Going to Oslo
The Monday was another slightly wet, slightly rainy day. I got my laundry done at Inge's (losing one sock in the process, oh no!), and started walking to the train station. Online, some recommended waiting at a road going north from Copenhagen, but that day I was thinking to just take the train to Helsingor, where people going to Sweden would take the 30 minute ferry across the small watery gap, to Helsingborg.
Before making the same mistake in Oslo like in Copenhagen, arriving with no local currency (damn Scandinavians and their 3 different Kroners!), I changed what money I had left for some Norwegian Kroner. It was interesting at the money changer's because I only had very little money. I really hadn't thought about getting cash from ATMs - how much my bank or my credit card company would charge me and which one's a better deal, and I didn't want to think about it, so at that time I ended up with 100 Norwegian Kroner from 10 Euro and 21.75 Danish Kroner.
The train ride was quite good, with interesting villages left and right of the tracks. At one point everybody had to get off and the train left without us! A new train then came, I wonder if that's a common thing in Denmark.
At Helsingor, the train station is directly connected to the ferry station, which reminded me of the computer game Transport Tycoon, but I wanted to get a ride before getting on to the ferry, for one thing that would spare me the ferry fee (which is only about 3 euros, but hey..). So I walked to the car's entrance to the ferry port (with my heavy backpack, it felt like a long walk) and started waiting...
Hitchhiking is always an exercise in waiting and hoping, with your thumb out. Will this one stop? Smile! Oh nope, he drove straight past me. Oh another car, smile! Nope. Maybe this one... nope. I'm sure my ride will be one of the next 5 cars... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... nope, argh!
After 3 hours, I gave up, and walked back to the ferry terminal for pedestrians, and paid 21 Danish Kroner. This other passengers were also fascinating. Once again the beer-runners were to be seen; carrying cartons of beers in shopping carts. I guess beer's cheaper in Denmark than in Sweden...
After the short ferry ride, with me holding my sign saying "OSLO" on it and getting weird looks from the people, we were in Helsingborg, Sweden. Wow, Sweden, first time here, I thought.
Because I only had Norwegian Kroner, I decided to use my bank card and get some Swedish ones from the ATM. while doing this inside the terminal, I heard a lady scream, and I looked at her way. She was running down the escalators, being chased by cans of beer! The cans were in a carton, and the carton was sitting on top of a shopping cart, but while going down the escalator the carton fell down, and broke apart, leaving cans flying all over the place, mostly down, with the poor lady on the way. It was quite funny watching the owner of the cans collecting them from the floor, in my mind he was probably thinking "oh no, my precious booze!".
After having a short look of the city centre (its city hall is a majestic ancient building), I got a tourist map and started looking for the best place to wait for a ride. Walking to the entrance of the highway was be impossible, so I decided to wait at the exit of the ferry terminal.
Some people online write that hitch-hiking in Sweden is very uncommon, and people look at you with a huge lot of skepticism. I can verify this, with a lot of people giving me weird looks as I stood there. But maybe it's because my sign said Oslo, a destination about 500 km away.
The cars came in intervals, after a lull of a few minutes there would be about 20 or 30, all getting off the 2 ferries that travel between Helsingor and Helsingborg. All of them with people looking skeptically at me. After about 2 hours, one car finally stopped. But the driver and his wife weren't going to Oslo, which is north, but in the direction of Stockholm, which is to the north east. They took me anyway, to a gas stop near the highway, which is about 8km away, and then the pointless waiting continued.
While waiting, I wondered why the Swedes all look so grumpy and old, do they get their driving licence at 40 or something? I even got harassed by a fat girl in an A-class Mercedes Benz. For some reason they found it amusing to go round and around the roundabout next to which I was standing and taunt me. Heh, useless idiots. Too bad I didn't take a picture of them to put here.
But then, the sky was blue, the trees were green, and I thought, if I were back home in Karlsruhe right now, I'd be sitting in front of the computer at work, being bored. "I'd much rather be here!"
After a while I gave up on Oslo and decided I should get back to the city centre and find a couch to sleep on. This was a problem because I wasn't really sure where the city centre was. All I knew was it's about 8km away. I started walking...
Past a cute suburbia/housing project where kids playing probably wondered why there's an Asian with a huge backpack walking through their neighborhood, next to roads, under roads, and finally to a train station which is one stop away from the centre. The walk took me about an hour, and it wasn't easy with the heavy backpack and sore-from-too-much-standing feet.
After taking the 5 minute train-ride, I was back where I was 3 or 4 hours before; the Helsingborg ferry terminal. I started looking for couches online from an internet café. Some of the couch-surfers even left their email addresses and telephone numbers on the site, which I found great. So I called one of them, Christian, and asked him if he'd be willing to host me.
Such is my luck, he has 4 French guys staying with him that night. But he suggested we meet up and talk about finding a solution to my problem. They were drinking wine at the bay area just to the north of the ferry station, which was luckily not that far away. Walking there I got to see a bit more of the city, other than the hordes of grumpy drivers that pass it...
Christian told me what choices I had; either find a youth hostel, or take a bus to Oslo. "There's a bus?". Yes, apparently there was, leaving at half past midnight. Hah. Either one would cost about 30 Euros, so I decided to take the bus, because otherwise who knows how long I'll be waiting there the next day.
So all six of us (Christian, 4 Frenchmen, and I) walked to the bus terminal, which is actually just underneath the train/ferry (and bus!) terminal, and then I waited for the bus...
The bus finally arrived about 20 minutes late, enough for me to wonder if it was going to show up at all. Actually it came from Copenhagen over the Oresund Bridge, so in retrospect I could have boarded it there and saved myself one day of waiting, but well, hindsight huh?
The bus was not that full, so I could get some sleep. But the problem with travelling while you're sleeping is, you miss all the scenery. But considering it was dark outside, I wasn't missing much!
Sleep I did, although not so well. I woke up as we turned off the highway and stopped at Göteborg train station. For some reason this city fell off my list of destinations, although in my mind I would visit it on the way back. "So this is Göteborg", was what my half-sleeping brain thought when we stopped there.
Missing the Border
The bus was stopping to get some gas, and from the picture you can see a Rema 1000 (well the "Rema" bit anyway, at the very right) at that stop, a supermarket chain which exists all over Norway.
Googling for all locations of the supermarkets, and seeing which ones of them are near the south of Norway on the E6 highway, I guessed it was the branch at Svinesundparken.
Google Images confirms this because it shows that half-arch of the "Bohus" when you search for "Svinesundparken".
I had overslept the border by less than 5km...
The next time I woke up, we were already in Norway, sadly I wasn't awake for the border crossing. It was 5:45 in the morning, but there was already some sunlight, though covered by thick clouds, so I decided to stay awake and enjoy the scenery, because, hey, you can only have one first visit to Norway!
After a long windy drive, sometimes along tiny 2 lane roads, we finally hit a big city, with about 3 skyscrapers. "I wonder what big city this is. It can't be Oslo, it only has 3 skyscrapers.". The bus drove into the city, and I assumed it was going to drop off some passengers there. But it wasn't going anywhere else, we were in Oslo!
