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.

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. .

Well, having made all of that clear, how can you now experience interrailing without having to go anywhere really? In my opinion, interrailing is made up of 5% looking tourist sites, 5% trying to get through borders, 5% using the public transport, 10% paying for it all, and 75% is sharing experiences and life stories with other travellers. The beauty of the 75% is that you, by being on an interrail ticket, already seem to have subscribed to a common ideology of some kind. At least in my experience, this ideology is mostly genuinely anti-conservative and anti-authoritarian, as a lot of talk is concentrated on how close-minded people at home are. Further, it is mostly pro-open borders and pro-internationalizing the employment market, at least if there are any street artists involved who try to make money in several European capitals. However, it often differs to what extent people see themselves as socialist, anarchists or pro-market liberals. In any way, it almost always means you can talk without having to treat oneanother as ambassadors of one’s respective countries.

The trick is then of course to leave all those things at home that other interrailers do not have either. Most of all, that is an apartment (if you have one), but also your bike, car, and contact network. However, your local knowledge of sites to visit might be something to buy you into the backpacking community, so you should keep that. And then you simply go to one of their main overnight places and behave just like all other interrailers. In Oslo, the one site I’ve discovered is Sognsvann. Just pick a clear summer night, pick up your sleeping bag and take the last subway up to Sognsvann. Almost every night you see bonfires up there and if you just drop your Norwegian shyness, you can just go over to one of them and just say “hey, do you mind if I sleep over there?” and you can be quite sure that they’ll invite you to join them and share fellow traveller stories all night.

A downside to this is of course that they quite often will be leaving within a day or two. An alternative to get into contact with some similar kind of people is therefore to instead walk up to Blindern Studenthjem at night time, find a small group of people sitting on the stairs and start out by asking “This is the International Summer School, right?” If you can keep the conversation going by asking where people are from, you should expect to be invited to hang with them within just a few minutes. This year they have people from tens of countries attending , including Serbia and the USA as well as Palestine and Israel. Also, I’ve heard that they often go to Chateau Neuf, where the beer is said to be only 22 NOK, although I haven’t tried that myself yet…