Christina Swan

I lost my watch on the train from Trondheim to Stavanger. That makes it the second time I've lost something nice that Ed gave me, around or on my birthday, from my front jeans' pocket, in a public place. On my 22nd birthday in Peru it was my diamond ring, and this time my watch. Sigh.

Time to get programmed into "African time" again. The only disadvantage is that meetings and work usually start "on time" in Norway. On the other hand, living life without a watch lets me:

- go to bed when I am tired, and not when the watch shows a certain time or way past a certain time

- eat when I am hungry and not when it is "lunch time" or "dinner time" etc.

Since all good things come in threes, I have to list yet another reason which has to do with the passage of time, but not in the same way: I have realised that about half my closet/selection of clothes have been lying around in my sofa and chairs for almost a season, which makes it more difficult to find clothes there that are warm enough for winter... all I find in my chairs are dirty summer clothes. When the season changes, you realise you've got to tidy up, because when one piece of clothing ends up in a chair, it becomes a parasite, infesting my whole room with more and more and more and more dirty clothes, an endless eternity of what other people would call a mess.

Well, I cleaned it up anyway (most of it at least), when at one point I couldn't find my earring, the other half of my pyjamas, my wallet and my mobile phone charger (you can't drive anywhere in Norway without your drivers' licence, which is in the wallet, and you can't contact many people outside of the house when your phone battery runs out! Could have been yet another interesting wannabe African or Saudi Arabian experience; confined to the house while needing desperately to go out and get to work and earn a living. In some ways that might be easier because perhaps if I lived in Africa I'd have fewer things and thus fewer things to lose). At one point in Norway though, you just want some order in your life. Scatterbrain. So you tidy up, and find your things. And life goes on and on. :-)

Christina

Ps. Ed and I had a great "mid-term" holiday in Trondheim recently! The northest we've been in Norway, which still isn't so north if you look at the Norwegian map. When we were up there, it didn't feel like we were "up north" though, interestingly enough, even though we went to the top of a rotating restaurant tower and saw the whole of the city... hehe.. had an amazing time with friends, extended family, checking out the universities, the cafés, etc etc.

I blog on...

Life seems to have reverted back to, or should I say "become", normal for me lately. I both like it and I don't like it. I juggle two jobs and one study course daily, feel that spare time is a miracle and should not be wasted in merely relaxing (flashbacks to Cambridge, only now there aren't really bad grades and strict supervisors to punish me if I do waste some spare time), I try and fit in some time for Ed, for family, and for other things that belong to "the normal life". I also keep up my blog, like "normal" people my age do, and write about myself in the individualistic, egocentric belief that lots of people out there are interested in what has happened in MY life lately. I could write a whole blog entry about how normal it is to write blogs, but I can't be bothered. Instead I shall write a blog about other normal things.

Normal is what I reckon most of the population does. If you are to believe statistics, most people are normal and have a job, a car, a place to live, and are married to/cohabiting with/going out with/engaged to someone who also has a job and a place to live, etc etc. Almost half of all marriages end in divorce however, which has all so painfully been experienced by two of my best friends who married only two years ago and have now decided to separate :-(. So here in Norway we are living what has become the NORm in both good and sad WAYs (NOR-WAY).

Normal is nice as it normally involves a car that works, a Normal car (Delores was, unfortunately, outstanding, and so could not be called normal for a second). When Dolores broke down, we bought a replacement, this time a RED golf 1,8 GL 1991 model which has driven 176000 kilometers and has automatic steering etc etc etc. I have become quite a car expert lately. I will buy this car from my Dad on my birthday in three weeks' time, when insurance becomes a bit cheaper because I will become one year older and "wiser" and so on. The phenomenon of having a nice car to call my own (well, nearly at least) has hit me in the head because I go and check on it all the time, to make sure no one has bulked it or scratched it, and to make sure it hasn't started rusting yet... this concern with a thing that can only be deemed material worries me, because never before have I worried so much about and been so afraid to lose a wordly possession that can, like all other material things, theoretically break any minute. But I suppose it's part of the metamorphosis into Norwegian normality...

I am also normal in the sense that I think less and less of things that don't really occur around me so much. "Out of sight, out of mind", and I think there's some truth in that. At the same time I am becoming increasingly worried by this issue, because I know that somewhere else in the world, it has become normal that children and adults starve and die as a result of preventable diseases, war, natural disasters, etc... Even though it's not part of OUR normality, it shouldn't be brushed under the surface, or should I say brushed under the car mat, and forgotten about...

No matter how normal it becomes to be normal (I still haven't ticked off the mortgage, the 2,4 children and the pet, nor the cabin in the woods, but I can spare myself for that just a little while longer), I don't want to forget that the normal can seem absurd to an outsider. Like Martians or aliens arriving to earth in a section of Donald Duck, or immigrants from a completely different background arriving in Norway, there will always be people who look upon "our" standards of normality as completely off-putting, strange and unfriendly. And there will always be people outside the city and country who have a far tougher reality to face, yet face it with much less stress and much less concern for the car than we do.

I will hereby, like everybody else, try and be something out of the normal, and thus remain normal, for as long as normality possesses me.

Christina

God has definitely opened the floodgates of heaven on Stavanger. It has been raining and raining and raining and raining for two days straight now, allowing the child in me to play in the puddles. But (surprise surprise) the puddles this time are in Dolores, the beige wonder of a car that I've become increasingly intimate with these last few days.

I was driving home from some friends' late last night when I noticed that the ground of the car was flooded. Picturing the scenes of horror movies where the flood turns out to be blood - or something even worse - I quickly reversed the car all the way back to safety, to Vegar and Kenneth and Geir's house. In the dark, dripping rain, all by myself, and with an imagined monster singing "Turn Around" in the back seat of the car, I slammed my door shut as I hurridly left the car to enter the house again and BAM! Something slammed, and all of a sudden the left window of the car had completely disappeared. I tried winding it up again, but nope, it had fallen into the door of the car... Picture the desperation had this been in a horror movie, and with the Turn Around monster in the back of the car, now also able to get out of the car through the open window. Anyway, my three brave male friends quickly came to my aid with torches and some good old masculine wisdom about what had gone wrong with the car. I had to swallow my concern and drive home again with some good advice replaced by the monster in my back seat, and my "see you tomorrow, God willing" sentence dripping away in the rain.

I got home safely. As did Dolores, but I wrapped her up in plastic so that she wouldn't be cold through the open window in the night. This morning, the car refused to start so I had to skip lectures, but in the afternoon I decided that I wouldn't let myself be defeated. I put wellington boots on, brought a blue plastic cup with me into the car, and started splashing around in there. Wellington boots are now Required to enter Dolores, with the amounts of water that have flooded into the car from afront, or above, or both, and this stands as a stark reminder that Dolores is no Cabriolet where you have to actually Remove your shoes upon entering. Anyway, Dolores is my friend, and I have spent the evening with it, and with Vegar, unscrewing the parts of the door and cleaning out rust and dirt and adjusting the window and putting it back into place again. Thank God for good friends who help out with these things!! :-) And thank God for newly acquired wisdom about the anatomy of a car door... could be useful in the future!

Now Dolores is up and running again. Newspapers are soaking up its leakage (all women can be unfortunate and leak at times, but this one receives media attention!). Its window is again closed. And it is left to live its own life, outside in the cold, pouring rain, while I sit inside in a warm jumper and contemplate the wonders of floods in general.

For the floodgates of heaven are indeed open, and that isn't just evident through the weather. In fact, Ed now has a job in Stavanger, the job he didn't get beforehand, as a teaching assistant at ISS. Full time job, working with little kiddies of age 4 and under... wow... I'm actually a little jealous. Although I won't complain, considering I love my job, and that I too now have a new (or should I say additional) job - working in KIA (Christian Intercultural Work) as a project leader.. Initially the job is for three years, but I can always quit beforehand within reasonable notice. The job involves developing teaching resources for confirmees about immigrants as a way of making Norwegian youth interested in, and passionate about, friendship with immigrants. Yay.

But my conclusion today is that God is good, Ed's coming over (!), and it's raining. All good things come in threes... :-)

Chrissy