Norway

The neighbouring country Norway got a visit from my whole family when I was almost two years old. My mom Annika, my sisters Linda, Åsa and Sandra and me were travelling in a blue van while my dad Björn and his friend Torsten went by motorcycles.
I have some vague memories from the trip which lasted for three days and I remember it as an exciting trip where we slept in the van and were driving north of Oslo in the rural Norway. My mom remembers it as a horrible trip where us kids were going nuts in the van and we refused to wear seatbelts and opened the door on the passenger side while she was driving. She was scared that we would fall out of the van and she just wanted to go home again and she thought about taking the boat from Oslo to Copenhagen in Denmark to get us almost back home to Helsingborg in Sweden where we lived.

This never happened but one year later when my dad's birthday was coming up we went on the ferry but in the opposite direction first, from Copenhagen to Oslo before we returned the next day. I just remember being seasick and spending most of my time at the toilet when I wasn't playing in the ball pit.

My grown up memories from Norway is just from touring with my bands Ninjaspark and Slutet. Ninjaspark which was a blip blop band with a punk attitude have been playing Oslo multiple times and once we even went all the way to Bergen. Here's a recap of some of the memories from these drunken times:

* In Oslo we played a venue which I have forgotten the name, but it was a radical left-wing venue where they didn't let anyone in before they had seen them in the camera outside the venue. We completely destroyed the backstage area by having food fights and jumping on the tables, pissing on the floor etc. so we were banned from the area. They didn't cancel the gig though so we played and had a guest appearance from a band called Fitts For Fight who had been playing before us. What we didn't know at this time was that Fitts For Fight were a fake band who had stolen all of their songs, so it felt even more amazing that we had a guest appearance from them when we heard the news. I thought it was fun of them to steal songs and just add screaming vocals on them and call them their own and make a short career out of it.
Surprisingly enough we got paid more for our show than we had agreed on, even though we had destroyed the backstage area. I guess it was because so many people turned up for the show. 

* Another time in Oslo we played at some sort of café slash bar where people tried to read books at the same time as our concert. It was a horrible gig and if I remember it right it was some kind of incident with one of our band members, Erik, who got so drunk that he lay on the floor with a mannequin when the manager of the place found him. He then got banned from drinking more that night. They hadn't even booked us a hotel for the night and told us that we could go and sleep in the park, and I got so mad that I would probably have punched his face if it wasn't for my band members holding me back. It ended with us getting a too small amount of money for a hotel for the night and it was impossible to find any that wasn't already fully booked or too expensive. We found a hotel at last that would let us stay in a room which was out of order due to a leak in the sink and we were just happy to being able to sleep somewhere.

* The next day we went to Bergen and I never told my band members Erik and Linus this but on the train there I thought about quitting the band. I had enough of all the problems with touring and I didn't see the fun in being in the band anymore. We played the gig where we had technical issues which made us restart the computer in the middle of the show. The sound that you can hear when you start Windows went out at full volume to the almost empty concert hall and people started cheering. The next day we had 16 hours of bus ride to go home and me and Linus had a small amount of wine with us from the day before. It wasn't enough for both of us to get drunk so I gave my bottle to Linus to watch him getting drunk as my entertainment for the ride home. When the bus driver stopped in the middle of nowhere for a change of drivers half way from Bergen to Oslo, Linus went out to take a leak behind a big stone and he almost missed the bus leaving again, to be stranded in the middle of nowhere. Thankfully he got on just 1 second before the bus was leaving but he almost got thrown out of the bus again for wrecking too much havoc. He tried to borrow a guys guitar, he lay down in the lap of some passengers and had fun in an alcoholic kind of way while all others were sober. It ended with Linus sitting down and playing Tetris on his Game Boy and he fell asleep while doing it. I turned the volume up to max and the tune was looping for a long time with max volume, but he didn't notice and slept like a baby. 

* The last time we played in Oslo it was me and Olle in the band and we got cheated and never got the money we had agreed on. This wasn't the first time they tried to screw us in Norway and that makes you think if they really are that rich as they claim since they found oil? Our new friends Linda and Elin who we had met while playing in Hudiksvall in Sweden flew to Oslo to see us again. And there we also met Sigmund and Kjersti who would become our new friends. They watched the show were I was wearing some kind of space helmet that another band had brought, and almost the entire show was playback and drunk dancing. The only time I tried to play on the synthesizer it sounded like crap so I quickly stopped. 

All of us went into a taxi to go to our hotel for an after party but we quickly got thrown out by the driver who screamed "drittsekker!", which means assholes, since we thought the ride was too expensive for our taste. At the after party I started to drain all of us in soap and schampoo until Kjersti explained that she was allergic to it. I was feeling so bad for doing this to her and the evening ended on a bad note.
When Kjersti and Sigmund then went to Gothenburg in Sweden where I now live, they told me that they had just been fooling me, and that she wasn't allergic at all, I loved them for pranking me like that.

When Ninjaspark was over I started a new band called Slutet who played some kind of post-rock and the approach on stage was the opposite of my former band. Me and my friend Christofer who acted as the driver went to Oslo together with the band members Peter, Josef and Jennie.
We stood outside the club and talked to some random girls and I told one of them as a joke that she should have Christofers room key to the hotel where we all shared room. I took it from Christofer and gave it to her, but then I couldn't find her 5 minutes later and I got scared that we would get in trouble at the hotel the next day for losing the card. We got drunk and somehow Christofer went out on his own journey in the night and was never seen again until the next morning, just before we were supposed to check out. He had the key card with him since he had found the girl at a random after party, the world is small sometimes!

* Best things about Norway – the majestic scenery out in the wild
* Most mediocre thing about Norway – it's not that different from Sweden in many ways, but it feels like a dorky little brother
* Worst things about Norway – the distance between Oslo and Bergen, the expensive prices and that the concert promoters always try to cheat you

Best countries in the world according to the nerd (will be updated with every post):
1. Croatia
2. Montenegro
3. Andorra
4. Cyprus
5. Greece
6. Italy
7. Monaco
8. Malta
9. Netherlands
10. Iceland
11. Denmark
12. Lithuania
13. Macedonia            
14. Ireland
15. Belgium
16. Estonia
17. Kosovo
18. Finland
19. Latvia
20. Norway
21. France
22. Bulgaria
23. Luxembourg
24. Liechtenstein
25. China
26. Bosnia And Herzegovina
27. Albania