Hammer of the Gods

"I come from the land of the ice and snow, of the midnight sun where the hot springs flow..."

Sat 10th Dec
Indeed, there was a light snow covering the ground as I awoke to my first Norwegian morning but inside it was so well heated, it was almost t-shirt weather! I tried to SMS my sister to wish her a happy birthday but my SIM card still wasn’t working and it didn’t get through. After breakfast, we finished watching FOTR and at about 2:00pm we went out and Zlatko showed me around the city. He took me to the main street, Karl Johans Gate and we had lunch at Burger King – a regular thing for Zlatko. A medium size meal costs AU$15!! We also went to see the National Theatre which in winter has an ice-skating rink set up outside for the kiddies.

Fun and games at the iceskating rink in front of the National Theatre.

It was already starting to get dark (even earlier than in London) so we caught the tram back to the apartment. Living alone as a bachelor hasn’t worked miracles for Zlatko’s cooking skills (which explains the regular visits to Burger King!) and when he does cook, he sticks to things which are easy to prepare – on this particular night he made hrenovke. Not that I minded at all – they were good (and besides, when you’re travelling, what you eat for dinner is your last concern). I did, however, like his array of snackables, such as these terribly addictive perppercake biscuits, and his ingenious concoction of Pepsi + Mozell (a carbonated apple cider drink) which I drank litres of while I was there!!

Over dinner we discussing music and as it happened we shared a similar taste yet again. So after dinner he hooked up his iPod and we spent some time going through it as he played me some of his favourites. He played one song and asked me to guess it, and though I hadn’t heard it before, I picked it as a Deep Purple song. When he found out I was a fan, he asked me what my favourite song was – and when I said ‘Child In Time’ and he exclaimed “Mine too!! Have you heard this version?” So he played this awesome live version I hadn’t heard before (and put it on my iPod) and as we both sat entranced and listened to it in complete silence for the whole 12+ minutes I had one of those trippy moments: it just suddenly struck me that I was sitting in Oslo, Norway, on a cold, dark night, listening to Deep Purple with a guy twice my age who I only met yesterday – what the?!? I was the first time I had stopped and thought about the trip, rather than living it in the now and then I thought about the week in London all the things I did there by myself and how less than two weeks ago I was lounging around sunny Adelaide. Freaky……….

Once we’d finally come out of our trance, he got me onto some good bands that I hadn’t heard much of before: Grand Funk Railroad, Focus and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. He asked me if there were any good Australian bands going around and I played him some Powderfinger which he took quite a shine to – so a made a mental note of that. Before bedtime, we managed to fit in the first half ‘The Two Towers’.