Welcome to Non-Covid Land

04th of September 2020. After a very busy week including a mild panic attack, I finally arrive in Norway.

In fact, the week leading up to my departure has felt a little like a crime story: One week before my departure I sit in my apartment, watch the news in the morning, well noon, while I have breakfast, well brunch, and when they – as usual – announce the latest numbers of Covid infections right in the beginning, I see the piece of bread falling out of my hands in shock. My usual me couldn’t care less, my recent I-am-travelling-to-Norway me is now turning on the red alarm button. When I go to the Norway immigration site, the alarm grows into a full blown panic attack. Up until now I have kind of rested on the fact that Norway had opened its borders again and Germany belonged to the green area. Now I see that one day prior Norway has had a press release saying that it is now rating Germany as a high risk country and travellers have to observe a 10 day quarantine and can even be denied entry to the country. I begin to hyperventilate. I haven’t talked to my hosts about this possibility. They look like people who are – well, let’s say, unconventional, but at the same time they do have a baby and that could prove to be an unpredictable factor. (People with kids can behave quite unpredictably in my experience). I spend the rest of the day trying to reach my hosts, but without luck. I don’t really have a plan B. So I create one. I have a friend in Bergen. But apart from my first host I don’t have another host yet. It feels like being left hanging in the air. 

In the following days I still cannot reach them. I begin to find confidence within me and say to myself that I will make it work somehow, even if they cancel the whole arrangement. I know I could never afford a stay in a hotel in Norway – seriously, who can? – but my friend in Bergen says, yes, I can stay with him. Of course, I would have to change my flight, seeing that Molde, where I am supposed to go, is ehhhh – a slightly different direction than Bergen (450 km to be exact).

It so happens that I have also been feeling a little ill the past few days. Of all things. These days you can’t even blow your nose in public for fear of being thrown out of the supermarket. Only I know that the exhaustion just comes from the fact that the universe has somehow collected and built up everything dramatic that could happen in my relationships and thrown it right in my face, as if it wanted to say “You’re leaving? Yeah, well, there’s this and this and this that has been quietly seething in the back for years and that you need to face RIGHT NOW.” 

So in addition to organizing the trip, finding a new person to sublet my apartment to (after the person that had already agreed cancelled last-minute), I have to deal with a whole volcano outbreak in my personal relationships with friends, ex-partners and family members. Fun times. But I guess that just happens when you set things in motion. It’s like a fucking chain reaction.

Since I need to be out of my apartment on the 1st of September, I ask my aunt who lives in Hamburg and who is already 84 years old if I can stay with her a few days. On the train to Hamburg – 3 days before my departure – the woman I am supposed to stay at finally answers. She didn’t have great reception, she says. They don’t worry much about Corona, she says. The village they live in is pretty much like Quarantine anyway, she says. 

Yeah. Well. I send a prayer of gratitude to the universe and shed a few tears of relief, feeling a little silly for having worried so much.

I arrive at my aunt’s who is a heart-warming person, but almost deaf. Communication is a little one-sided and hard. Also: She has no internet (insert Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” here).

I spend my days walking around beautiful Hamburg, the city I was acually born in, looking at the harbor and contemplating its meaning as gate to the far north, and my evenings sitting in the living room with her looking at old pictures and playing the guitar.

Funny thing: The guitar. I knew I really really wanted to bring it with me. I knew it would cost a lot, but I was still surprised when I learned that you actually needed to buy an extra seat on the plane for it (“My guitar would like a window seat, please”) – or put it into cargo which amounts to about the same price. Right. So the day of my flight comes, I enter the airport in Hamburg which has a slightly deserted North Korean vibe to it, go to the counter and check in my bag. I show the staff my guitar and he replies unimpressed “Yeah, you’ll have to bring this to the ‘bulky luggage’ section.” So I proceed to bring it to the bulky luggage section, claim it again in Oslo, check it into a machine to go on the flight to Molde and that was that. Nobody charged me anything. So I just brought a guitar on the plane to Norway completely free of charge. Ha.

Arriving in Oslo airport I do notice that something is different. I wonder what it is. I look around. Then it hits me: Nobody is wearing masks. People are coming out of the plane into the airport and they’re immediately tearing away the masks from their faces, as if to tear down the chains that bind them. Now they are finally in … Norway! Non-Covid-Land!

The government website stated that people can be denied going on their connecting flights within Norway if they show any symptoms, and they could even be denied entry to the country altogether. I was half expecting the Covid police waiting for me, fully equipped with a test set, wanting to see my passport, inquiring about my quarantine (they wanted a written and signed confirmation of the people I stayed with), demanding justification from me why on earth I was coming to Norway as a workawayer in the midst of a pandemic and even from a high risk country! What was I thinking!

Part of me feared that this might be the shortest trip ever.

And then – nothing. No one even wants to see my ID. Nobody cares. And then I even get a free bus ride (did you know that Norway is actually such a cash-less country that not even the bus driver – the bus driver! – accepts cash?). Because of a last minute wallet switch I left my credit card in Germany and so I only have a few Norwegian kroner that a friend in Germany gave to me. I want to give it to the bus driver, he shakes his head and is like “no, no, no, no cash” and I am like “Well, that’s all I got”, he sighs, asks hurriedly where I am going in a mixture of Norwegian and English, I reply with the station and then he just shrugs and waves me through hastily. So…yeah. Such a nice country. Life seems to be giving me the lesson to REALLY stop worrying so much and stop stressing out about things that are pretty much beyond my control anyway.