A Week in Oslo
Greetings from the damp grey North
I’ve been quieter than usual the last couple of weeks because I went directly from the Thanksgiving holiday (which had a bit more Drama than ideal) into international travel. We drove home with the kids on Saturday, and on Sunday I drove down a rainy and traffic-clogged Mass Pike to Logan Airport for a flight to Oslo.
I was here for the Entangled Visions workshop about visualizations of quantum mechanics, along with an eclectic collection of scientists, artists, and philosophers. My talk was about the Many-Worlds interpretation and its use in fiction; mostly trying to explain why the Everett interpretation is not insane (or at least not as insane as some presentations make it sound), with a few brief citations of specific treatments of it. I don’t know yet if they’re planning to make the slides available; once I do, I’ll do a more detailed blog post about that, but here’s the title slide:
As I said when I first got the invitation back in the summer, holding a workshop in Norway in December is certainly a choice. I’ve never been to Oslo before, though, and we’re not in session, so I jumped at a free trip to a new city. Ironically, while I got a lot of jokes about how cold I was going to be during this trip, it’s been in the mid 40s Fahrenheit and raining here, while they got 8-10 inches of snow in Schenectady, and the Schenectady forecast was calling overnight lows in the single digits Fahrenheit, possibly dipping negative.
The workshop started after lunch on Tuesday, but at my size I can’t really sleep on planes, so I asked the organizers to book me a flight arriving Monday. I got to the hotel around 1:30pm, having barely slept on the flights over1, but since there were only a couple hours of daylight remaining, I went directly out to play tourist. I had done some fairly minimal scouting of locations on Google Maps, but basically headed out to Zen navigate my way around— there’s a Christmas market thing a couple blocks from my hotel, then I turned in the general direction of the obligatory old church, then the harbor, then circling back around to the royal palace and the hotel.
On the plus side, not having any kind of plan made this relatively relaxing for several miles of walking. On the minus side, I have only the foggiest idea of what most of the things I saw were, and even less idea of their history. (There weren’t a lot of signs in English…) It was a nice mix of stuff, all in all— quaint old Europe, weird modern buildings, nice parks, a big old fort turned into a museum, weird public art.
I did a bit more exploring Tuesday, walking through the royal palace park and the old town up the hill from my hotel, again with no real plan. The rest of the week (until this morning) was given over to the conference, which started at 9am and ran through evening events. It was a very broad range of stuff, if anything skewing toward the artsy side, so I’m not sure I have coherent thoughts yet, or will share them once they develop.
Just to keep my blogging license up-to-date, though, a few general thoughts about the Oslo experience:
— Somebody at dinner last night asked me to compare Oslo to big American cities, and I said honestly that my reaction was mostly “Oh, this is cute…” A more diplomatic reply might’ve been to say that it’s fairly comparable to Washington, DC— similar population, not a ton of really tall buildings, lots of parks and statues. It doesn’t have that overwhelming “I’m in a City” feel that you get in NYC or London— it’s more urban than I would like to live in, but not oppressively bustling. It’s very easy to walk around most of what you’d want to see downtown— I kept being surprised by things coming up more quickly than I expected from Google Maps.
— For an American, all the Nordic countries are international travel on Easy Mode, because basically everyone speaks excellent English, and anyone in a service-industry role had well-tuned radar for the blank look I get when trying to process something in a language I don’t know and would switch immediately. Most important signs have English translations on them, and the restaurants I went to all had English menu descriptions. It was really low-stress in that regard.
— Speaking of restaurants, I had two really good meals outside the conference: Monday dinner at Den Glade Gris (pork and beer…) and Tuesday lunch at Elias Mat & Sant. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this is about to be in Oslo looking for fine dining, I recommend both. The conference dinner was at Sjomagasinet, in a swanky restaurant district down in the harbor, which was also nice.
— I did my bit to uphold the reputation of American tourists by going down to breakfast Tuesday in shorts and a dri-fit gym T-shirt; I was the only one in the place not fully dressed for the day. The rest of the week, I wore chinos as a concession to European mores. At least I was better than the German couple who were seated next to me in Den Glade Gris who ordered a glass of wine apiece, then when the waitress came over asked “Do you not have fish? Fish from the sea?” This despite literally all of the decor being pig-themed… (They paid for the wine and left without ordering food.)
— Obligatory American-in-Europe comment: everything is really expensive. The restaurant prices don’t look outlandish, other than the booze2, but the portions are way smaller than what you would get in the US for a slightly lower price per entree. I didn’t really mind because the conference paid for my flight and hotel, so I could afford to splurge, but it was striking.
— Weather-wise, it was mostly grey and dreary, with drizzly rain. I’m told this is typical; maybe a couple degrees warmer than normal, but nothing shocking. The really striking thing is the light— the sun comes up around 9am and sets around 3pm, so during the two full days at the conference, I basically wan’t outside during daylight. That’s significantly less than Schenectady (7am to 4pm, more or less), and it’s really telling. Also a reminder of when my father used to blow the minds of sixth-graders by showing them on a map that my hometown is at the latitude of the Mediterranean. The Gulf Stream is really something.
— Baffling Cultural Practice notes: 1) The hotel bathroom was basically one big shower stall, with a small hinged glass partition that sorta-kinda blocked water from going directly onto the sink an toilet, but didn’t stop huge puddles from spreading there. I have only ever seen this in Europe, and don’t remotely understand it. 2) The hotel room had two twin beds with very thin mattresses, and quilts heavier than the weighted blankets the kids have. I ended up stripping the sheet off the second bed so I had something to cover myself with that didn’t instantly make me sweat. The beds were also narrower than an American twin mattress, barely wider than my shoulders, so I am really looking forward to being home in my own bed.
— Pedestrian Cultural Practices: On the walk to dinner last night, one of the hosts noted that Norwegians don’t really concern themselves with the walk/ don’t walk signals, which I had also noted. We discussed approaches to this in other countries— apparently Finland is like Japan in that people will stand next to deserted streets at midnight waiting for the light to change. I explained that it’s highly variable in the US— Californians are weirdly patient about waiting to cross with the light, New Yorkers not so much.
Anyway, I’ve had a great time in Oslo, and would happily come back to see it in the summer if the opportunity were to arise. I’m definitely ready to get home, though, so I’m going to hit Publish and then jam stuff into my suitcase for the flight home.
I’m not sure there’s anything all that insightful here, but they’d strip me of my blogging rights if I didn’t post something from a trip to Europe. If you want to see whether I write anything about the conference as a whole, here’s a button:
And should you feel so moved the comments will be open:
Probably a bit more than usual for me on a plane, honestly, thanks to the adrenaline crash following nearly missing the flight thanks to the Mass Pike.
Wednesday night I bought some beer at the front desk to drink while watching Stranger Things before bed, and it was something like $15 for a 12-oz bottle of Carlsberg. Also, the clerk was required to pop the caps on the bottles before handing them over, lest I… save one for the next day? I don’t know, alcohol laws are weird the world over.
>> Californians are weirdly patient about waiting to cross with the light
Speaking as one who moved to L.A. after growing up in and around N.Y., I will tell you that, at least back when I lived there, the reason for the patience was the very high probability of getting a jaywalking ticket. Which was made even worse by the claim that this ticket would add points to your driving record.
The latter might have been urban legend, admittedly. But there was no question about the former -- it was almost a rite of passage for all n00bs.
My wife and a friend did Norway from Oslo to Bergen and were impressed with the cleanliness. From Bergen they went by ship to the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, Canada then home to the Gamma Quadrant east of Sacramento.