Hi!! If you’re reading this blog thank youuu. I’ve always been unsure how many people would actually be interested in reading my writing but here you are :’) And I’m thankful for you.
I’m considering writing another post before this prefacing my thoughts and feelings pre-exchange and also to introduce this blog properly but we’ll see. I guess if you’re reading this then you would already know if it actually came to fruition.
I had initially planned to set up this blog back in Singapore so that I could regularly document my time once I arrived in Norway, but then that wouldn’t be very representative of the procrastinator that I am, would it? Hence, this post is gonna be a condensed version of my first 12 days in Norway in an attempt to make sure I’m caught up with the going-ons and hopefully my future posts will be more in-depth and thorough, since I’ll be able to write daily (hopefully) and not squeeze almost 2 weeks into a single post.
31 December 2019
Setting off was not the picture of reflective tranquility I had originally envisioned. I imagined myself on my usual route back from Sun Plaza for the final time, pensively lost in thought, acutely aware of the fact that I was about to realise a childhood dream – living abroad, far away from Singapore.
Instead, my final hours were spent frantically collating the last few items I needed to pack, tying up loose ends, and stressing out about my overweight baggage. We had planned to reach the airport around 7pm for dinner, but I think we only left home at 7.30pm haha. Everything from then on was kind of a blur(?) Last meal was a chirashi bowl at Itacho, and then by God’s grace I managed to check in my luggages even though they were 3kg overweight – I ended up having to hand-carry an 11kg backpack, a shoebag, and my thick winter coat stuffed with 4(?), 5(?) other jackets and pullovers.
One thing I had romanticised about leaving Singapore for an extended period of time was the send-off, I shall unashamedly admit here.
I don’t know, I feel like, even if unintentional, people consider your relationship with them in a more purposeful manner because of your impending absence than they usually would were you back in Singapore. It’s heartwarming, and I wish we would all do so more frequently rather than requiring a catalyst to trigger such emotions. Also, I’m a hugger. I loveee hugs. But everyone knows Singaporeans aren’t huggers. If it was culturally acceptable I would hug my friends all the time, but unfortunately it isn’t. I’ve always adored how it’s tradition for the one leaving to go down the row giving everyone who came a hug and heh, can’t lie but I was most looking forward to that part of the farewell. Again, idk if it was because the entire evening felt rushed but I didn’t get to live in the moment as much as I had hoped to but nonetheless still thankful for the many hugs I got that day :’)
Many thanks to everyone who came to say their farewells that day, I’m sending all my love to you guys. Relationships mean a lot to me, and I’m grateful for each and every one of you. As much as I joke about not coming back, know that even if one day I really leave for good, our relationship will always have a special place in my heart<3
After bidding my farewells I started on my 18.5h journey to Oslo, Norway. If I’m not succinct here I foresee my post turning into something way too lengthy so I shall try to be brief.
Basically, I slept through almost both flights. I’m usually a keen user of the in-flight entertainment system but I didn’t even complete my third movie this time round.
Food on the flights were meh, nothing to shout about.
But yay for lounge access!! Looking forward to visiting lounges across Europe during my time on exchange, although it’s unfortunate that my home airport of Gardermoen doesn’t have one, of all airports ugh. Here’s a pic of the food I had in the Dubai lounge (Ahlan Lounge @ B), best food I’ve had in a lounge so far – and I’m sure it wasn’t because I was hungry.
Also, if you know me you’ll know that I love my showers. So I was delighted that lounge access largely comes with free showers hehe.
Touchdown Oslo!!
After arriving in Oslo, everything miraculously fell smoothly into place. Spent some time repacking my luggage because I had so much hand-carry with me. After that, I had to figure out the cheapest way from the airport to Oslo Sentralstasjon, which entailed buying a 30-day student pass for Zone 1. Then, I lugged all my luggage through the heart of the city to my Airbnb. Crashed for a couple hours after ‘celebrating’ the Singapore New Year before heading out to Aker Brygge to catch the fireworks in celebration of the Norwegian New Year (time zone things). I would never do this back in Singapore, but good weather and manageable crowds make a great combination. Secured front-row seats, literally no way you could bag better seats because I was so close to the fireworks they didn’t fit in frame while I was videoing the display.
01 January 2020
Can’t remember if I slept in after the long night out catching fireworks but I don’t think I did(?) Anyway, spent the day being a tourist in Oslo.
Started off by getting breakfast/lunch. Tryna save money in this very, very expensive country so I only got 3 buns and an orange juice. That was already enough to set me back almost SGD10. Also, that was my first meal in Oslo heh. Would’ve starved if I didn’t meet the other Singaporeans coming over, but more on that later.
Breakfast & Lunch
When I was out buying breakfast a Somalian man came up to me and tried to ask for my number? He asked if I was attached and then went on to say he was single?? I don’t want to speculate but hmmm, anyway I dodged all his questions and got home safely. (Writing this mainly to help me remember this encounter, I almost forgot this even happened haha.)
First attraction I visited was the Oslo Opera House – the view was 10/10. Doesn’t hurt that the sun is perennially ‘setting’ during Oslo’s winter so basically it’s golden hour from sunrise till sunset, a photographer’s dream.
Also, the seagulls here are massive. Case in point:
I’m not sure if you can really tell because there isn’t anything to scale it with, but trust me, they are huge.
After which I moved on to the Vigeland Sculpture Park. It’s basically a park with an assortment of disturbing statues and a monolith in the middle. It’s supposed to represent life(?) The artist probably had a very tough one.
Disturbing statues notwithstanding, it was actually a very pretty park. (Although entry to the toilet cost NOK15, approximately SGD2.30 – not great for a guy with a bladder like mine).
This statue of an angry baby might be the most famous statue in the park, for reasons unknown to me, but ya here’s a photo of it; taken during my second visit to the park on a guided bus tour which was part of my school’s orientation programme.
Apparently the hand’s golden because people keep touching it, that’s not the only part of the statue that’s turned golden though🌚.
Oh yes, wanted to share some pics of a very pretty cemetery I walked past while on my way to the park. I didn’t know whether it was appropriate to take pictures but I couldn’t resist because it was just so charming. Honestly would love to be buried somewhere like that in the future.
Here’s another pretty area I walked past:
Went home to take a nap because I was knackered. Planned to only sleep for 2 hours and then wake up to grab dinner because honestly I was famished but I snoozed my alarm and next thing I knew it was 4am the next day. Ended up walking to Burger King at 6am to grab food.
02 January 2020
Woke up bright and early today because I was a man on a mission. Initially I was pretty disappointed to find out that there were only two of us from NTU heading to the University of Oslo (UiO), because that meant my dream of road trips and forging tight friendships with my travel companions were dashed. But thank God for His plans! I found other Singaporeans through UiO’s Facebook group for exchange students who needed help collecting their student accommodation keys. We decided back in Singapore that we would try to get rooms in the same apartment even though we were all strangers prior. (Turned out to be a wonderful blessing, but more on this later!)
The office for key collection opened at 10am and thankfully I was there by about 9.45am(?), after much struggling with my luggages. It took 3 minutes for my number to be called and whoop whoop I managed to get all four of us rooms in the same apartment. I went back to meet Aaron because he came later and phew, thank God I went early because he ended up waiting about an hour(?) to collect his keys.
Met another Singaporean, Wen Liang (Wayne), who was there picking up his keys with Aaron as well. Short story about how they met: Basically, both of them were at the MyCall shop buying their SIM cards having never met each other before when Wayne heard Aaron’s Singaporean accent and went up to ask whether he was Singaporean lol. Long story short they became fast friends who shared dinner by the end of the day hahaha. Honestly, you could’ve told anyone they were close friends and they would be none the wiser.
We were supposed to head to IKEA with Charisse and Philisa to buy bedding but unfortunately their flight got delayed. So the three of us went ahead without them.
Dinner at IKEA!!!
Oh yes, a little bit about my room. (There are too many things to talk about, I really can’t afford to be so thorough if I’m ever gonna get this posted and be up-to-date with my writing sigh.) It’s on the fourth floor and there’s no elevator ugh. But the view from my room more than makes up for it :’)
Also, here’s my bed after being dressed with all the bedding I bought from IKEA – I loooveee the duvet, reminds me of the ones at luxury hotels which I absolutely adore.
Okay I’m going to end today’s recount here because I really need to sleep and also THERE ARE STILL SO MANY DAYS OF BACKLOG, WHEN WILL I EVER CATCH UP.
03 January 2020
Kicked off today by heading over to Kringsjå Student Village to collect stuff from an NTU student whom Joyce had been in contact with. For some reason Kringsjå was significantly colder than Sogn but enjoyed the walk there what with the iced up roads and another 10/10 view.
After which, headed back to IKEA with the girls to grab their essentials and also some stuff I wasn’t able to get yesterday because they were too cumbersome to carry home. Got two hotdogs and an ice-cream for lunch.
Sorry I don’t have a photo of the hotdogs but there might be one on my insta.
Met up with Charisse’s friend Yamin who stayed over at our place for three nights on the way back to Singapore from her exchange in Bordeaux.
Joyce whipped up a simple but satisfying dinner of smoked salmon and seaweed soup – smoked salmon all day, every day, that’s the dream man. Thanks Joyce!!
04 January 2020
All the Singaporeans (who we knew of at that time) came to our apartment for lunch today!
Wayne was the main chef and they (note how I’m not using the pronoun we) cooked us a homely meal of braised soy sauce chicken, stir-fried vegetables, and rice.
A couple of us then decided to explore the Oslo Opera House and walk around Aker Brygge (basically Oslo’s version of Clarke Quay but much quieter and less happening).
Sorry all my photos are unedited because I’m too lazy (for now, probably forever) to edit them.
Here’s a picture of the pistachio ice-cream cone that four of us shared in a bid to save money:
For dinner, we ate out. Big news because we never thought we could afford to. But Peppe’s Pizza had student discounts in addition to their ginormous pizzas. Five of us shared two large pizzas and still there were leftovers for Siti to take home haha.
05 January 2020
Went to church for the first time in Oslo today! Glad to have found Christian friends on exchange to go together. Always a pleasure to be in the company of fellow brothers and sisters in Christ :’) We decided to visit Hillsong today – surprisingly they only had a small congregation and no overflow halls?? They were only about the size of LK. (Of course, missing everyone in LK – does feel a lil’ weird not being able to attend LK for 6/7 months having never missed service there for more than 3(?) consecutive Sundays my entire life.
They had a guest speaker from South Africa today so at least the sermon itself was in English. I mean, there was the option of a translation aid and we could use it should the entire service be conducted in Norwegian but yeah.
After church most of us decided to head over to the lake at Sognsvann. The initial plan was to have a picnic there but seeing as we had neither food nor were (most of them) dressed warmly enough, the plan was quickly ditched. It was a very pretty place though, and I look forward to returning to do the full hike around the lake and also the other hikes in the area.
Yes, the lake was completely frozen over, and yes, we all walked on it while making jokes about falling through the ice.
Group photo!! (I quite like this pic heh.)
For dinner we had fried noodles made from the instant noodles left behind by the previous tenants and leftover herbal chicken soup. And for some reason we also had rice?
Movie night while having dinner! We watched Miss Congeniality.
It dawned upon me that I was one guy watching a chick flick with four girls lol – but it’s okay, I do enjoy watching chick flicks anyway.
06 January 2020
It was sooooo foggy when I woke up today, honestly you couldn’t see 100 metres ahead of you, maybe even 50. Thing is, we had plans to take a ferry to a nearby island to do a little exploring. Fun fact: Oslo is actually part of a fjord?? I never knew that. Anyway, the ferry ride is included in our 30-day transport pass so I thought why not. Had initially planned to go on New Year’s Day together with my visits to the Oslo Opera House and the Vigeland Sculpture Park but the ferry wasn’t operating on that day and anyway I didn’t have much time because the sun sets so early now that it’s winter.
Honestly I think we all had half a mind to scrap plans because of the poor visibility but I really hate it when my plans are disrupted so we pushed on heh.
We made it to Hovedøya!
Here are a couple more pics taken on the island:
We then went to do some grocery shopping in Grønland before heading home to grab a quick lunch because…our first programme in UiO was next!!
An introduction to Norway of sorts.
Honestly, it was quite useful, but for some reason the second part of the talk was about Oslo’s environmental initiatives and efforts which I didn’t quite see how it was relevant to the programme and also because I attribute such activism to a ‘liberal European mentality’, to which I can never relate, case in point: Greta Thunberg.
After which, we all went to another event organised by the university, First Night in Oslo. Supposedly, this was held at a club, but I strongly dispute that because I want to still be able to say that I’ve never been to a club before; and in my defence, it was nothing like a club.
Expensive beer that Charisse and I shared – NOK63, or roughly SGD9.55.
Philisa, Charisse, Joyce, and I all went together but Philisa and Joyce left after having the free cake to play Pokémon GO. Sorry but I’m not even gonna try to hide my judging here hahaha. JUDGE. (Ohya, quick digression, while we were on the way to the ‘club’ an elderly man, Chinese but grew up in Vietnam(?), stopped us and had a really lengthy conversation with us which no one knew how to end. Also, he took a picture of us, just us, he wasn’t in the picture. I don’t know what to make of that, go figure. Charisse and I concluded that he was just lonely and had nobody to talk to so simply having conversation with us could’ve made his day. Just putting it here so I remember when reading back in the future.) Charisse and I stayed on to finish our beer and more importantly, try to socialise (more of me than her, since I’m the one who’s shy.) We decided that we wouldn’t leave before striking up conversation with a stranger and it had to be an angmoh because asians were like a safety net and still within our comfort zones. We stood around for quite a long time, pretty much like predators stalking their prey before Charisse suddenly launched into conversation with Beata, who’s from Poland, and the group of friends she had come with. We ended up staying to play Kahoot with them as a team, so yay for a successful night of socialising – although maybe not for me because Charisse did 90% of the talking. Beata added me on Facebook and saw that I had been to Germany, asked me how it was and all awkward me could muster in reply was, “It was nice.” Ded.
After all that we still managed to go back and cook dinner, albeit a really late one. And ooh, I bought a slab of fresh salmon for sashimi consumption, truly living the dream hehe. We also bought Brunost, which is ‘Brown Goat’s Cheese’, pretty much the product most representative of Norwegian food.
Dinner
Salmon Sashimi
Brunost
07 January 2020
Started off today with two talks by UiO. The first was for all incoming exchange students this semester and the second was specifically for exchange students in the Faculty of Humanities.
Met up with my buddy group today. It’s nice to be given the opportunity to mingle with international students because back in Singapore you wouldn’t really be able to do so, at least I know I wouldn’t – me being awkward me. But yeah, thank God for enthusiastic buddies who truly wanted to make sure all of us felt welcome and had a community to be around in this foreign land. Shoutout to Jutha and Cecilie :’) They gave us a mini orientation to UiO before bringing us to the Royal Palace and kindly treating us to tea at a cafe.
My buddy group
The Royal Palace
08 January 2020
(Brief disclaimer: I’m gonna breeze through the next few days because this post is really getting too long and I’m kinda tired of writing it already.)
Went ice-skating today! For a country where everything’s expensive I was surprised that it was free to both rent skates and use the rink. Although admittedly the rink was a very makeshift one located over a basketball court – so basically what used to be a basketball court now has a layer of ice over it haha.
After skiing, we went to the Munch Museum with our buddy groups. But ahhh, arguably Norway’s most famous painting, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, was not on display sob. Apparently we missed it by a couple of days ugh.
We were treated to a glorious sight upon exiting the museum:
Polar Stratospheric Cloud
It’s supposed to be even rarer than the Aurora Borealis. Thank God for the opportunity of witnessing this visual spectacle.
Walked around Oslo for awhile with the buddy group before heading to school for quiz night. I don’t have any pictures of the event but here are some from our stroll around the city:
09 January 2020
Today, we had a guided bus tour of Oslo courtesy of UiO once again. Yay for free things hehe.
They brought us around mostly to places that I had already been to but it was nonetheless a good day out.
First stop of the day was the Holmenkollen Ski Jump. I’ve always loved watching ski jump events because they look so impressive but seeing the actual ski jump (slope) in person was awe-inspiring. Like you truly get to admire the skill and immense courage of the athletes. Even the spectator stands were crazy steep, you could get vertigo just looking down upon them.
If I was born in a country like Norway I probably would have tried ski jumping or some sort of extreme sport of a similar vein because of my need for adrenaline heh, but unfortunately I was not. (I still dream of one day getting a skydiving licence though.)
The next few stops were the Vigeland Sculpture Park, Akershus Fortress, and the Oslo Opera House.
Vigeland Sculpture Park
Akershus Fortress
Oslo Opera House
10 January 2020
Last official day of orientation today! (The exclamation mark wrongly suggests that I’m excited for it to end but a full-stop seems too muted a punctuation for the sentence, sorry #englishthings haha.)
Had a two-hour visit to the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, which reminded me a lot of Singapore’s Science Centre tbh. Wandered around by myself for awhile before Charisse and I spent an inordinate amount of time at this puzzle game (y’know the one where you have to slide blocks either horizontally or vertically across a grid in order to help the one selected block ‘escape’ – it was quite a popular iPhone game for a period of time called ‘Unblock Me’) we were determined to solve but were eventually unsuccessful despite multiple attempts sigh. Our Asian genius failed us.
This was the only picture I took at the museum – an anecdotal recount presented holographically.
We ended off orientation week with a guided tour along the Aker River. For some reason I kept thinking that this was gonna be a ferry ride on the river LOL. Turns out it was a mini-hiking expedition copiously littered with hazards in the form of iced-up trails. I spent much of the hike alone because I struggle at initiating (and more often than not, engaging in) small talk, but nonetheless thankful for the conversation I had with Emma, a fellow buddy group mate, albeit a short one, towards the end of the hike :’)
Some pictures I took during the hike.
11 January 2020
Charisse, Philisa, and I went for our police registration appointments together in the morning – this was so that the police could do up our residence permits. Then we had kebabs for lunch, not cheap but certainly value-for-money considering how big each kebab was. I don’t actually have a picture of it but there’s one in the second of my Instagram highlights of Norway.
Wayne and Aaron came over for dinner and we all ended up planning for future trips together hehehe. Charisse found a calendar app and we started inputting all our available dates into it and blocking off dates for trips, #exchangelife.
Dinner
AHHH, I’m finally done with this monster of a post. Had to force myself to write a little everyday in Austria (more on Austria in a future post), but whoop I am doneee \o/.
I’m sorry if the quality of writing gradually fell as the post went on, and tbh I don’t think many people would’ve had the patience or the interest to have read the entire post so thank you very much if you’re still here reading. I promise that once I’m caught up with regular scheduling the quality of my posts will improve and that it won’t merely be a documentation of my days but will also include some introspective elements – so do look forward to that!
Until next time, signing off,
#kaINorway🇳🇴
kaINorway 