27 Jun 1985, Posted by Scott An Chora in Travelogue, No Comments.
06/27 Oslo, Norway
We ended up in Oslo’s train station an hour and a half earlier than we had originally planned. We had eaten and kind of ran out of touring options and found ourselves debating on which train to depart on. One train left at eleven and the other at midnight. Jim was having another one of his bad days, randomly complaining about everything and anything that came into view. I wasn’t up for spending much time sitting in this vacant station with only Jim’s attitude to entertain me. When the first of the two trains arrived, Jim walked the length of the train while I watched the gear. “There’s no first class, so let’s wait for the next one” Jim demanded. I wasn’t enthusiastic about spending another hour there, so I asked Jim to watch the bags and went to see if there were any first class compartments for myself. About half way toward the end of the train, I passed through a group of young ladies gathered outside an open window of the train, giggling and laughing with one another. I caught a smile and a bit of eye contact as I continued through to the end of the train. Jim was right, only second-class compartments. Sometimes second class is not a bad deal, it can be an opportunity to meet interesting people, but not the best of arrangements when finding sleep is the priority.
As I headed back toward Jim, these young ladies kinda caught me off guard. A few of them stepped in front of my path, preventing me from walking through or around them and then the group closed the circle in on me. They began singing a melody. I assumed it was in Norwegian but then the chorus came through in English “I love you, I love you, I want to marry you”. If there was a reason for accepting a second class compartment this was it. Jim, clinging to his attitude refused the opportunity. I reluctantly accepted and as my punishment I had to endure another hour of complaints. When the second and last train of the evening entered the station, unfortunately it too had no first class compartments. This time it was even more obvious that we had made a bad decision when we discovered there was absolutely no space to stretch out. There weren’t two adjacent seats in any one car, so the two of us ended about four cars apart. I found the last available seat next to a beautiful young lady who had to be at least six two, a true Viking breeder. Throughout the night she tried and tried again to share my seat. With her leaning up against me, draping her arms across me, some form of touching, all of which prevented me from achieving any type of real sleep. To add insult to injury, late that night our compartment was visited a couple of small dogs and a chicken – yea, a chicken. How do you get a ticket for a chicken? Our three new visitors had nothing better to do than voice their opinions to one another all night. Bottom line, I got no sleep. When we finally reached Trondheim I felt as if I had gotten body slammed and was dead on my feet. I met up with Jim outside on the train platform. We compared notes and figured we had two options: go into Trondheim and pay for a room and sleep all day, or get back on another eight hour train and head farther north. We figured we could see the sights on our way back down, so we choose option two and decided to head north into Fauske. We had marked down Amsterdam for the fourth of July and didn’t plan seeing all of Scandinavia in one visit anyway.
