To illustrate the depth of my liquidity crisis, I took a picture of all of my money.

Now, it may look like a lot, but let me tell you a couple things. First, notice that my bank account is not pictured, because it's empty. Second, the little bowl of notes and coins to the right is mostly Croatian Kuna with some Euros, Swedish kronor, and dollars thrown in there, none of which are very useful in Norway. The pile of coins to the left is Norwegian currency, but they are 1 krone coins, which have about 10 cents in purchasing power. So basically the only money I have is a big pile of dimes, which is almost worse than no money at all.

The reason for my sudden cash flow crisis, which will fortunately end tomorrow with the arrival of my last (!) Fulbright check, is a lot of travelling. I’ve now travelled for three weekends in a row – Oslo, then Vienna, and just last weekend, Stockholm.

I already wrote about Vienna, but I left out Oslo. Now that I’ve been Stockholm, however, we can do a little weird-things-that-happened-to-me-in-Scandinavian-capitals. So that’s our theme today.

In Oslo, for example, I tried to go for a walk down a creek, and ended up nearly buying a Tesla roadster. I suppose I wasn’t that close –my pile of dimes isn’t nearly big enough to buy a $100,000 electric sports car – but I did promise the salesman that when I’m looking to buy my next insanely expensive car in Scandinavia, I would come to him.

I also went to a deeply bizarre sonic art show in an abandoned building, where I managed to attract some women by blowing into a giant horn they’d put in the middle of the room. Both of these, however, pale in comparison to what happened on the way to the art show, where I accused a perfectly innocent composer-in-training (who I’d met on the street just seconds earlier) of being a member of the vast and prejudicial anti-euphonium cabal currently dominating classical music.

I would explain how this occurred, but I don’t think I’m up to the task. The confluence of events that led to this 45-second interaction is just too complex and convoluted. When I woke up that morning, for example, I had never heard the word euphonium before (it’s a tiny tuba), and it’s not like you meet composers all the time, especially ones who never write for the euphonium. And in any case, I don’t tend to passionately accuse strangers of anything, let alone incomprehensible crimes against euphonium-dom.

I believe the only real lesson we can draw from this event is that universe is basically strange and unknowable. No factors can be identified; no causes can be uncovered beyond the most basic and meaningless: the essential randomness of existence. Any time you think you have the answer to life, the universe and anything, just try to incorporate the fact that I, a mild-mannered guy who seems pretty sane most of the time, once told a Norwegian composer, at the top of my lungs, that he was a prime example of “prejudicial anti-Euphonium attitudes so prevalent in classical music today!” Try as you might, but no universe where this occurred can be considered coherent, rational, or ordered.

Moving on, I also had a lovely time in Stockholm. I went to lots of awesome museums, saw tons of sweet boats, and managed to eat despite not having any money. However, the strangeness of life followed me even to this well-ordered city as well. Admittedly, I was staying in a hostel, and so you can almost expect the rabid Swedish-Chinese Nine Inch Nails fan who was very informative on the subject the past decade of Northern European Nine Inch Nails concerts, or the weird old Swedish guy who I drank beer and watched the Eurovision finals with. What I didn’t (couldn’t) predict was nearly getting trampled by the biggest horse I’ve ever seen, or being bitten by a goat, or being knocked to the ground by touching an electric fence.

Taking the fence, for example, you could blame that on me being a huge idiot, or not knowing any Swedish, or you could blame it on the sheep I was trying to photograph. But that doesn’t approach how I stumbled on a pasture of sheep in Stockholm, which is a city of 1.6 million people. There’s no rational explanation, and in fact, I would say that there cannot be one. Again, we’ve just run up against the fact that the universe does not make sense.

Anyway, here are some pictures, first of Oslo, then Stockholm:

Oh, and relating to those pictures of the big wooden ship, read this Wikipedia article about when the Swedes tried to build the world’s most powerful warship. I feel for that shipbuilder. I’ve been there many times.

Finally, here are some pictures of a hike I took yesterday in Bergen: