How to get 75% interrail experience without leaving Oslo

Interrailing is great fun and despite low air plane tickets these days, there are still many reasons to engage in interrailing. For example, the fact that you can decide on the spot whether to stay in a place or leave to the next city. Once you hook up with some other interrailers, it can quickly mean that you trash your entire pre-planning and instead just decide to hang around with them instead.

Interrail map -- leaving out parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Marocco and Turkey
Interrail map — leaving out parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Marocco and Turkey

Also, interrailing is something entirely different than driving around Europe with a car, even though you might have borrowed the car from a family member and are leaving cheaply in all other ways, simply because you don’t really meet your fellow travellers very much. And when you do, it is somewhere at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, with both cars heading in different directions. Meetings like that seldom last beyond just a few minutes.

Interrailers however meet mostly in trains between two transportation hubs (which usually are cities) or when they try to stay overnight in some town, preferably without having to pay for it (which usually can be done either in some park close to the train station by simply rendering the local police out of control by outnumbering them heavily in some of the main hubs or somewhere on the outskirts of cities, where no-one has thought about putting up a sign saying that you’re not allowed to sleep under someones balcony). In both cases, they have many hours on them during which they can (and usually do) engage in discussions on all kinds of topics, though at least I end up talking about mid-term (between long- and shortterm) European politics (Is it better or worse in Poland now after the end of the soviet era? Did singer with the extremely deep voice who some Swedish travellers have on a CD just not become big because he was European and not American? etc.), sites one needs to have seen that no-one knows about, or experiences with control freak border guards.

I guess taking one of the far distance buses comes the closest in that they meet one another either while travelling between or within cities (a setup which I believe also comes closest to the experience people had during the early modernization period when trains connected inner-cites with one-another, before they were largely replaced by cars that are impossible to park in inner cities and instead suburbs, gas stations and interstate/highway restaurants and motels with one another). And often I do have some of the same conversations in the bus between Oslo and Copenhagen that I would have while interrailing. However, it is generally harder to move around in a bus and although a few bus pass systems exist now, they are few and probably due to another few reasons I haven’t thought about, it all just ends up with contacts made on a bus breaking off immediately upon arrival, whereas interrail contacts often continue into finding a common place to stay, etc. .

Continue reading How to get 75% interrail experience without leaving Oslo

Summer Holidays

Due to the summer holidays there are no updates to be expected in the near future. Also, I will be leaving for Hermosillo, MX taking off from Copenhagen, DK on August 11th, so updates will be scarce also in a somewhat longer perspective. In the last few days, I have been converting the clip on the Danish minority to another (and larger) format and transferred it from te commercial “Windows Movie Maker” to the free for use AVISynth. FOr those of you who had problems reading the subtitles on the previous version, the upcoming version should bring relief. Right now it’s stuck in the Google Video approval system, but I’ll update all links once it’s up and running.

I am just about to finish another visit at my parents and so I’ll be heading back to Oslo for now in order to help with the Afghan refugee actions, before I’ll go to Berlin to visit my friends from highschool and take the IEALTS (English test) on July 29th, and from there on to Schwaan to participate in the Solid youth camp (watch the video from last year) up until August 6th. After that I’ll hang around Zealand, Dk until I am to leave this continent.

Now you might wonder why I participate in a youth camp…
Continue reading Summer Holidays

Political summer activism

Political acitvist with too much time on your hands during the summer holidays? If you live in Oslo, you should of course join us in the struggle to keep Norway from throwing out the Afghan refugees. However, if you do not live anywhere around here, this is one thing that is easily done: write letters do the editors! Yes, that was “letters” as in plural of “letter” and “editors” as plural of “editor”. The newspapers do not have much of anything to print during the summer months, and most of the ordinary writers in the letters to the editor section of any newspaper have gone on summer holiday this time around. Nevertheless, people still read that section. If you keep the letter short and to the point about some current issue, it is very likely to get in.

Here are some examples…
Continue reading Political summer activism