Oslo

A couple of weeks ago, on a whim I bought a ticket to visit my ICO friend, Jan Harald and his family in Oslo, Norway and took that trip this week.  I left early on Monday morning and after a few minutes in a long line at the Riga airport the computers went down.  It was a mess – 5 or 6 flights all leaving within 10 minutes of each other and no one obviously in charge of the plan.  It felt less like a developing country and more like an underdeveloped (or like Chicago Midway Airport and Southwest Airlines) I made it though and when I got on the plane there was Olesja!  She’s one of the girls from the corps and a good friend who is studying to be a flight attendant.  What a funny and happy surprise.

Monday night I went to Oslo Temple band practice and ended up being THE solo horn!  It’s why I don’t like to announce “I played in the CSB for 8 years!”  Because, I don’t usually add “second horn only.”  Anyway, it was fun and fortunately not a very serious practice and 2 of the pieces I knew pretty well.  I was a disaster at the high notes (a new horn and not playing for over a year, except one wedding while I was home – blah, blah, blah) but otherwise survived OK.  We came back to watch the last game of the World Series (3 days late) and I tried to explain a little bit of baseball to Jan and his wife, Eli. (Because I’m such an expert!)  One of my goals for this trip was to get some organizing done without the regular interruptions of working in Riga.  I did have some time to do that but of course not enough – I really need a couple of weeks without interruption but that won’t happen.  We visited the Nobel Peace Center one afternoon.  It has some really powerful media presentations – very thought provoking and challenging, especially to an American Christian.  Maybe I’ll think and blog more about that later.  The weather was awful – foggy and rainy – so not much sightseeing got done and if you can believe it, I didn’t take one picture.  I’ll have to return at a better time of the year.  

It was great to talk to Jan and Eli and get some perspective on my little world.  Sometimes I think life begins and ends here and especially with my work.  Of course, that’s not true and I need to be aware of the needs of my friends in other places.  

Lots of other things have been happening, but I’ll save them for another blog entry.