the same old

Nothing exciting to tell right now. Just visiting buildings, taking pictures, drawing. I spend about five hours a day most days walking around the city looking for buildings. A typical day is shaping up like this: Get up around 10am. Check to see if I have any love in the email. Shower. While I’m drying off I figure out what buildings I need to see that day, find them on a map, plot a strategy for getting there and head out around 11am. Depending on the day and where I’m headed I either catch a train into town or walk. Sometimes I take music, sometime I don’t. On the way to the buildings I look for interesting things. I think about people I know and love. I plot future adventures. I think of poems and stories. This happens all day. I don’t talk to too many people. The city is crawling with tourists, both foreign and native. In July the people of Scandinavia all take there summer holidays. This means that the city folks go camping and the country folks come to the city. The shopping street, Karl Johans Gate, is madness with people here on holiday. It makes me feel unclean to walk down that street and I always try to find a different route. I feel especially awkward pulling out my camera to take pictures because it marks me, also, as a tourist. And I’ve never really been a pictures type of tourist. I prefer experience, taking memories, living in a place rather than documenting it. Searching for a deeper understanding and not collecting trophies of the a place. I realize that this is not a widely held sentiment. There are people I know, people I consider close, who view photos and photo albums with pride. I do not take this away from them. In fact having looked through photo albums of friends and found it pleasurable, I know that my stance is perhaps not even the correct one. However I can't help pocketing my camera until the very last moment before I need to take a photo, because, after all, that is what I’m doing here: documenting. You should see the lengths I'll go to not have to pull out my map. The other day I had to check the map, there was no getting around it, so i walked down three blocks and up another from where I was to a secluded side street. Goofy. But so I pull out my camera in a crowd and stand there trying to pull the perfect shot out of the subject. Usually this means waiting until most if not all of the people and cars have moved out of the way, cause we can’t have those types of things mucking up our pretty buildings. I spend the better part of the afternoon doing this. Around 5pm I head home. Mostly because of hunger. I don’t eat before I leave. And I find it incredibly difficult to buy anything in the city. Sometimes I think, “Oh, maybe I should go to that restaurant. That hamburger sure does look good advertised there the way it is.” And then the quick math. 129 Norwegian kroner and 6.3 kroner to the dollar is 129/6.3=$20.47. And then I just tell myself I can wait until I get home. [I can see this economic business becoming a reoccurring theme of this trip]. Anyway, once I get home I check to see if I have any love in the email. But these excursions usually happen between 1am and 7am Pacific Standard Time which means that there is never any love in the email in the afternoon. So I settle in, put on some music, which I can only listen too within a 5-foot radius of the computer, as I don’t have working speakers so every sound is piped through my ipod ear buds, and work on the photos I’ve taken that day. Pull them out of the computer. Resize them. Mull them over. Put them in appropriate files so I can find them later. This takes maybe an hour. Which leaves me with a good five to seven hours of free time. Sometimes I work on the thesis. Sometimes I play chess against artificially intelligent opponents who kick my ass. Sometimes I write poems. Lately I’ve been creating a comic strip on MySpace. It’s called Just Guy. That’s a diversion. Sometimes I read. I make some food, rice or noodles and sandwiches and salad and peas. When I get tired I strip down, get into bed and read until sleepmonkeys overtake me. Then I dream bizarre dreams. For instance last night I dreamt I traveled back to 1954 and I had to find my grandfathers house, except everything was different then what I knew and so it was really hard. Right now it’s almost 10pm. it’s raining outside and pretty light out. This sometimes gets me. I’ll look out the window and think, “It’s 7.” A quick check of the old timepiece shows that’s it’s actually 9:30. It’s raining right now. It has been sunny and in the upper 70’s all week. Today was overcast and now it’s raining. I leave tomorrow for Bergen. I hope the weather comes back.
I tried to put more pictures here but stupid blogger wouldn't do it.