Spent the weekend at my mother's place and practiced shooting clay pigeons for a hunt I'm going on later this month. It's not really my thing to play with lethal weapons, but it's not quite the same thing in this context. At the end I was getting quite good at it.
I find that I'm fascinated by people who make music. My neighbor in Mexico, Leo Heiblum, used to play music at odd times and especially at the end I tried to participate a little. I'm not talking about making studio quality stuff, just people who can pick up a guitar, or tabla or whatever and play for a few minutes. There's something very human and comforting in these situations and for me it's something very new as most of my family has no musical skill whatsoever (although my sisters have some). Personally I can't play anything, but I think there might be hope for me with Guitar Hero. Yesterday I ended up at Gustav's place with Elin where we made some food and talked about nothing. Gustav is one of these strange people who don't quite fit in any box and encompasses a vast amount of interests and skills.
Being around these people also helps to push me in the direction of picking up my painting again.
On Friday I picked up a new board, bindings and shoes since my old equipment is all over the place and it appears that the bindings are broken. Yesterday it was snowing all day, but today I woke up at 8:30 to clear skies and 10cm of new snow. It turns out that there's a ski center within walking distance from my house. So I geared up and headed into the forest with an orange and some chocolate in my backpack. The forest was quiet and without a soul in sight.
The sun shone though the snow covered trees and I didn't break a sweat by the time arrived to the deserted lifts. After some quick adjustments with the screwdriver I was on top of the hill looking down on the city and further out into the Oslo fjord. The scene was postcard perfect. It took me a few minutes of unsteady turns, but I soon found my rhythm. As I hit the first patch of new powder I was in heaven, silently gliding on top of white cotton in the middle of a frozen forest.
After I few hours I painfully rediscovered muscles I hadn't used for a few years and the hills filled with families teaching their kids the fundamentals of skiing. I walked back to my house passing dozens of people on cross-country skis, all smiling and happy. We complain a lot about winter, but it's quite obvious that we belong here.
This afternoon I also made tortillas for the first time in my life. I found a shop that sell both coriander (Cilantro) and manzanillo chiles so I decided to get out my Maseca tortilla flour and try to make some decent Mexican food. The salsa turned out quite good, but as always, not spicy enough. I made some guacamole and heated up some "Meksikanske" beans to go with a alambre dish.
The tortilla making turned out to be quite a challenge. Getting them evenly flat and avoiding that they stick to things is tricky. I had to craft a makeshift non-stick surface from a ziplock bag. Two big boards served as a press with myself standing on them in order to get the right amount of pressure. The first one looked more like a small pancake and the next 3-4 suffered from cracked edges and burns, but I finally got the hang of it and make some that worked.
As a kid we moved quite a lot. In my first 12 years of education I managed to go to 11 different schools.
One of things it taught me was that home was whatever place I kept my stuff it, be it in our one and only purchased house or the hotel suite we stayed in Houston for about 2 months while we waited for our stuff to arrive in a container from Norway.
When I left Mexico last November I expected it to work the same way this time. I'd pack up 50kg of crap, drag it to the other side of the planet and instantly make a new home on Oslo. After being back in Mexico to visit my wife and friends I'm starting to think that it might get more complicated as you grow older and attach yourself of certain places and the people there. I feel much more at home in Mexico, even when I'm not in the city, but in Diego's house at Zicatela beach.
At the same time there are certain aspects about Norway that also makes it home. Even if I complain about the weather here I can't help myself from getting just a little bit emotional when watching the snow fall and there are certain ways about how the Norwegians act that makes me realize that no matter how many tacos I eat at the end of the day I'm always going to be different in Mexico.
So home is now a feeling and not a place, a feeling of being calm and safe and surrounded by people you love and not by familiar things. This is great because it makes it much more flexible, but it also makes it harder to get there. Harder because I used to go home to my apartment in order to relax and feel at home and now I have to learn to relax in order to feel at home.
This Christmas and New Years was exhausting and I expect that it's only a preview of how the rest of this year will turn out.
The idea of having Oslo and Mexico City as bases seems quite good if it weren't for the 20 hours of travel it takes from one place to the next. The whole notion of friends is also more complicated now. I've always just left them behind and forgotten about them when I moved before, but I now have people in my life who I want to keep close for a very long time.
The Internet is all well and great, but you need more than a postcard amount of communication in order to have a significant relationship with anyone. The only advantage the Internet provides is that you can avoid having to give a compressed summary of the events on your life when you see people again, but the real stuff takes place over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine.
Some more pictures from the trip to Zicatela and Guadua:
This weekend we moved into the new place at Figgs vei 7. Saturday was hell, first we went to rent a huge van, then we got lost on our way to buy a fridge and washing machine. After that we went to pick up a new stove, move that to the Grødem place, then pick up Daniel's stove and other crap there. After that we went to take apart and pick up a big bed and finally we went to IKEA to buy a sofa, a table, some lights and more crap.
Then we just had to get up to the apartment, unload everything and put together the sofa and beds. But yesterday was great and we had her first dinner there. Snik also came up and seems to be adjusting without craping or peeing all over the place, which I understand cats so sometimes when they are not happy. We found some great looking chairs in the loft and the place is really taking shape. My bed is fantastic and I couldn't be happier with my new place of residence. Daniel also seems to be enjoying himself a lot there...
I've always loved cat, but as an allergic kid I could only last a few minutes with them before having a full blow allergic reaction with asthma and everything. One of my most hippie friends, Christianne, was one of many people who told me that you can get rid of allergies by just being around whatever you react to long enough. I wrote it off as BS together with Reiki and the homeopathic medicine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not planning of eating sugar pills and diluted herbs next time I get a cold, but I may have been wrong about the allergies.
After being around Otto, the neighbors dog, for prolonged playstation sessions I noticed that I could be around him for a lot longer than at the beginning. By the time I left Mexico I could be around a big German Shepard for at least 3-4 hours before reacting.
I now live with 3 cats and training myself to withstand them. I intentionally hang around them and pet them, making sure to wash my hands afterwards. If I get home early I have to take a half a pill, but I've managed to go without for 8 hours at a time which is a huge step for me. Overall living with cats is cool. We have an cuddly old one, a playful 2 year old and a shy redhead. All the damn hair sucks, but it's nice to have purring fuzzballs all over the place.
Thanks to Daniel I know have a new place to stay, with my own bed and everything, starting on the 15th of December. People have been telling me that it's imposible to find a decent place in Oslo, but we actually landed a sweet 1/2 house on you first try and closed the deal in about 2 hours. 90 square meters, upper floor of a house with a huge balcony for 7,000 kr/mnth. Rocks! The kitchen is a bit shaby, but overall I couldn't wish for more. There's a forest directly behind it and from the balcony you can see all the way to the Oslo fjord. I'll be living there with Daniel at least untill Paola gets here and maybe longer if she likes it.
Today we're launching a new website for one of our productized systems, now called Contento in homage of it's Mexican origins. It's a CMS system and altough we still have a lot of work to do on the polish, it has quite a nice admin interface compared to alot of things we've looked at.
I'm hoping this will be the first of many launches during my stay in Norway. One of our most defined goals for 2008 is to get several of the many systems we have running for our clients made into a real product.
Any comments about the name, logo and site are welcome.
I'm a 32 year old Norwegian living in Oslo. Before that I lived 10 years in Mexico. I work as a project manager and graphic designer in Copyleft Solutions.
