Lessons Learned Vol. 2

The original title of this post was to be “STRANDED!!! ON THE FOURTH FLOOR”. This was to be a reference to an incident on my recent visit to Dundee and the apartment I was staying in. I couldn’t find a way to get down to the ground floor and eventually phoned reception asking for help…. Suffice to say I got out eventually.

I had a great time being back in Dundee but I will not write about that in this post. Apart from saying how proud I am of my youngest child who did fabulously well in his exams. I think it was my brother who commented after my eldest did very well in his very first set of exams that being able to celebrate a successful exam season was not something our parents every got to experience.

My intention is to write a post about Dundee over the next few days entirely in Norwegian. It’ll probably end up being along the lines of: “This is Graeme. He is standing. He is wearing blue clothes” but I’ll try my best.

So, to the lessons learned:

1/ In future I should probably pay more attention to my holiday destinations. As I mentioned in a previous post I spent a couple of days in Viana do Castelo thinking I was in Porto. Truth be told, for many weeks before I booked my flights I assumed I was going to Lisbon. If Sonia’s reading this I can only apologise - I was working on the basis that Sonia was from Portugal therefore she was from Lisbon. Thankfully Amy was in charge of organising things so at least I ended up in the right place.

2/ Don’t assume anything about connections. Since I arrived in Norway I’ve been very impressed with the connectivity of the country. It would seem that you only have to tell one central place that you’ve moved and voila, all your banks etc know. It’s v much a cashless society - I think I’ve seen 1 (maybe 2) people pay for something in cash since I arrived. That all being said, this doesn’t seem to stretch to travel connections. I had assumed ( a mistake, I know) that it would be reasonably simple to get back from Mosjøen Airport to Bjørn but alas… First of all there does seem to be a bus that passes near the airport but according to the timetable (and I’ve just checked it) it runs 3 (THREE!) times a week. And of course none of those coincided when I was due to arrive. Not a problem I thought, I’ll get a taxi. And I even manned up and phoned them. Alas all I got was a Norwegian message and for all I knew it was saying that this number is no longer in use. But that’s ok, they suggested an app where you could book a taxi and get a maximum price. Excellent. So that’s me into Mosjøen. And then I discover that the bus to Sandnessjøen doesn’t run as frequently as I thought. The icing on the cake - the bus was due to arrive in Sandnessjøen 3 minutes after the last ferry home. So what to do? First of all I had to kill 3 and a bit hours as the buses weren’t as frequent as I thought. Thanks to the taxi app I was able to compare the price of a taxi to Sandnessjøen with a hotel so in the end I ended up staying at a hotel over night. Alas there was a festival going on in the town (and my next door room it would appear) but thanks to the gift of noise cancelling headphones that didn’t bother me as much as it might have.

3/ Don’t book holidays when you have to play the very next day back. Our new permanent priests arrived on Dønna while I was away - I had actually swithered about when to have my holiday (ie before or after Sonia and David’s wedding) but thought it was better to finish in Dundee. So my first chance to impress the new boss was a service/ baptism on Vandve island on the Saturday. It got off to an ominous start when I realised I’d forgotten my wallet so had to do a questionable manoeuvre to dash back to my apartment. In the end I made the ferry in plenty of time (well, 5 minutes before it was due to go) and one of the first questions I was asked was “Have you got the keyboard?” Err, no? So not off to a great start. I hoped that there was some machine there that we could use but as we approached the church I remembered that there wasn’t. Oh dear. Much to my horror, and no doubt all the listeners, I then had to lead the singing of the hymns. I hadn’t quite realised this until Jorge announced the first hymn and then looked pointedly at me. Fortunately there were very good singers in the congregation so all went well. Bit of a panic with 2 of the hymns which I didn’t have a scooby about how they went but I sidled up to Eivind who is a very strong singer and asked him to take the lead.

After the service, Jørg and I went for a wander around the island and ended up at the Halibutskole on Vandve. This was a fabulous glass factory with some amazing sculptures (if that’s the right word?). We ended up chatting (I say “we”, I of course mean Jørg) to Olaf who does the glass blowing. If I picked this up correctly, they both come from East Germany so it seemed an instant bond was made. We were invited in for a cup of coffee which was very kind of them.

In other exciting news, I’ve been asked to be a guinea pig trialling some elixir from Germany that may do something about my bald spot. Of course the worry is that all it might do is make it bigger but hey ho :-) We shall see what happens.

Readers may recall a post from when I first arrived about the Dønna phallus. I hate to criticise but it is not quite as impressive as one might hope. It would seem I’m not alone in that thought - as I was wandering through Sandnessjøen today I came across a cartoon exhibition and a number of pictures on display were very much playing on that idea.

It’s good to be back on the island and though I did try and keep up a bit with my learning I do feel that I’ve slipped back a bit with the Norsk but hopefully it’ll start to come back. I was complemented on my Norwegian a couple of times on the way back which was v good for morale :-)