Well hey there, everyone! I know it’s been a few…months since I last posted, but I’ve spent that time gaining all sorts of valuable information about Norway and Norwegian society. Here is just a small sample of what I’ve learned:

1. It is illegal to keep reptiles as pets in Norway. However, if you can demonstrate an allergy to a sufficient number of furry animals (I was unable to determine the exact number or severity of allergies required), you can apply for a special reptile license.

2. The King of Norway is not allowed to smoke in the palace. Instead, he goes outside. Of his own royal palace.

3. In Norway, deer are hunted with dogs, but the legs of the dog cannot be longer than a certain length specified by law. (I was unable to determine the exact length allowed, but it is not very long, meaning that the dogs allowed to hunt deer can’t be any bigger than a beagle or so). The reason for this law is that while the dog drives the deer towards the hunter, it cannot go fast enough to excessively stress the deer. What this means in practice is that deer hunting dogs (as far as I have seen) are generally small, white and fluffy.

Besides gathering valuable insights into Norwegian society, I have also been having a couple of adventures here and there. Among others, I have spent a weekend skiing with the other Fulbrighters, hosted a Frisbee tournament, played a hell of a lot of ping pong, spent an inordinate amount of time searching for a toaster oven (the holy grail of kitchen appliances if you, like me, do not own an oven), and attended both a Norwegian sushi party and a Norwegian pizza party.

I also went on a trip to Croatia. I returned on Monday, and I now feel sufficiently recovered to tell a couple stories about the experience.

Croatia, as you know, is a small Balkan country along the Adriatic Sea south of Slovenia, but north of Montenegro and Albania. It is, of course, west of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Croatia is the wealthiest of all these countries, a semi-member of the EU, but not the Eurozone, and has about five million people and a really cool mountainous coastline with lots of islands and little towns. It is, in other words, the Norway of the Balkans.

I knew very little of this when I went. I’m not sure if I could really explain why I went to Croatia – I was googling all sorts of potential travel destinations and a kind of mist descended. When it rose, there was a Croatia Airlines e-ticket to Split International Airport in my inbox.

Despite my lack of planning, the trip began quite smoothly, except for when I forgot to pick up my checked bag to clear customs. Fortunately, however, they sent the bag through to Split anyway. My first two days I spent in Split, staying at an awesome and cheap Airbnb apartment. It was great – I ate delicious Croatian food (they have these sweet restaurants called konobas with strongly-opinionated staff who will allow you to order whatever you want as long as it’s what they think is best. Fortunately, they’re always right). I also saw some Roman stuff, some Renaissance stuff, and a lot of sunshine.

I then hopped on a bus and made my way down the coast to Dubrovnik. The drive was astonishingly beautiful, and so was Dubrovnik. Here are some pictures:

I stayed at a hostel where I met a couple of Canadians in the midst of a six-month Euro trip. They decided to join me on a hiking trip, and so we all got on a bus to Orebic.

Orebic is on the end of a very long peninsula, nestled between some big mountains and a narrow body of water that separates the peninsula from the island of Korcula. It’s amazing beautiful – the drive down the peninsula was just astonishing – but it’s where things began to go wrong.

We woke early and hiked our way up to the top of Mt. Ilja. As is so often the case, the weather is not quite as nice at 3000′ as it was at sea-level. In this case we got an incredible view of the inside of a cold, wet cloud – a view I’m quite familiar with after 6 months in Bergen. It was bad enough that I could see better without my glasses, and so I took them off and put them in my pocket.

We huddled into a kind of pit on top of the mountain to have lunch. I had brought, quite brilliantly I thought, a bunch of hardboiled eggs enclosed in a homemade egg container fashioned of cardboard and athletic tape. There were two problems with this plan: first, the eggs (which I drastically undercooked) and second, the egg container (which didn’t work at all). I opened up my pack expecting to find a delicious lunch – instead I found several cups of raw egg sloshing around with my spare socks.

This was a disappointing moment, but fortunately we Gris are resilient in the face of disaster, especially when two nice Canadians are sharing their food with us. However, in the eggy confusion, my glasses slipped out of my pocket. I didn’t notice this until we left the inside of the cloud and I suddenly realized that it was now sunny, but I still couldn’t really see.

The rest of the hike was kind of a blur (ha ha!). Actually, the rest of the hike was just as great as the first half – we ate wild tangerines, found old Balkan war shell remnants, enjoyed some killer views of Croatia, and messed around with some really crazy egg sacks I found in a pool of water. I enjoyed myself immensely. Here are some pictures:

I spent the next night across the water in Korcula. The best I can say about my accommodations is that they were cheap and there were lots of warm blankets – personally, I would pay slightly more for heat, windows that don’t whistle in the wind, slightly less proximity to a loose church bell, and a showerhead that can be attached to the wall somewhere above my belly button. However, there was a pretty good pizza restaurant, and I managed to get most of the egg out of my socks.

Our plan was to catch the ferry out of Korcula the next afternoon, and we spent the morning hiking around the city before we had to leave. Fortunately, we ran into an old Croatia sea captain scaling some fish who told us that the ferry was probably cancelled. We checked, and the salty old guy was right – but there was another ferry/bus combo that would still allow me to catch my flight the next day. The ferry ride was also lovely:

When I arrived back in Split the night before my flight, my accommodations were again excellent, and despite that I couldn’t see anything very well, I was in excellent spirits. This positive feeling quickly drained away, however, when I realized that I probably didn’t have enough battery to allow my phone (and alarm clock) to wake me early enough to catch my 7:30 flight. I had left my wall adaptor in the hostel in Dubrovnik (and actually my hat as well, although that mattered less when it came to getting up in time for my flight.) I set off to find a travel adaptor, but I had several strike against me: it was after 6pm on a Sunday, it was dark, I know nothing about where to buy travel adaptors in Croatia, and I didn’t have any glasses. Another key one was that I only know a very small area of Split – as soon as I left that area looking for travel adaptors, I got super lost, which would have been less of a big deal if I had been able to use my phone and/or see.

In the end I didn’t find one, but I managed to wake up in time anyway. I flew back to Norway (pausing to buy large amounts of duty free alcohol and chocolate along the way) and now I’m back, teaching, writing workshopping, planning more trips and preparing for the (hopefully) final stages of my job search. More on all of that later – stay tuned!