Bergen Norway Oslo OSL personal reflections

Oslo Airport Never Odd or Even

a sign on a wall

Was it a car or a cat I saw?

I could not be certain what I saw or heard as I walked through Oslo Airport. This is a place where words and sounds had fleeting meanings as I passed through empty space in terminal corridors.

She whispered in my ears. There was no left ear or right ear whisper. The whisper came from both sides into my ears. What did she say to me? The words were lost in translation, even though they sounded like English words to my ears.

I was in Oslo Airport, walking to my gate for a plane connection to Arctic Norway as she whispered in my ears. There was her voice and gone again in a fleeting moment. I paused, looked around in my sleepy daze for the female face attached to the voice I heard. There were women all around, but none beside me. I was standing alone in the airport terminal, away from other people walking to their gates waiting for planes to take them somewhere else in Norway, away from Oslo.

So many encounters in travel are transitory, yet those moments are often the ones that remain vividly in memory after a long time gone.

OSL The Voice

Whispering sweet nothings in Oslo.

Warsaw was Raw

As I read the Scandinavian Traveler magazine on the plane, two young female students seated in the row beside me read college texts. I put on my glasses and read introductory descriptions of cellular biology from the textbook of my seatmate. The words were familiar to me from my undergraduate studies in molecular biology, but the meaning was so far gone in my past.

Numbers-1

Reading several pages of cellular biology college text made me reminisce on how I evolved over the years. I thought about meeting Seth Miller, Wandering Aramean, a few years ago. While drinking margaritas, after I mentioned graduating with a fermentation science degree, he asked me the chemical formula for ethanol. My mind was blank. I had not thought about chemical formulas in more than 20 years. My educational interests had evolved over the decades. My brain had devolved in some ways.

I remember and I forget. I believe that is the nature of most humans. We have a finite capacity for collecting, understanding and remembering knowledge. I have been fortunate to have spent time around several genius minds. In my opinion, the attribute of geniuses that distinguishes them from the rest of us, is their ability to learn, categorize and quickly recall what they have learned. The rest of us have a tendency to learn, remember, forget, remember and forget again, over and over, throughout our lives.

No Melon

Does being smart make you happier or just smarter than others?

I picked up three newspapers before boarding my British Airways flight this morning at London Heathrow for Bergen, Norway. There was a story about a British university student in veterinary medicine who hanged herself over a relationship hangup. She also played women’s rugby. Most of the academic geniuses I have known were not as proficient at comprehending social relationships as you might think for an extremely intelligent person.

Nurses Run

I like word games and math puzzles and the Mensa quizzes in airline flight magazines.

Number games

I played the American Airlines magazine quiz last week and I was stumped in finding the fourth common English word you can make out of seven letters. I quickly figured out gallery, regally, allergy. After several minutes, my fermentation science brain came up with lagerly, as in I am writing rather lagerly at the moment sitting in this hotel room beside an open window with the arctic air blowing in on a crisp autumn night in Harstad, Norway, while drinking my fourth Kronenbourg 1664 lager beer. Lagerly is not a Scrabble word.

I gave up on figuring out the fourth word and looked on the next page in the American Airlines flight magazine to see the word I missed was ‘largely’. So plain to see, yet my mind was oblivious to the random order of things.

OSL Are we Not drawn

On my overnight flight from San Francisco to London on British Airways two days ago, I had one of the best sleeps on an airplane in years. I crashed out about 90 minutes into the 9.5 hour flight. I was overjoyed when I woke up and turned on the IFE monitor to see there were only four hours remaining to London. The cute blonde German girl leaning on me as she slept was kind of exciting too. My eyes were wide open upon landing in London.

Flee to Me

Travel is exciting and mysterious. I think the wonder of exposure to new and unexpected encounters is what has kept me from being able to sleep more than three to five hours at a time for most of the past two weeks. There is so much information to process through momentary encounters.

Comprehending experiences and categorizing them mentally is a demanding task. The alterations travel imposes on the mental construct we use to organize our lives is the life lesson learned. Travel is the fast track to awareness and connectedness in a global society.

undnu

In simpler lives, the scenery seen during travel is pretty cool too!

Arctic Norway,

Arctic Norway

5 Comments

  • P T September 17, 2015

    Yours is not like other blogs. You speak to me. Looking forward to next post.

  • Tiara September 17, 2015

    Did you go all the way to Spitsbergen, Svalbard? I was in Longyearbyen early August and the sun never set during my stay up there.

  • Ric Garrido September 18, 2015

    @P T – Thanks for the support.

    @Tiara – I caught a flight to Evenes and I am in Harstad, Norway. I could have booked an SAS award flight to Svalbard, Norway at the time I planned this trip, but the hotel cost was more than I wanted to spend. I would be at the Radisson Blu Polar Spitsbergen at Longyearbyen if it were still available for 50,000 points for a 2-night stay. It is 70,000 points per night now.

    My plan was to head down to Svolvaer in the Lofoten Islands , but the weather forecast for rain motivated to stay in Harstad at Clarion Collection Hotel Arcticus for the weekend.

    The photo in this post was taken from the airport bus from Evenes Airport to Harstad. The Arctic Circle is 66 degrees north latitude. Harstad, Norway is 68 degrees north of equator.

    Daylight is 13 hours today and decreasing 8 minutes each day. The sunlight is beautiful. I walked through the forest today and I would have been comfortable in shorts. I was sweating in jeans with the temperature perhaps in mid-50s or about 12 C. The leaves are all kinds of colors and falling off trees. The sky has now clouded up and rain is forecast for Saturday.

  • Tony September 18, 2015

    Brings back memories. I had a lot of time to kill in December so I spent a week in Svalbard. That was an interesting experience.

  • soren September 19, 2015

    Ric – excellent deep sh*t.
    V. nice – No Melon
    S

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