chil­dren and the adults in Eids­voll mocked my Oslo accent and said I talked funny and pro­nounced words wrongly. Other children’s par­ents called me Sus­sane and I tried con­tra­dict­ing them for a while but it didn’t make a difference.

Since moving back to Oslo for uni­ver­sity I’ve felt dis­ap­poin­ted in this little city with little to do and less to see. I’ve longed for greater and grander places, dreamed of moving to London or Paris or New York or even Stock­holm. But I’m begin­ning to appre­ci­ate Oslo for what it is now. It is my home, and it is beau­ti­ful. There are parks and museums and the fjord with beaches and islands and there are hills for skiing and forests and lakes and the city centre is so small everything is in walk­ing dis­tance (at least if you’re not too lazy). There are bars and res­taur­ants and cafés and although it is expens­ive I can live with that because I love Oslo.

In the week since I fin­ished my essays I have done noth­ing con­struct­ive. Well, to tell the truth I did read The Tem­pest last Tues­day but hey, that’s almost a week ago. I’ve since partied, been to the Andy Warhol exhibit, impro­vised an Obama party before head­ing to the ‘actual’ elec­tion night party which was hosted by Repub­lic­ans, had count­less cof­fees at count­less cafés, met up with an old friend and made a few new ones, dis­cussed Kafka with a real German, skipped and jumped around listen­ing to silly girly music, been ridicu­lously drunk, excru­ci­at­ingly hung over, suffered insom­nia and lost my appet­ite. And I’ve not had this much fun in a long, long time!

Yes­ter­day was windy and rainy and cold. I really wanted noth­ing more than to stay in, but I was rest­less from the week of doing stuff all the time — I sup­pose I’ve become spoiled? — and I some­how found myself on a bus head­ing down­town to meet Stian for coffee. As the bus went through an inter­sec­tion a gust of wind blew a girl’s umbrella right out of her hands and towards the bus right beneath my window. I watched, enthralled, per­haps in the way you really can’t look away when you drive past  the site of a car acci­dent because even though you don’t want to look you just have to — I was so curi­ous to find out what would happen when the umbrella went under the bus, but at the same time I felt incred­ibly bad for the girl who was about to have her umbrella run over by a bus. But then, in the split second when the umbrella was about to dis­ap­pear under the bus some­thing incred­ible happened: it was instantly blown right back into the girl’s out­stretched arms, as if the bus had rejec­ted it and spit it out. Strange, right? I thought so, anyway.

The night before as Lis­beth and I made our way past the river Akerselva on the way to the tram stop, we noticed on the adja­cent lawn a group of ducks that had appar­ently rejec­ted the river itself as their nightly refuge and instead gathered on dry land. I took a snap­shot which scared them a little but I think it was worth it as I really think it came out pretty cool. Notice the flash reflec­ted in all their eyes and the fog in the fore­ground. Spooky! (You might have to zoom in on the photo to see it…)