Saturday, April 25, 2009

Expats

While surfing the net I happened to land on some blogs of expats living in my country. While it is nice to read about impressions of people living in your country it is also interesting to see that people usually make the same mistakes as you do. So in order to collaborate to world peace I decided to use the little experience I have as a country-hopper-expat and write some advices for blogging about other countries:
1. Remember you are living in another country, what is normal for you might not be normal at all there and vice versa. Don't make judgments.
2. No country is perfect, not even your country.
3. It does not matter how well you speak another language, natives will always recognize you as a foreigner.
4. Be polite and try not to offend people.
5. Being an expat means that you decided to go and live somewhere else. If you don't like what you see, either help to fix it or move on.

These rules are harder to follow than what they seem. I find myself breaking them all the time, but if one tries to follow them you'll see how much your perception changes and how much natives start improving their perception of you.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Jotunheimen

Today I came back from an incredibly wonderful experience, skiing in the Norwegian mountains in Jotunheimen National Park.
We started on Sunday taking the DNT bus to Gjendesheim, and once there we went out to check the skis and see how things were going. On monday we crossed the lake Gjende to get to the cabin at the other end, Gjendebu. The first half was against the wind and the second half was more or less problematic because I rewaxed my skis in the middle and I choose the wrong wax. The result was that I was accumulating a lot of snow under my skis, so I had to stop and rewax them. We arrived at Gjendebu at around 15:30 (18 kms trip).
On tuesday morning we started the trip to Olavsbu, a self-service cabin located around 14 kms from Gjendebu. The weather was perfect most of the way, and the trip was very pleasant. The only problem came at the very end when we were caught by a strong wind but we managed to get to the cabin without problems. We arrived at Olavsbu at around 15:00.
On wednesday morning we started our trip to Fondsbu, more or less 12 kms from Olavsbu. The very first part of the trip was hell, it was an almost vertical climb and since I don't master the technique yet it took a lot of energy and time (almost one hour for about 200 meters). After that the trip went better until we hit another climb, although this was shorter. Once we were done with that climb, the down hill part came. That was fun, although I fell like a gazillion times. We arrived at Fondsbu at around 14:30.
Today we started at around 9:00 to Tyin, in the hope to get to Tyinkrysset and catch the bus back. The original plan included a final stop at a cabin called Slettningsbu (very close to Tyinkrysset), but we decided that we were too tired to do it, so we went straight to Tyin. It was a 22 kms trip, and 20 of those were over the lake Tyin. We arrived at Tyin at around 13:40 and we started walking to Tyinkrysset. We missed the 14:15 bus so we had to wait for the 17:05 bus. However while we were waiting, somebody approached us and told us that he was snow blinded so he couldn't drive his car back to Oslo and asked us if we were going to Oslo and could drive him there. We agreed and we got a ride home!
Despite being incredibly tired, I'm totally looking forward for the next trip.