This is the blog of a Norwegian (Marianne, aka 'M') who moved to Australia in 2007 to be with Roger (aka R) and feels lucky to have escaped a comparatively communistic country with ridiculous weather!

.. if we could get one.

Catgenie

We just got back from the ophthalmologist. She looked at Thomas' eye from every possible angle with several different instruments and concluded that for now, it's a benign pigmentation.

But she also said that it is 'pre-cancerous' and a very high percentage of these pigmentations become cancerous at one point or another. So we will go back for checkups every 6 months. We were also told to keep an eye on it and if it starts getting darker, the shape of the pupil changes or it's obviously getting bigger quicker we'll go back sooner. If the specialist thinks it's starting to become cancerous, the eye will be removed to prevent spreading to the rest of the body.

But for now, all is well:)

I took this photo today to have something to compare it with.

R and I wanted to go somewhere for Christmas/New years, and we started investigating it about a month ago. We wanted to go to Singapore, but we kept an open mind. Unfortunately, it all turned out to be ridiculously expensive, and we didn't wanna spend $4000 per person for 5 nights. So we gave  up on it and realised we'd prolly started investigating a bit late, and resigned to staying here for Christmas.

Yesterday we checked the prices for a flight to Norway just for fun, and found that it's really really espensive up until the 24th of December. Then the price drops by about $1500 from one day to the next, because no one wants to travel on Christmas Eve and Day I assume. It's still one of the more expensive tickets you could get, but not too bad. So we went ahead and booked it, about 2 hours after we decided to check the price, 'just for fun'.

We arrive in Oslo 28 December, and then will travel around to see the country and my fam until 2 January, when we will go to England to see R's family, and will return here 7 January.

I called my dad just after we booked it, and he was all shock and excitement all at once, and helped us make some plans for the week. Camilla was even more excited, and mum seemed a bit undecided.

Should be fun:) 

Spose some of you might know my Norwegian blog about life in Australia. Well, it's gone now. It had very few readers, and because it was just a project on the side, neither R nor I could be bothered putting enough effort into it.

I might incorporate it into this blog, by making a new category and just write about the same kinda stuff, maybe in Norwegian, or maybe not. I dunno.

Me: Is vitamin D added to food here?
R: How would you add it to food?
Me: In Norway it's added to some kinds of milk, because there's not a lot of sun, so I was just wondering with all the sun you get here, if you would do it.
R: Haven't heard of it being done.... What if you don't drink milk?
Me: Then you're screwed... but everyone drinks milk in Norway.
R: I'm sure they don't.
Me: Yeah, kids are practically forced to drink milk in school. At the beginning of each school year they hand out a form where they sign up to get milk with their lunch every day. The teacher will tell the pupils to make sure their parents sign it, and the parents are made to think milk is good for their kid.
R: Wow, Norwegians are like mushrooms.
Me: How?
R: They are kept in the dark and fed bullshit.

 

Don't drink your milk!

Lately I have noticed that some of the best blogs I enjoy reading, are written by people who are owned by a cat.

Today I stumbled across this quote by Barbara Holland:

"A catless writer is almost inconceivable.  It's a perverse taste, really,
since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room
than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of
the pen and walk on the typewriter keys."

 

In the 3 days since my oz blog was put to death, it has had about 180 visitors. Normally it would get that many in about 3 weeks. It has never been more popular. Funny how dead things/persons are always more popular.

Picasso, Elvis Presley, princess Diana and the oz blog.

"Someone recently told me that “over-vaccinating” pets can lead to a huge amount of health issues. My curiosity was piqued, and I googled ‘over-vaccinating’. The result was thousands of websites on a disorder called ‘vaccinosis’, a disease syndrome caused by weakness which is precipitated by vaccination. After reading through a lot of these sites, I am now convinced that giving pets regular vaccinations is one of the worst and most damaging things we can do to them.

Most vaccinations given to humans are given once – when we are children. We are then immune for the rest of our lives. So why do our pets need to be vaccinated every year? You can’t make them more immune to a disease, no matter how hard you try.

Dogs’ and cats’ immune systems mature fully at 6 months. If a modified live virus (MLV) vaccine is given after 6 months of age, it produces immunity, which is good for the life of the pet. If another MLV vaccine is given a year later, the antibodies from the first vaccine neutralise the antigens of the second vaccine and there is little or no effect. The immunity is not 'boosted' nor are more memory cells induced."

-excerpt from the article on vaccinosis that I wrote for R's site-

Thomas went to the Cat Clinic recently, and today he got mail from them. I find that adorable. None of my cats have ever gotten mail before:)

Here's the envelope - addressed to Thomas:

The toy:

And the letter:

 

"let your humans know" hehe:)

Another example of Australian friendliness and how they see animals as family members.

Last night we went to see Tim Minchin at the Brisbane Powerhouse with some friends. He is very funny:)

Here are some videos.

 

 

 

I have tagged myself to write a wishlist. Sonja and Miss Piggy have done it, and even tho my life is pretty damn perfect at the mo, I decided it sounds like fun. The tag is to write a list of 7 wishes, which don't necessarily have to be realistic.

I wish...

1. That Julie and Thomas will live as long as me, and be healthy and happy the whole time.

2. That Roger and I will stay together until we are old and wrinkly and then die quickly at the same time (in a plane accident for example - exciting ride which gives us time to prepare and then instant, painless death).

3. That the pigmentation on Thomas' eye will never become cancerous.

4. To study animal behaviour and handling/training, and then find an animal related job.

5. That all men around the world would develop some respect for others, especially women, and stop taking advantage of women's bodies for their own pleasure.

6. That all the charity organisations which receive billions of dollars every year would pull their finger out and fix world poverty. (They have enough money to do it, they just waste it all on stuff that doesn't work.)

7. That my dad would get me a graphics tablet for Christmas!

7 is coming true:D

Simpsonised!

 

My graphics tablet arrived todayXD

It's looovely and I loooove it:D My mouse is completely neglected, I'm doing everything with the tablet to get used to it.

 

Isn't it beatiful? Thanks dad:)

It's Christmas (aka Xmas) Eve. It is also the first Christmas which I have not celebrated at all. At all. No decorations, no food, nothing. I did send some pressies to Norway, seeing as they bought me pressies and it seemed fair. But that's it. This also happens to be the best Christmas I've had since I was kid who still enjoyed the whole Christmas thing. I love how I'm not celebrating Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, why do some people spell it 'xmas'? I see how it's more convenient to write 4 letters instead of 9. But that doesn't really make up for the fact that it makes the pronunciation wrong. 'Xmas' would be pronounced 'ex-mas'. It is cute I spose, and fitting too now that I think about it, because Xmas really isn't a Christian holiday. And it never was. It is just remains of a pagan holiday, which the church attempted to christianise.

And what about the crossing road sign in Usa? It says 'X-ing', which would then be pronounced 'ex-ing'. And what's that supposed to mean? Must be some usatian word. They do like to make up silly words. Such as 'turkey shoot' and 'tuna-fish', as opposed to 'tuna-bird'. (Do they also say 'cod-fish' and 'salmon-fish' and 'parrot-bird'?)

It has been interesting experiencing Australian xmas. They overdecorate their houses so completely. For decorations, they use snowmen, reindeers and santa clothed in his winter outfit. Because the northern hemisphere is under the impression that xmas is cold - which is obviously completely wrong - their traditions and motifs for xmas have been set to reflect a cold climate.

Aussies are also a very patriotic people. They have about the same level of patriotism as the usatians, but without the misplaced belief that they need flags and firearms and to never leave the country to even go on holiday to prove that they are patriots. Goods that are Australian owned and made will be preferred over anything that is imported.

Australia is a big country. Seriously, it's frickin huge! It covers about twice the area that all of Europe does. With all this tumbling space, it's no wonder that everything is big. Spiders make cobwebs which are enormous. They will start at a branch in a tree, then stretches over to a branch in the next tree, and then down to the ground, covering between 1 and 2 square metres. Spider must be very hungry.

As much as I love Australia, I have decided to go back to Norway for a holiday, and I'm taking R with me. We leave tomorrow morning, and are going via Sydney, Bangkok and London before we arrive in Oslo on the 26th. That's a total travelling time of 31 hours.

We will spend 8 days in Norway, seeing Oslo and my fam, and then go back to England for a few days to see R's friend and family. We return here January 11.

Our itinerary is here, and photos will be posted here. Feel free to leave comments in the gallery:)

We arrived in Oslo at 10:30 this morning. The flight from Sydney to London was pretty long and boring. I don't know what it is about the flight from London to Oslo, but it always somehow manages to bore me out of my mind. Even more than the 21 hour flight from Australia. It's weird.

Qantas and Japan Airlines are much better than British Airways, and we will never be travelling with BA again.

England was its usual sucky self. It was wet, cold and miserable. Our flight onwards to Oslo was scheduled to leave at 7:15am, and there were only about 30 people getting on it. They started the boarding procedure about 5 minutes late, but that wasn't a big deal. Then we were sent through the gate, then through some doors and down the filthiest steps ever, litter everywhere, and then we were put on a bus. So they sent us to some remote part of the airport, to the wrong gate, only to put us on a bus to take us to the right gate. Excellent. Roger pointed out that 'maybe there wasn't a gate for it, cuz it's so busy this time of day' He's good at sarcasm..

When we got to the plane, and finished boarding, there was still a few minutes left before the scheduled departure. But for some reason, we stayed there until the plane was more than 20 minutes late, for no obvious reason, and were given no explanation for it. 7:30am on boxing day is not a busy day at airports. Heathrow was pretty much deserted. So if there's one day when a flight should be on time, it's early morning on boxing day.

So anyway, it was about 1 degree celsius when we arrived here in Oslo, and partly cloudy, which cleared up after a few hours. First thing we had to do was to find an atm to get cash for the bus from the airport to Oslo. That took some searching, as there wasn't a big sign that said 'atm' to make it easy for people. Then we went and found the right bus and asked the driver if he stopped at or near the hotel we were staying at. He did, kind of, it was about a 10  minute walk from where he stopped.

I managed to leave my jacket in Australia, so it was a rather chilly walk. R was wearing just a t-shirt and cargo pants, and found the cold 'comfortable and refreshing'. He's weird.

You'd think being in Norway again after so long would feel weird or peculiar in some way, but it felt perfectly normal.  Nothing particular about it. There is one thing I have noticed about Norwegians that I never ever noticed while I was living here tho; when they talk to each other, they all sound angry, like they're telling each other off for something. Roger pointed out to me on his previous visit that it sounded like I spoke that way to my dad. And now I have noticed it for the first time.

After a short rest in the hotel room, we decided to go for a walk and find something to eat. I put on thermal underwear, then a nylon top, and then a cotton hoodie. I also wore 2 pairs of socks. So I wasn't really cold when we went out but for some reason my face got really cold. I've never covered my face, and it never used to get cold. The rest of my body was fine, but the hypothermic face kinda ruined it for me.

R had decided to put on a long sleeve shirt, just for me, so I wouldn't be embarrassed when people stared at him for wearing just a t-shirt. (Awww). And he decided that his face felt cold too.

So instead of going for a walk, we stopped at an Italian restaurant near the hotel and ordered pizza. The guy who took our order was pretty rude, and he was Italian, which makes me wonder what it's like to order food in Italy...

By the time we finished our meal, the sun was setting, and it was getting colder. We decided it was too cold to be outside, and walked back to the hotel. We will do more walking and looking tomorrow while the sun is up.

Australia is 9 hours ahead of Norway at the moment, so I fell asleep at 10:30 last night, after struggling to stay awake for hours. Roger joined me shortly afterwards. Of course, that meant we both woke up around 4am, and dozed till about 5:40, when we realised there was no chance of going back to sleep. Free breakfast conveniently started at 6, so we decided to get up and get something to eat.

When we got to the restaurant, I noticed that it was all typically Norwegian food; salty meats, fish in sauces, (Roger: "fish for breakfast?!?") cheese, several kinds of milk, biola (yoghurty drink) and Norwegian orange juice, among some other things. There was no international food whatsoever. No scrambled eggs, bacon, croissants, yoghurt or fruit. So what does that mean? Are foreigners not supposed to enjoy breakfast at the hotel?

Having grown up with most of the food there, I found heaps of stuff I liked. Roger only found 2 things he wasn't completely disgusted with: sausages and fried potatoes. I made him try the orange juice cuz I've been telling him how much better it is than the Australian one. He hated it, and was unable to drink it. He said it was sickly sweet and thick, like it had syrupy stuff in it.

I told Roger I thought they had all Norwegian food because Norries have this obsession with showing off everything Norwegian. His reply was 'I wouldn't know it was typically Norwegian, it would just be food to me. Just a little weird to have it for breakfast'. Take that, hotel managers.

And another thing I've always known about Norwegians but never really thought about: Double beds are given 2 seperate single sized doonas. My parents did it, my grandparents do it, and the hotel does it. Why? Most people who are in bed together are couples. Seperate doonas make cuddles difficult and inconvenient. One doona covers one and a half persons, so when you're having a cuddle, either half your body is left out in the cold, or you have to pull the 2nd doona half way across the 1st one. And when you fall asleep all cuddled up, there's bound to be gaps where the cold air comes in. In Norway of all places!

I would like to know why. Roger said he wanted to go and tell reception that they have mistakenly put 2 single bed doonas on the queen sized bed. I'll go and ask them to give us a queen size one, suitable for a queen size bed.

It is another night when we have both woken up at 4am, so we decided to get up. I figured this is a good time to write a blog entry about what we did yesterday.

At about 9am it started getting lighter, so we left the hotel with 3 or 4 layers of clothes each. We were equipped with the GPS, and were going to walk to Vigeland sculpture park (Vigelandsparken). We had a few probs with the GPS at first, because it thought we were driving and wouldn't let us walk up one way streets and wanted us to walk where people shouldn't walk. But then we realised that it has a setting where it will only plan walking routes, and after we changed it to that it behaved really well.

The walk took about an hour. The ground was quite icy in the park, and we kept slipping. I don't get why they wouldn't put salt or sand on the ground. The park was full of German tourists, and with all that ice it's an accident (and lawsuit) waiting to happen.

After walking around for a bit and taking photos, we started walking towards the next thing we wanted to see: The viking ship museum (Vikingshipshuset). We stopped at a 7-eleven on the way, and when I walked in I expected to be greeted and to say hi back (like I'm used to in Australia), but we were ignored. No big surprise I guess.

The walk took about 40 minutes, and the viking ships and artifacts were really kewl. The souvenir shop wasn't very impressive, but we did get some kewl keyrings and fridge magnets. After we'd finished there we walked up the road to the Norwegian museum of cultural history (Norsk folkemuseum) and took advantage of their toilets and cafe.

Then we took a taxi (because it had started to rain and it was annoying) to Karl Johan, the main shopping and tourist street in Oslo. Unfortunately the weather didn't really allow us to walk around much, and we quickly proceeded to Oslo City, a chopping centre about a 5 minute walk from Karl Johan. I've always thought of Oslo City as the ultimate shopping centre, but when we got there I realised it's smaller than the one in Ålesund. I guess I was small the last time I went.

The shopping centre was like any other shopping centre we'd ever been to, and for some reason it had no electronics store, which was the one store we needed to find. We also checked the price of a 2 gig memory card to compare to the Australian price, and it turns out it was 3 times the price. Fascinating.

We left the shopping centre and went looking for an electronics store, but with no luck. They are everywhere in Ålesund, so I thought they would be easy to find, but I was wrong.

I haven't been in Oslo for years, and I must say I'm not impressed at all. Everywhere we go there is graffiti on the walls, holes in the footpath and buildings which look ready to fall over. (In Australia graffiti will be cleaned off right away, and if it comes back it will be cleaned off again. You don't see any graffiti when you walk through an Australian city.)

It was starting to get dark at this point, and my shoes and socks were soaking wet and I was sick of being cold, so we decided to walk back to the hotel, which it turned out is only a 2 minute walk from Oslo City.

Here is where we walked yesterday: (click to enlarge)

Breakfast starts in a few minutes, so we will go down and eat, and then we will check out at 11, and then somehow amuse ourselves until 3pm when will pick up the rental car and drive to Elverum to see my dad and Camilla.

After my last blog entry, we went down to breakfast and had typical Norwegian food again. We then decided to race up the stairs to the 11th floor. I got as far as the 8th floor before I had to stop for a minute. R got all the way up without stopping, and was waiting for me when I got to the top.

We hung around in the hotel room until 9, when we realised we were hungry again, and went down for a 2nd breakfast. We raced up and down the stairs again, because it's really good exercise and we had fun with it:)

After arranging a late checkout, 12:30 instead of 11:00, we went for a walk around the main shopping and tourist area, bought some new shoes for me, a beanie for R and some postcards to send back to Australia. We stumbled across a restaurant which offered free wireless broadband, so we headed back to the hotel to get our stuff and check out, and then went back to that restaurant and had lunch and hung out until it was time to get the car.

The guy at the car rental place sent us 'out around the corner into the carpark and you should see it', so we walked there and found a multistory carpark. We looked around the ground floor and found no car. We found it ridiculous to go around looking for one car among hundreds of others, he shoulda showed us, so we went back and told him we couldn't find it and asked him if he could tell us roughly where it was. He said 'into the carpark, then left and down to the lower level and then left again, follow the signs' to which I replied 'oh, you only said carpark the first time' and he said 'no, I said left and left and left again'. Which he didn't, but we didn't wanna stand there and discuss it, we wanted the car. So we followed his directions, and found it right away.

After a few minor problems with the GPS the first few minutes, the drive went perfectly, altho it was pissing down the whole time and difficult to see anything, and then started snowing when we got close to Elverum.

Meeting fam was nice, we had a 3 course dinner, and met the dog and one of the cats and dumped our stuff in our room and got online.

 

After spending one night at dad's place in Elverum, we went north to dad's and Signe's brand new cabin in the mountains, which was a 2 hour drive on about 10 cm of snow on small side roads, which was a pain. I could only do about 50 kmh and the car kept wanting to go everywhere I didn't.

The cabin was a really nice place, even tho it wasn't completely finished. We entertained ourselves by trying to put together our bed for the night, but it was missing some screws. Camilla got really jealous when we decided to claim the loft area for the night, because it's the cosiest bedroom.

That night we had dad's spaghetti, which is prolly what I've missed the most while I've been gone. We then had dessert and saw a movie before going to bed. We woke up at 7 the next morning, as expected, and no one else was getting up until 10, so we went for a walk around the area and got heaps of nice photos, including sunrise photos of the mountains.

After breakfast and a chat, we set off towards Ålesund. There was a thin layer of snow on the roads and no ice, so we could do around 80 kmh most of the way.

We arrived in Ålesund at 5 pm, but because it had been dark for ages by then, I was convinced it was 8 pm. We went to Peppe's for pizza, and watched robots trying to kill each other on tv before going to bed at 1am.

Today we are gonna spend the evening with mum, Camilla and our brother, and basically just entertain ourselves, and RELAX. So far we've been driving around for hours every day to get to new places. It will be nice to stay in the same place a few days.

Don't forget to check out our photos.