Monday, April 21, 2008

Fish and coffee

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I’m in a really good mood today. The air is full of sun and my headache is all covered in this layer of ice coffee going YEAH WOOOH YEAH and it’s pretty nice.

Pleuronectes platessa or whatever is my new favourite fish.

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Visiting the family

I mentioned to mum and dad that I had been to the Threepenny opera, upon which we all simultaneously began to hum Mack The Knife while making dinner. It was like… I don’t know what it was like. It was nice.
After dinner (rice, salad and homemade minced steak made of the deer our neighbour had shot) I sat for hours in the sun drinking tea with my grandmother. The cats were running around, and so were the hens. I played the piano even though I’ve forgotten how.
My youngest brother had caught lots of flatfish (rødspette to be exact) and he gave me one of them.



In five minutes I’ll fry it in butter and eat it.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

:)

Hello, my name is human. I like ice cream and sun on my skin, I like tasty food and to have my back scratched. Cats have warm fur now, I like spring.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Kurt Weill

We saw the Threepenny opera in New Norwegian, I liked it a lot. And then we started to talk about that time I dragged Anne and Ida along to see September Songs – The music of Kurt Weill.

Friday, April 18, 2008

the toes

Lately I’ve been trying to stand on the toes on one foot with my eyes closed while brushing my teeth. Someone at the ballet academy said it’s good for you, but it’s really annoyingly difficult, even when not brushing my teeth.

Friday, April 11, 2008

chocolate

Our teacher gave us chocolate, cookies and Russian tea while discussing our paintings today. It was nice.

I’m unemployed again because my cinema closed down in march. This means I’ve got lots of time, and I use it to write, every day. It’s satisfying, but I don’t get any money.

Monday, April 07, 2008

China

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We saw pandas and drank tea at teahouses.

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In Kunming there were this Stone Forest with lots of weird shaped rocks with stories to them, I loved that. And they had dinosaurs at the museum.

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Dinosaurs are so weird.


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Mmm, food :)

Sunday, April 06, 2008

The Transsiberian Railway

In Moscow, finding the right train in the dark, finding our cabin.
“There’s something about this departure forcing me to continually go out of our compartment and stare out of the windows in the corridor, as if everything depends upon me and that I watch the lights in Moscow, the blocks of flats and later on the warehouses and trees fly past and past and lie down behind us. As if everything will stop if I’m not here to let it disappear.”

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The train took six and a half days in all. We went through the Siberian cold, white and full of factories without roofs and windows, and down to the red-brown Mongolia, the Gobi desert with sand, camels and horse skeletons, and from there further and finally down to China. We saw a quarter of the world roll past under us and man, it’s huge.

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We travelled second class and had compartments with four beds. Luckily the train wasn’t full, so we were spared the random fourth person that would have taken the last bed. Every wagon had its own samovar, and a toilet with a sink. This was where we brushed our teeth, washed our hair, had a shower and washed our clothes. Our neighbours in our wagon was from Sweden, Finland, Holland, Ireland, Spain and Britain.
The eating wagon changed with the country, so we had the Russian one for the greater part of the trip. The restaurant lady was grumpy and spoke nothing but Russian, but her soljanka was ok, and one day she showed me a sepia picture of herself as young.

The excitement that went through the train when we were finally stopping at a station. We put on our clothes and hung around by the windows in the corridor, everyone waiting to breathe again. And then, when we were hurried inside again by the Chinese conductor, with what we could buy from the babooskas outside (noodles, beer and Russian sausage) everyone would look at the time schedule, when are we stopping next time? Is it in four hours? Six? We’ll just have to wait then.
At one tiny station in Siberia we were close to losing some passengers, including my dad. A train rolled in between ours and the station, and a minute later we started to move. I was so scared. There were some others in the wagon with more sense and vigour than me, so they made them stop and wait.

Most of us in the wagon got to know each other rather well, living this close for six and a half day, playing cards, talking, exchanging books and addresses. One of the nights we even had a party because Harri from Finland’s birthday (we gave the restaurant lady some euros to have it in her wagon). It was surprisingly sad to say goodbye at the train station in Beijing, but when we got to the hotel and discovered what a shower is and that it can be used to washing the Gobi desert out of your hair, it was hard to be very sad.

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Siberia

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Mongolia

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The Gobi desert

Russia

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“It snowed yesterday, when we got there. The smell of cold air and car exhaust, hands freezing, the face. The canals are covered in grey ice, tiny traces where the ducks have been. Sometimes the water shows, black and filled with empty bottles. Only Neva is totally free of ice.
In the restaurants we get warm again, the soup that lies to rest in the stomach and spreads until even the eyes feel like warm glass.
My feet are hurting again, I noticed already when I got up. Numb and tender, like two blue half moons.
I cut my hair with a nail scissor in the hotel bathroom.“

We went to the Heremitage, the Nabokov museum and the Dostojevskij-museum. St. Petersburg was really beautiful. When Benedicte’s studying there this autumn I’ll definitely visit her.

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Dostojevskij’s house.


We got arrested in Moscow, it happened something like this:
We were quite near Kremlin and ran over a road. Three or four policemen with fur hats started towards us with their arms crossed.
”It is against law. Give passports.”
We didn’t want to give the Russian police our passports, so we gave them copies, and that was ok. Afterwards we were accompanied across the Red Square to the nearest police station. They wanted us to pay 3000 roubles.
We asked if this wasn’t a bit much for crossing the road.
They agreed that this was perhaps a bit much.
“So is it possible to get a family discount?” my dad asked.
And yes, that was possible. So they took the correction fluid out from the drawer in the table and said the half was ok.

Afterwards I found a huge bookstore, because I had already finished Grammar of Love – Bunin and The Stranger – Camus, on the train to Moscow, and I badly needed something for the next train ride.

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