I sat on a bench in a warehouse-sized room watching a screen that covered one wall. On the screen the camera slowly zoomed in and then slowly pulled away from a wall of limestone bricks…and then zoomed in again. This installation (I feel I should use artsy vocabulary for this post) is called An Unknown Quantity by Zachary Formwalt. The brick walls hold up the stock exchange building in Amsterdam. The voice over, with the calmness and tone of an evil bad guy about to pull your teeth out, “links the complex presentation of the historical events with capitalism, politics, and imagination” (according to the handout I was given). The video lasted for 39 minutes. I did not stay for 39 minutes. I did give it maybe nine minutes of earnest appreciation (and it was nice to sit down after walking around Bergen for hours).

I was at the Bergen Kunsthall Museum, one of several museums that make up Art Row next to Lungegardsvann Lake (I can pronounce that better than you might think).

I tried to appreciate Nina Canell’s installation of “microchips and cucumbers” (synthetic but look like the real thing) “an apparently contradictory motif which nevertheless, in a similar way, exposes the inside of a corresponding compact and complex system consisting of a built-in code and information.” Well, if you put it that way, I do kind of get it. I like the name of the installation: Cucumbery. I’ll never look at cucumbers or microchips the same way again, which is probably the point and worth the visit.

Nina’s piece that I did develop some sympathy for looked like what electronic nerds save for parts, a small machine with dials and meters with tangled wires, some of which were tacked to the wall. Sporadically the contraption let out a squeal and the wires spasmed like a dying heart. I felt sorry for it.

Next door was one of the Kode museums featuring an exhibition of famous Norwegian artists including, of course, Edvard Munch. Room led to room intuitively and dark rooms were lit by a motion sensor making one feel quite special, as if the paintings were waiting just for you and happy to come out of the darkness.

You can look all you want at the masters in coffee table books or gallery reproductions, but there’s no equal to standing in front of a landscape the size of a ping pong table. Edvard Grieg is my people. He understands depression; he should, he checked himself into a sanitarium once. His landscapes are cold and wild and intimidating. His portraits know what it is to live in a northern climate where skin is pale, and expressions are as stoic and mysterious as flat drifts of snow, more melancholy than painful.

One of his nudes reminded me of me when I walked past the wall-sized mirror in my room last night, cellulite thighs, flabby arms, and sensuous (read bulging) belly. I want to thank Edvard for finding real women worth painting.

Munch’s brush strokes look deceptively simple, almost childish, but the expressions of his people are piercing.

Call me plebeian but I would rather gaze at Inger on the Beach than a cucumber anytime. Then Inger and I would go out for a kaffe to talk about cellulite thighs and flabby arms and waiting for men that leave you sitting on the shore.

Does everyone walk away from great paintings with the urge to paint?

That’s what I have my Surface Go for.

So, with apologies to Edvard (and every other painter who knows what he’s doing), and his Evening on Karl Johan Street, I scribbled with the passion of a kid with finger paints, Evening in Bergen (that’s me in the blue Helly Hansen coat).

Fun, funky hotel room from the Magic franchise of hotels. I picked it because it was cheap which means no included breakfast, microwave, fridge, pool, conference rooms, or bar. But who cares? It feels safe (must slide card key twice in two doors to get to my room), the bedding is white and can’t hide anything, and has the deep windowsills of an old building, My fifth floor room and window seat give me great viewing of the equally high windows across the street. If they can see me as clearly as I can see them, I must remember to shut the curtains at night!

Last night the pounding music and loud shouting of Christmas revelers, which would annoy me back home in my apartment, was a cultural experience here. Nothing could keep me awake anyway.

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I was Sisyfos and my boulder was my over-packed carry-on bag that I was lugging, with frequent rest stops, through the Minneapolis airport to my gate that was very close to being a suburb. I didn’t sleep at all the night before I left because I packed all night. I was exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry. I collapsed sweaty and sore in a corner in the nearly-abandoned waiting area. I had a good two hours until my flight to Amsterdam and I only wanted to put my feet up on my backache-inducing boulder and rest, maybe doze a little.

So why, with maybe fifty other places to sit, did a young woman sit down in the chair right next to mine, an invader in my nest? Obviously, she wasn’t from the land where personal space is at least the size of a North Dakota field, and definitely was not of the standoffish German ancestry that I come from and grew up with in Minnesota.

I did like something about her though. I was feeling the embarrassment of a novice traveler burden with bag that did not have wheels (it is meant to be a backpack, but I was afraid I would do damage if I tried to hoist it on mine) and the stranger’s bag was bigger than mine and seemed even more unwieldy. It was a sports duffle. She was of college student age, wearing a Washington State sweatshirt, and FaceTiming on her phone, wired to earphones, of course.

I couldn’t guess what language she was speaking but she was taking no interest in me. I couldn’t figure it out. We were nearly the only people in the waiting area. Anyone would think we were traveling together, mother and daughter possibly (okay, nearly grandmother and young granddaughter) but I was a bland Minnesotan with skin the color of white bread and graying blond hair and she was exotically attractive with olive skin, dark curly hair, and glimmering brown eyes.

No granddaughter of mine would have those stunning genes.

I had a little inner conversation with myself, chiding myself for my unfriendliness, my oh-so-Germanic sense of personal space. I tried to act like it didn’t bother me, like it was normal, which, any good introvert would tell you, it was not.

Finally, she ended her call, put her phone in her pocket, and stretched her legs out and rested her feet on her bag. That’s my casual, comfortable-with-myself move. I suddenly recognized her as all those casual, comfortable-with-themselves girls I so envied in high school and college. But I was still deciding if I could come up with a good excuse to escape because even more than maintaining personal space, Minnesotans are polite, and I didn’t want this stranger to think I didn’t like her.

I needed something to eat and drink, so I started loading myself up like a pack donkey, because you “never leave your luggage unintended” the airport PA announcements reminds us, especially with a stranger who inexplicably sits right next to you. I was hoping to sneak away. Darn, now I had to come back because she would think I was rude. I could have asked her if she needed anything, but I didn’t, because I was tired, hungry, and thirsty.

And rude.

I shuffled to a kiosk where I got a fruit smoothie and banana. I returned and sat in my chair, shedding coat, shoulder bag, and boulder in a heap around me, and drank my fruit smoothie in front of her. That would scare her away.

She turned to me, smiled, and said, “How are you?”

We were on the same flight to Amsterdam and we talked non-stop until we boarded.

Ege is from Turkey and she is a student at Washington State College on a tennis scholarship (her big bag contained her beloved rackets). She was on her way home for Christmas enduring a very long trip with multiple plane changes in multiple countries. She wasn’t going to arrive home until Saturday. She had just finished final exams; I had just finished grading final exams. I bet she was tired, hungry, and dehydrated too.

I watched her bag while she went to find something to eat (after asking if I needed anything more) and she watched my bag while I took a walk, stretched my aching legs, visited with Eva, the German Shepherd Service Dog, and found a restroom.

We traded emails, I gave her my school business card and let her know if she ever needed help with school work, she could contact me. She dug in her shoulder bag and pulled out a key ring and held it in her palm to show me. “You know what Evil Eye is?” she asked. I told her that I had heard of it.

“This is Evil Eye. It will give you good luck.” She handed it to me.

It was a small, blue glass eye but not a creepy eye, but a beautiful cobalt blue smooth disc with a white center (called Nazar Boncuğu in Turkey).

Why did Ege sit down next to me when she could have sat anywhere? To teach me a lesson and remind me why I love to travel.

I had, at the last minute, put some Minnesota post cards that I had found rummaging for envelopes, in my bag. I gave her one of Split Rock Lighthouse and told her about Duluth and the North Shore. I felt it such an inadequate gift in exchange for what she gave me.

Ege had given me good luck and protection. I hung the Evil Eye on my shoulder bag and felt instantly like I was going to be fine the whole trip through.

We were assigned seats in different parts of the plane and, in the hurry to disembark and make connecting flights, I did not get to see her again.

Exhaustion, hunger, and dehydration can ruin a day, let alone a trip, and the chance to experience something truly remarkable, a stranger who could sit anywhere but sat next to me.

In reality, serendipity accounts for one percent of the blessings we receive in life, work and love. The other 99 percent is due to our efforts.

Peter McWilliams

I am booking my hotels in Norway. I’ve picked a hotel booking site based on the cute guy on the commercials and even cuter Chihuahua used in one of those commercials.

Hotels mean adventure, mean travel, mean I’m not in my small apartment with my stack of dirty dishes and piles of laundry. Why, if I can live three weeks out of one bag, can’t I live ten years without so much stuff?

What I like about hotel rooms is the simplicity, the empty closets, the bare necessities (if you consider hairdryers, microwave, mini frig, coffee maker, and a 100 channels on the tv bare necessities) and those miniature shampoo, conditioner bottles, the petite soaps, and, even the tiny package with the shower cap as if people still use shower caps anymore.

I scroll through hotels in Bergen and Oslo with the basic checklist of cost and location (I will be walking a lot), and whether they include the can’t-miss Norwegian buffet breakfast.

I have booked three hotels, one modern, one convenient, and one traditional. The modern, if the photos are accurate, is space chic with the lighting of a 70’s disco dance club. It’s sort of Star Trek with a twin bed.

But it’s the features I can’t find on the booking sites that I’m most interested in. As I scroll, I imagine who might be the taxi driver who gets me there, the desk clerk who checks me in, the servers at breakfast, the tourist I share an elevator with, and the maid I pass in the hall. It’s the serendipity of booking that fascinates me; that a chance decision will determine the people I meet and the possibility of life-changing encounters.

The word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole; it is from the Persian fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip,” whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of” (Dictionary.com).

Serendipity is not something you seek but something you run into, the unexpected delight around a corner chosen at random. It is the people you have no way of knowing you will meet but that you will never forget.

With a few clicks on a website, there are now people in Norway, who don’t know it yet, but they will change my perspective, decide my memories, and end up in my photos.

This hotel or that hotel, next to the train station or next to the ferry dock, the early train or the late train…this road or that as Robert Frost wrote, being one traveler, I cannot “travel both.”

Frost’s narrator could only take one road leaving the other for a future trip yet lamenting, “knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

Planning a trip means making a lot of choices but also leaving a lot of choices. A trip is never long enough for me, but I know how lucky, how serendipitous, I am to be taking this one.

                                                         Hi, Mom!

 

 

 

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.                                                                                                                                                 George Bernard Shaw