Culture Shock

Who knew there would come a time when Western culture was a shock to my system? After four days in Norway, I am having an extremely hard time adjusting to it all. First, I am generally travel fatigued and although I’m pretty travel hardened for developing countries, it’s not translating well here. Second, the prices are so far off the high end of my scale that I’m not dealing with them terribly well. And third, I’m in the middle of my first travel medical emergency.

I think I turned into a thrifty grad student overnight when I quit my job. And then of course six months in Peru and Nepal did nothing to prepare me for Norwegian prices. Over Christmas I nearly had a breakdown in City Market over whether to buy a $4 jar of pesto for dinner, and when I decided to “splurge” for it, I told Cole that meant we couldn’t afford eggs for breakfast. Maybe that should have been a sign that I’d fallen off the deep end of cheapness. Instead, I went off to Peru, a fertile feeding ground for my inter cost consciousness, and I got even more thrifty.

Enter Oslo, the most expensive city in the world. Hotels six times more expensive than Peru and a complete dearth of cheap (or even reasonably priced) food has not mixed well with my inner cheapskate. The sticker shock has been rough. And of course my reaction to this sticker shock has been the logical and calm reaction you have all come to expect from me: don’t eat, because it costs too much.

I started out this trip travel fatigued from Peru and not eating probably made my body weaker, so somewhere between Denver and our second morning here, I developed a nasty infection in my toe (left leg, why do you continue to let me down?). I probably should have taken a day to get it taken care of in Oslo, but because the country is so expensive, I decided we should continue on to Bergen en route out of Norway and get it taken care of later. This plan backfired completely because it did not occur to me that we wouldn’t be able to find a room in Bergen at 11 pm at night. The Peru logic goes: hey, it’s still light out, so not too unsafe to walk around, and the hotels want our business so someone will for sure let us in. Not so. Eventually we ended up biting the bullet and staying in the one hotel we could find with a receptionist still on site (tip: find one attached to a bar!), at a price that would have paid for a good four days of travel in Peru. (This is starting to look like a trend: later we tried to book a hotel two days in advance and the town was already full. In Peru I was foiled by planning to much in advance; here it's by not planning enough. Hopefully there is a happy medium to be found.) At that point, my toe was looking worse than the worst pictures I could find online, so Jay and my mother were able to run a successful intervention to get me to rest for a day, eat and find a doctor. I’m still not sure if I can get over the sticker shock of Norway in time to really enjoy our days here but I’m going to try. Whether my toe will get better with this first round of treatment is also TBD. But on the plus side, we unintentionally discovered the one reasonably priced thing in Norway: the hospital!! Thank goodness for nationalized health care and $50 ER visits.