Peace, Love, and Lutefisk: Adventures i Norge

I survived almost two weeks of running around Europe. It was such a great trip, but it feels envigorating to be back in Tromsø! The sun is out, the snow is melting, and did I mention the sun is out!? Seriously, today the sun rose at 3:54 am and will set at 9:34 pm. For those of you keeping track at home, that's 17 hours and 40 minutes of sunlight. Tomorrow we will add 10 minutes of sunshine! Crazy fun. Hopefully it will help me be productive all day and night to make up for the winter months.

My travels end up being a little crazy on the way home, but I finally made it back to Norway. I got up at 5.30am to get a cab to the Pisa airport. I called and left a message on the taxi phone machine...and then nothing happen. I sat and waited and waited without a cab or car in sight. I finally decided that I could probably walk to the leaning tower and get one, but it was deserted. I then walked from their to the main road assuming I would see one and again nothing. At this point I was on the verge of being very late, so I started hitchhiking, to no avail! Come on, who wouldn't pick up a distraught looking American with a huge backpack tiny Italian vocab? Well, no one did, so by the time I got on the bus to the airport, I missed my flight.

I bought another Ryanair ticket which thankfully only cost 60 dollars and it was even scheduled to get in just in time for me to still make my connection...but of course we were slightly delayed out of Pisa. We landed in London Stansted and I ran to the gate to check in, missing it by 5 minutes! There were no more flights to Bergen from Stansted, so I hopped on a 3 hour bus to Gatwick on the other side of London. I got a ticket to Bergen on an SAS flight and finally arrived at 11pm (instead of 3pm). So, 17 hours and 300 Euro later, I had made it to Bergen and back to Norway. It felt so easy all of a sudden.

I had a great weekend in Bergen having the last session of an Election Observation course there. I said goodbye to my friend Marjaana who is leaving to start working for the summer and was again grateful for Andre's mom who did my laundry and made me some great food. One of the most random parts of the whole weekend in Bergen was meeting my relatives! I'm going to write about that in my next blog. It was quite an experience, so stay tuned and in the meantime, check out the photos I added from Italy!