I’m in a bit of a liquidity crisis, and to illustrate it, 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, 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 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 returned two days ago from a weekend trip to Vienna.  I enjoyed it immensely – but since my favorite things to do when I travel are go to art museums, eat large lunches and then fall asleep in parks, that doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will want to read about it.

Fortunately, when I wasn’t sleeping in parks or looking at art, I was staying in a hostel.  As many of you know, this pretty much guarantees meeting strange people, and if you are willing to spend time with these people, strange experiences as well.  The Hostel Ruthensteiner was no exception, and so I’ll tell a couple of tales about that instead.

I’ve just returned from a 10-day jaunt to Italy, a trip full of eye-opening experiences, but by far the most amazing thing that has occurred to me recently is occurring right now.  In Bergen, Norway, the darkest and rainiest place I have ever been, the city which once experienced more than 80 consecutive days with precipitation, where clouds and fog conspire to keep the temperature a steady 45-50 in winter and summer alike, I am sitting in a hammock, in the sun, not wearing a sweater or wool socks, feeling comfortable, dry and warm all at the same time.  Probably it will start sleeting tomorrow, but for the moment I'm feeling good.

Anyway, Italy.  Speaking in broad strokes, my trip was enormously successful.  I had a great week. When you look more closely, however, the trip was a mosaic of poor planning, unfortunate happenstances, and many different varieties of incompetence.  

My dear readers,

I am pleased to announce that after only four months of seemingly endless drudgery and pointless exertion, I have secured a position as a productive member of society in the year to come, assuming, of course, that you consider high school English teachers to be productive members of society.

I’ll be working at an independent (read: private) school in Virginia Beach.  For the sake of their institutional credibility, we'll call it school #1 - feel free to ask me for more concrete details.  Despite their decision to hire me as a full-time English teacher, it seems like a pretty good school – easily the best in Virginia Beach, and probably second-best in Hampton Roads.  I’ll be teaching a variety of English courses at different levels, including a senior elective that I get to design.  I am pretty pumped about that.  Early favorites for topics include Russian lit, 20th century humorists, and pirates. 

Well I didn't post in January or February, but I still interesting things here and there, so I thought I'd write a couple of them down.  The best are at the end, so if you're not interested in my stories of teaching, I'd just skip down towards the skiing and saunas.

These months were mostly interesting from a professional standpoint - now that I'm a bit more competent, my mentor teacher has been providing me with awesome opportunities to design and run classes.  I've had the opportunity to teach Hemingway, Shakesepeare and storytellling, and each of these experiences has been incredible, at least if you're the kind of person who's really into teaching literature.

In yet another similarity between Norway and the Game of Thrones heptalogy, at this point in our saga, it is definitely more accurate to say that winter has come. Snow covers the country; Norwegians salivate at the sight of skis, and Bergen’s rain has become distinctly icy.

I blame Heather, who just finished visiting. Disregarding the appalling weather and six hour dusks (I hesitate to describe what we have in Bergen as ‘days’), we managed to get up to several interesting adventures.

First, a couple updates. My work is going well. I am getting quite good at ping pong. Writing a novel turns out to be more difficult than I realized, but I push on nonetheless. And, momentously, I have curled.

Well hey there everyone – it’s been a while since I’ve rapped at you, but that’s because I’ve been accumulating strange and mildly amusing stories to tell.

For example, since we last spoke, I have traveled the fjords with dozens of Japanese tourists, explored Bergen’s (mostly surrealist) art scene with Megan, graded my first high school and university essays, and travelled to Trondheim for my first Norwegian frisbee tournament. Now don’t get the wrong impression. The vast majority of my time is spent on mundane activities. I estimate that 64% of my time is spent reheating leftovers in my ovenless/microwaveless kitchen, for instance. But, still, I have a couple real winners to tell.

In one week, I will have been in Norway for two months, and I have learned about many of Norway’s cultural obsessions. Among others, I have explored wool socks, odd fish products, and cardiovascular activity. This past weekend, however, I investigated one

Norway’s most important cultural touchstones: cabins.

There were a few odd things about this trip. For one, I was invited. My friend’s Norwegian co-worker, Brigitta, won a free stay in one of the university’s cabin, and she apparently chose to invite 3 close friends, two coworkers, and then a whole bunch of people she didn’t really know, most of whom were Ukrainian. This brings us to the second odd aspect of this trip: of the 13 people on the trip, 7 were Ukrainian. That’s 53% of the whole, which I believe is a significantly higher proportion than most cabin trips. Third, Kevin and I were quite a bit younger than the rest of the group, excepting one of the Ukrainians, who was the four-year-old daughter of two of the others.

So this trip was a little strange. But, I came to Norway for somewhat strange adventures, and so off I went. This cabin was in Utne, which is a small town on the Hardangerfjord a couple hours west of Bergen. Brigitta picked me at at my dorm on Friday, and two hours later, we were driving off the ferry into downtown Utne.

I’ve been living in Norway for nearly two months now, and yet my social circle is still almost entirely devoid of Norwegians. I live in the international student dorm, and besides Norwegians are shy. Last night, however, I was invited to a fully Norwegian party. Obviously, I was thrilled. Finally, I would have the chance to observe Norwegians in their natural habitat. What are they really like?

As it turns out, a Norwegian party is pretty similar to an American one. You sit around chatting with people and drinking alcohol in a seedy student apartment. Also there’s American music on, and there are jello shots.

However, there are some important cultural differences.

I’ve just returned from a fjord cruise, and I come bearing gifts – pictures, actually.  Like most things that you do around here, it was silly beautiful and a wonderful time as well.

First, however, an update.  Several major things have happened in my life.  First, I have joined Ultimate Rain – Bergen’s premiere frisbee team.  Yes, there is another team, and yes we are possibly better than they are.  We’ll see, I guess.  Anyway, fun fact I learned in practice: frisbee has both rules and strategy.  Who knew?

Second, I have successfully integrated ping-pong into my daily schedule.  Every night, around 8, my friend Kevin and I head down to Klub Fantoft (the dorm common room which also has a bar and a dj) and play ping-pong.  He’s a bit better than me, but I’m improving rapidly and as soon as I figure out his serve, he’s done.  There’s also a few West African dudes who come down to play, who are also better than me, although I beat some of them occasionally.

It has come to my attention that readers of this blog wonder what, exactly, I’m supposed to be doing in Norway – as far as they can tell, I spend all of my time hiking and eating salmon.  This, I assure you, is far from the truth.  I also spend a fair amount of time playing ping pong, and I frequently wander around, and not always in wilderness settings.  Additionally, I spend some time working – in fact, this week was my second in the high school classroom and my first leading the Writers’ Workshops.

I’ll start with my job at the high school.  I’m working at the Cathedral School in Bergen (Katedralskole in Norwegian), which is the oldest (it was founded in 1153) and probably most prestigious secondary school in Bergen – though a Norwegian would never say something as conceited as that.  I’ve tried to ask about the reputations of the schools I work with, but everyone seems too embarrassed to tell me – the Norwegian education system is about equality, they say.

In my last post, I predicted two things: that my first Norwegian backpacking experience would be incredibly beautiful, and that it would involve public transit-related misadventures.  On both counts, I was correct.

Here was the original plan: Wake up at 7:15.  Get on Bybanen (light rail) at 7:45.  Arrive at bus station at 8:10.  Get on bus at 8:25.  Get off bus in Øystese 10:30ish.  Begin hiking.

There are six items in that schedule, but I only successfully completed two of them.  The first was the easiest: I successfully awoke at 7:15.  When I went to board my train at 7:44am, however, I was informed by the little time-until-your-train-thingie that I had 36 minutes until my train.  Apparently, it seems, trains run less frequently before 8am on Saturday morning.

One of the best ways to get to know a county is through its food.  Even today, when American culture, English and global corporations have touched almost the entire globe , food culture remains a stronghold of distinctive national identities.  In Norway, where everyone watches American tv, speaks English and buys iPhones, preparing a meal is a full-immersion cultural experience.  You rarely feel so alien as when you’re buying food from the grocery store; accordingly, you rarely learn so much.

Well, I’ve arrived in Norway, and it is fantastic. Like all my posts, this one is by no means comprehensive, but I’ll tell a couple tales from the last few days.

I left Maine midday on the 7th.  I had been a nervous wreck all day.  I packed and repacked frantically, and as I was taking my bags to the car, I stubbed my bare toe on a brick, causing me to swear loudly and bleed profusely.  A bad omen, I thought.

My parents drove me to the bus station, and the bus driver drove me to Logan.  I had calmed myself on the bus, but my arrival at the airport brought a fresh wave of travel anxiety – an apparently genetic condition passed down through generations of Koezes.

Fortunately, I had a series long lines to wait in, which allowed me to breath deeply and collect myself.  Or so I thought – as I waited in the security line, a uniformed agent of the TSA accosted me.  He wasn’t one of the ones who check your boarding pass or your naked body scans – he was just a roving agent.  No doubt a trained terrorist hunter, seeking out the most suspicious in the long line.  “Where are you going?” he inquired suspiciously.

These posts are quickly falling into a pattern: Hugh goes somewhere cool, does foolish things that cause his plans to come undone, and then drags himself out of the woods, a broken and battered shell of his former self.

Take, for example, my trip to Joyce Kilmer Wilderness area in Nantahala National Forest.  This is a distant, almost forgotten place in the western corner of North Carolina.  It is one of the only remaining tracts of virgin forest in the Eastern US, and the oldest designated Wilderness area in the United States.  It is incredibly beautiful, but also damn far from pretty much everywhere.

I left for Joyce Kilmer around noon in Charlottesville, VA.  Ten hours later, I arrived at the Horse Cove campground in a profoundly humid creek bed just outside the forest.  It wasn’t easy to find a suitably flat parking spot (when you’re sleeping in the back of your pickup truck, flat ground is essential), but eventually I did, and slipped into a damp and dreamless sleep.

My definition of returning from a trip is when I have showered; thus, technically speaking, I have not yet returned from my trip to Mt. Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi.  As I write, I’m sitting in the Yancey County Library (a lovely library in a restored former prep school), hoping that no one sits too close to me.

The plan was to drive to the trailhead, park, camp a few feet down the trail, then set off to climb the Black Mountain Crest trail to the top of Mt. Mitchell and back – a feat that many people have described as very, very hard.  The trail begins just south of Burnsville, North Carolina, and heads south and up (sort of like the opposite of the Nile) from just about 3100′ at the trailhead to 6130′ threeish miles later.  As you might expect, it then follows the crest of the Black Mountains, rising and falling over that ridge’s many peaks and gaps.  It ends up on Mt. Mitchell (6683′) 10 miles later.  Total elevation, as one might expect, is a lot.  Something over 5000′.

But, of course, things did not go according to plan.

This blog had lofty aims – I was to trace my development as a human being,  exploring my relationship to nature and the adult world.  Now, however, with my second trip report, my true purpose has been revealed to me: to document the extent of my idiocy, demonstrating my apparently complete lack of rational decision-making skills in the hope that some other young foolish person might learn from my mistakes.  It’s too late for me, but if you read this, you might be able to save yourself.

This latest trip was to Linville Gorge, otherwise known as the Grand Canyon of the East.  To an Arizonan, this probably sounds like the Himalayas of Pennsylvania, but in fact, Linville Gorge is an amazing natural wonder worth much longer than I was able to stay.

Hi folks – just returned from a three day jaunt on the AT in Virgina. It was a great trip, the first of many this summer, and I’m excited to give you all the deets.

I began the trip at where the AT crosses Rt. 56 between The Priest and The Three Ridges Wilderness areas in George Washington NF in Western VA.

t was an incredible drive from Charlottesville to get there – rolling foothills and picturesque farms all the way.  The final section along the Tye was particularly lovely – the town of Massie’s Mill caught my imagination.  Who was Massie?  I parked the car in what I hoped would be a shady spot and started north on the AT into the Three Ridges Wilderness.  There was a bridge across the Tye, and then the beginning of a long climb.  I felt great – I was hoofing it up that hill.  It had been a while since I’d hiked, and it felt wonderful to be in the forest again.  On the way up, I noticed a few wild edibles, but I was feeling too good to stop and harvest – hopefully they’d be just as abundant at the campsite.  My main goal was to gain some practice wild edible experience – I’d brought my book, and I was ready to eat like a king.

One of the most interesting parts of my high school reunion (I just returned from my five-year reunion at a New England boarding school) was asking people why they had come.  For many, it was a long and expensive journey, but without exception, my classmates minimized the inconvenience.  ”I was in the neighborhood” was a common refrain, though not a particularly plausible one when you hear it justifying a trip from Manhattan to Concord, New Hampshire.  One of my classmates told me Concord was practically on the way from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., and another went to great lengths to explain that she hadn’t come up from Argentina to go to the reunion, but to a wedding in California.