The Susanne

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!

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