33

It's my birthday today. I've got laryngitis (proper coughing-until-you-vomit laryngitis, too), I feel like shit and I think I should probably postpone it. But hey, I'm 33 and that is a pretty number. I've always been a bit ambivalent about my birthday, although not because of getting older: so far life has only improved as it's gone on and I wouldn't go back to my twenties or (shudder) my teens if you paid me an inordinate amount of money.
Birthdays are just odd to me. My family have always been a little strange about cultural festivals: we don't celebrate mother's day or father's day, and we never really celebrated Easter (long story). From when I was quite young we decided that presents should be something you really, really want, which, given our generally expensive tastes, meant that we tended to get birthday-christmas-birthday presents. On one memorable occasion when I was still living at home, everyone I knew, including my parents, forgot my birthday. It pissed me off a bit, but at the same time made perfect sense. If I didn't invest much meaning in the day, why should anyone else?
On the other hand, my partner understands the need for rituals. She got up early and made me breakfast. She wrapped my present with the biggest, pinkest bow she could find because she knew I was feeling unwell and a bit sad.
Although I explained that what I really want this year is a contribution to my sewing machine fund, she bought me Beautiful Thing, which is a DVD I've wanted for years, and which has just been re-released. So I get to stay at home on a rainy day watching a romantic tale about teenage boys from a housing estate (I'm secretly soppy and like to watch romances).
She really is the perfect antidote to my rational, serious tendencies. I don't really know why this gem of a woman puts up with my joy-killing rationalism, but I'm doing my best to put it aside every now and then.
Yes, I am starting a sewing machine fund. We're going back to Australia in January, and I will need a sewing machine. I grew up sewing on a 1960s Singer, and then on a late-80s/early-90s Singer when the earlier one died. Although the later Singer was a bit persnickety, it would sew nearly anything, including 14 oz denim. It's still in perfect working order, but it belongs to my mother, who, as of today, is moving to another state. 14 hours drive is a little far to go to borrow the machine.
I do have a sewing-machine over here, but I'm not taking it home. It's a solid and fairly grunty little thing, but I'd like something with a little more finesse, so I'll be selling it, probably in November.

I'm using a couple of days' enforced rest to catch up on reading blog entries. There were over 200, but I'm whittling them down.

Norway

I love Norway. I don't know what it is about Scandinavia, but I love it and would dearly like to live here. I'm sure there are things which would annoy me if I did live here, but this is my fantasy, so I can ignore them.

Getting here was pretty awful. When I got home from India I felt like hell. The M4 eastbound was closed, so it took me over an hour from the airport to home, and I then had to sprint off to the doctor. I rang them when the plane landed, explaining that I was landing from India and had to fly to Norway early the next morning, and needed an urgent appointment. The triage nurse rang me back and agreed that having a sinus infection would make being an air hostess miserable. I had a good laugh at that: clearly the only occupation the doctors' staff could think of when faced with my itinerary was cabin crew. I put on washing, took it to the laundromat for drying and dragged myself up our stairs to pack my bag. I felt ghastly at this point, and everything was taking me at least 3 times as long as it should have.

Somewhere around this time I realised that I had no idea where the information for our accommodation was, and it had only been sent to me in paper format. I found the telephone number of the agency, but the first website I went to gave their hours as 09:00 - 20:00 Monday to Friday. No use at 22:00 in London on a Friday night. I looked up the owner in the Norwegian phone book online, but they weren't listed. At this point I had a small meltdown. Thankfully my partner wasn't home to see me wandering around crying and being loopy. Eventually I got over this, and made a plan. I still had the address of the owner, who I knew didn't live far from the house, and there was a hotel nearby where someone might know who they were. I found another website, which gave the agency's hours as 09:00 - 20:00, 7 days a week. I rang the agency number, but the answering machine was in Norwegian or Danish, and I didn't understand. Plan A was to email the agency and then ring them from the airport to get the details. If that failed, then plan B was to drive to Strandebarm and try to find the owner. Plan C was to sleep in the local hotel overnight and try again in the morning.

Having worked out that, I collapsed on the couch for an hour and took antibiotics and Neurofen Plus. Things started to look a little better.

The taxi was booked for 5:45, which meant getting up at 4:45. I got to sleep some time after 4, after I had packed everything (including copious amounts of knitting) and printed out information for our stay. The prospect of being cut off from the internet for a week makes me a little frantic, as I usually just keep everthing online and don't worry. I actually got asked for my ticket in Hyderabad airport, and I didn't have a printout or know my flight number. Too much flying means that the desk is lucky if I turn up with my passport and know what city I'm flying to. Occasionally I get the wrong country on the first try.

The taxi arrived on time and then drove like a demon. We shut our eyes and tried not to think about it. Stanstead was surprisingly OK as we weren't in the first rush around 7, so there were no queues. The agency answered the phone and my email, and I bought some wireless time to download the details of our accommodation. Our plane wasn't at all full. Once on it, I slid into a dead sleep until we started descent into Bergen.

Once we got our car we had the challenge of driving into Bergen to find the tourist information office. We couldn't get a map of southern Norway at the airport, and Hertz gave us a spectacularly useless one. Now remember that I had had 40 mins sleep the night before and just over an hour on the plane, was suffering from a sinus infection, and was navigating from a tourist map. My partner had had two hours' sleep and was driving a manual car on the right side of the road for the first time. We got very, very stressed in Bergen. There were emergency vehicles at some point. We finally managed to park somewhere after much swearing and explosiveness. We found the tourist info. We found a place that sold very expensive knives (the other half wanted to get a Norwegian knife for her father). We found a supermarket, we found a public toilet. We tottered back to the car and tried to get out of Bergen. It wasn't easy. We went the wrong way a couple of times. Part of this was due to the fact that the detailed map of the city didn't have North pointing to the top of the page, whereas the map of the surroundings did. We then went exactly the opposite way to the direction in which I had been trying to go, and I realised that this would actually work. Two-and-a-half hours later we arrived at the house we had rented.

The house was superb. There was a combustion stove with firewood in the cellar. We drove around and looked at fjords and mirror lakes and windy roads and apple orchards. We drove up to a glacier and watched people ski down it. We fruitlessly tried to get tourist information (we were here after that magic date, 1st October, when tourist activities cease to exist). We drove into Bergen and out again without too much swearing. There was knitting (but not enough), relaxing (definitely not enough) and cooking (probably too much). We bought apples and pears from the roadside, so there was apple crumble and pear crumble. There were roasted vegetables, egg and lemon soup, sausage jumbalaya, more roasted vegetables and hot chocolate. There was a rotisserie chicken which had been soaken in brine, I think, and was the most delicious chicken I have eaten in Europe. One of my partner's colleagues heard that I was having trouble finding tapioca flour and got some for us, which was very sweet of her. I brought it on holiday and made these little cheesy buns. I made them with Jarlsberg, and as long as you knead them until the motor on the little hand-held mixer tries to give up, they are lovely and not too slimy at all. The house had a dishwasher. Lots of cooking did not require lots of arduous washing up. I think a dishwasher may be our first investment once we return to Australia. Life was good.

We sat on the verandah and looked at the fjord. We watched Battlestar Galactica on the laptop of an evening. We had some long overdue deep and meaningful conversations. Can I have a month here? Please?

View from the verandah... more Norway photos here

In the next exciting installment I will detail the fibre and craft activities we partook of in Norway. There were two yarn shops, a bead shop and a knitting industry museum. My partner willingly watched a 20 minute video on the history of a knitting factory which primarily made underwear. Admittedly she was coming down with the flu, but it's still a noteworthy event.

India

India was exhausting. I had firmly decided to just go with the flow, but nothing particularly disturbing happened. Things just took a long time. One morning it took 1 and 1/4 hours to drive to work because the traffic was so awful: the same journey took 20 minutes the previous day. I had to leave work at 13:00 one day because 30,000 people were coming to the lake next to my hotel to throw statues in it that evening, and I would have had trouble getting to the hotel at the normal time.

The hotel was beautiful: five star Marriott with several restaurants, a pool I didn't get around to swimming in and a beautiful garden.

I found the line of people saying 'Good morning madam' and 'Good evening madam' out the front a little daunting, and the fact that they checked every car that came in the gates for bombs was a little disturbing. I don't cope well with servility - it doesn't sit well with my world view. The food was lovely, and I have picked up a new habit: hot chocolate with hot milk in a jug, demerara sugar and chopped dark chocolate. Put your chocolate in your tea-cup, add a little sugar, pour hot milk over it, wait a little and stir... My excuse is that the room was airconditioned to 20 degrees as a fixed temperature, which when you are not very well can seem rather cold. In general, the food was very good, and I got to eat dishes I miss, like Malai Kofta and Paneer, and discovered Dosa, which will probably be my undoing. I have to learn how to make them. Have to.

I may be the only western person from my company to go to India and, instead of getting an upset stomach, come down with a cold and a sinus infection. I felt pretty awful most evenings. Work was OK: the class were very polite and hard-working, so I was pretty happy with that, and Sudafed Max (bless the British for still stocking pseudoephedrine in pharmacies) got me through most days.

I did have some trouble sleeping, and the last day was bad. I woke up at 04:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. I then worked a little, went to the office for a full day, came back to the hotel to finish packing and have a client teleconference, then slept from around 22:00 to 00:30. Got up, went to the airport, slept around 1 hour on the plane to Dubai and then 3 or 4 hours on the plane to London. I then had to go to a doctor, pick up some antibiotics, and pack my bags for Norway... after which I got about 40 minutes sleep before the taxi to the airport arrived...

Emirates was lovely, and on the Dubai - London leg I got a new plane with almost-flatbed seats. I asked them not to disturb me and slept like the dead for a few hours, after which I picked up a swatch I started about 5 times before getting it right. All I was trying to do was get the correct number of stitches in the correct configuration to have a pretty edge on seed stitch on both edges. The end result is below, but too little sleep made this difficult for me to figure out, clearly. Two of the crew came to talk to me about the knitting and told me how clever I was. Given my inability to achieve a pretty basic task, I felt like a fraudulent 5-year-old.

To have a nice bobbly edge on seed stitch:
Cast on an odd (divisible by 2 +1) number of stitches:
R1 *K P* ...K
R2 Sl P *K P* ...K
Repeat Row 2

One of my colleagues who has been seconded over to the company in which I was training has all her family in Hyderabad, which was why she took the opportunity when it came up. She took me fabric shopping with her mother and mother-in-law. Her mother-in-law was from a weaving family, and was able to tell me not to buy a couple of fabrics because of flaws. There were so many beautiful silks and cottons. I wish I had more time and more energy, but I got a good haul, much of which will be for presents in the future, some of which will be for me and for me alone...

India is so brightly coloured, and a large proportion of the colour comes from its women. The saris and salwar kameez come in colours I'd never consider wearing, but which look so normal in India. The way women ride side-saddle on the back of motorcyles, holding onto the shoulder of the driver, saris floating in the breeze: this still amazes me.

The tiny little yellow taxis and flatbed trucks amused me. I'm not sure what the taxis are, but the trucks seem to be Piaggio Ape. They are crammed with people and goods, and do seem like strange little bees, buzzing around a slightly altered universe.

India was hot, dusty, noisy, humid, tasty and very polite.

I got a very little bit of knitting done: two swatches, one in RYC Cotton Jeans for a Baby Yoda and another in Jaeger Aqua, for either another Baby Yoda or a Baby Kimono from Mason-Dixon Knitting. Babies are afoot.