Busy Day
I guess it's been a while since I did a thing on this thing. I've had an eventful and moderately upsetting day. Trondheim sort of fell apart around me. I woke up this morning to find an e-mail from Anja, my English teacher. Apparently she has the flu and will be out until at least Wednesday and she asked me to take over her classes on Tuesday. Alone. Like I'm solely in charge of 30 Europeans for an hour and a half straight. This can only end in tears.
The political science class with Svein I observed today was decent, he teaches mostly in Norwegian but I can pick up a few words here and there so it's still interesting. I like him a lot. He struggles with English so he gets really excited when I throw out a random word of Norwegian. He has a lot of funny stories and is grudgingly realistic about Norway's limited role on the global scale. He likes to make a big deal whenever he mentions a fishing-rights treaty where Norway beat the UK or Russia.
So school was good, getting home from school not so much. It's a twenty minute bus ride from Heimdal back to Trondheim, then a ten minute ride to Moholt where I actually live. I got on the bus in Heimdal, and we made it about half a kilometer before we got stuck in heavy traffic. We crawled forward and about ten minutes later came to a big bridge just outside town. It's a large bridge with a good 150 foot drop to the valley below. As we got about halfway across, we could see the source of the traffic: Police have blocked the bridge down to one lane and are only allowing traffic to pass one side at a time.
This traffic control is due to a young man, perhaps late teens, who has climbed over the guard fence and is hanging off the edge of the bridge, apparently refusing help from other pedestrians and police. I don't know if he was threatening to jump but it sure looked that way. As we drove by we saw a mountain rescue team with climbing gear running toward him. I have no idea what happened after that nor how to find a news source about it. We got stuck in the snow a little way up the road and the people at the back of the bus could still see what was happening. I didn't hear any screams so I'm hoping for the best.
It was at this point that our bus driver apparently decided "Fuck it". His method of getting the bus unstuck involved flooring it until the wheels took hold and threw everyone standing sideways (and there were a lot of us). Once we got moving, he didn't let off for a second. He kept us going as fast as possible until we were almost on top of the next bus stop, then slammed on the brakes and slid into the general area of the stop. This was a very long, very heavy, overloaded, jointed bus and the center pivot would skid out to the side every time he braked. Anyone caught in its path wouldn't have stood a chance. After repeating this process for a dozen stops, it was finally my turn to get off in Trondheim.
I got off and saw that the next bus to Moholt (#5) was at the station 30 yards up the road. I ran as quickly as I could across the ice to catch it. Luckily it was still there when I got to the station. About this time I realized that it wasn't so much luck keeping the bus there as the endless line of unmoving cars that stretched out in front of the bus as far as I could see. What surprised me most was that I could see two more #5 Moholt busses stuck in the line of traffic ahead. This traffic jam had apparently been in place for a while now and wasn't likely to break soon.
I decided to start walking along the bus route until traffic seemed to clear, then wait for a #5 at the closest stop. Within the first quarter mile, I saw two buses (one of them my beloved number five) stuck sideways in the road, blocking the other lane of traffic and any hope of a tow truck's assistance. As I continued along the route, this proved itself a repeated theme. I came across three more buses unable to move in the ice, and saw an astonishing number of #5's among those stuck in traffic--I counted 13 in all. I plodded along the bus route, whizzing by traffic that moved at an average of no miles per hour. I wound up walking the full three miles* from Trondheim to Moholt without seeing a car move more than ten feet at a time, and none of the cars I passed ever caught up to me. *And yes, it was uphill in the snow.
When I got home I had two cheap beers, a cheese sandwich, and a long nap.
On the bright side, Barbaro was euthanized today. I'm not a big fan of horses. There's no need for an animal to be big enough to kill a man if they don't routinely do it on purpose.
The political science class with Svein I observed today was decent, he teaches mostly in Norwegian but I can pick up a few words here and there so it's still interesting. I like him a lot. He struggles with English so he gets really excited when I throw out a random word of Norwegian. He has a lot of funny stories and is grudgingly realistic about Norway's limited role on the global scale. He likes to make a big deal whenever he mentions a fishing-rights treaty where Norway beat the UK or Russia.
So school was good, getting home from school not so much. It's a twenty minute bus ride from Heimdal back to Trondheim, then a ten minute ride to Moholt where I actually live. I got on the bus in Heimdal, and we made it about half a kilometer before we got stuck in heavy traffic. We crawled forward and about ten minutes later came to a big bridge just outside town. It's a large bridge with a good 150 foot drop to the valley below. As we got about halfway across, we could see the source of the traffic: Police have blocked the bridge down to one lane and are only allowing traffic to pass one side at a time.
This traffic control is due to a young man, perhaps late teens, who has climbed over the guard fence and is hanging off the edge of the bridge, apparently refusing help from other pedestrians and police. I don't know if he was threatening to jump but it sure looked that way. As we drove by we saw a mountain rescue team with climbing gear running toward him. I have no idea what happened after that nor how to find a news source about it. We got stuck in the snow a little way up the road and the people at the back of the bus could still see what was happening. I didn't hear any screams so I'm hoping for the best.
It was at this point that our bus driver apparently decided "Fuck it". His method of getting the bus unstuck involved flooring it until the wheels took hold and threw everyone standing sideways (and there were a lot of us). Once we got moving, he didn't let off for a second. He kept us going as fast as possible until we were almost on top of the next bus stop, then slammed on the brakes and slid into the general area of the stop. This was a very long, very heavy, overloaded, jointed bus and the center pivot would skid out to the side every time he braked. Anyone caught in its path wouldn't have stood a chance. After repeating this process for a dozen stops, it was finally my turn to get off in Trondheim.
I got off and saw that the next bus to Moholt (#5) was at the station 30 yards up the road. I ran as quickly as I could across the ice to catch it. Luckily it was still there when I got to the station. About this time I realized that it wasn't so much luck keeping the bus there as the endless line of unmoving cars that stretched out in front of the bus as far as I could see. What surprised me most was that I could see two more #5 Moholt busses stuck in the line of traffic ahead. This traffic jam had apparently been in place for a while now and wasn't likely to break soon.
I decided to start walking along the bus route until traffic seemed to clear, then wait for a #5 at the closest stop. Within the first quarter mile, I saw two buses (one of them my beloved number five) stuck sideways in the road, blocking the other lane of traffic and any hope of a tow truck's assistance. As I continued along the route, this proved itself a repeated theme. I came across three more buses unable to move in the ice, and saw an astonishing number of #5's among those stuck in traffic--I counted 13 in all. I plodded along the bus route, whizzing by traffic that moved at an average of no miles per hour. I wound up walking the full three miles* from Trondheim to Moholt without seeing a car move more than ten feet at a time, and none of the cars I passed ever caught up to me. *And yes, it was uphill in the snow.
When I got home I had two cheap beers, a cheese sandwich, and a long nap.
On the bright side, Barbaro was euthanized today. I'm not a big fan of horses. There's no need for an animal to be big enough to kill a man if they don't routinely do it on purpose.