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!

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!

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.

We cry when something is sad, said Gran after a while.

And then we often shed a tear when something is beautiful, too.

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…)

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