Evening:
Our batting average just improved to .250! We hopped into a taxi and headed over to the enclosed stadium, which was a major plus, given how much rain would have dumped on our heads over the course of two hours. A friend of Mom’s, Petra (someone who lives here in Norway) got some tickets for us—all we had to do was show up at the pre-purchased ticket line and everything would be taken care of. It took some time and some puzzled looks from the person behind the desk after we handed her the message that Petra sent us, but it was eventually taken care of and we got to watch the game.
Like I said, it was an enclosed stadium, but it was fairly small and about half-empty, so we didn’t need our earplugs. That’s not to say that it never got loud in there. The final score was 2-1—the home team lost—so there were at least a few bursts of cheering (along with whistles and screaming when one of the home players got knocked down).
Along with the cheering, though, there were some very strange chants. We couldn’t understand what they were chanting—we might not have understood even if they were chanting in English—but we did know was that some of them sounded like songs that you would not normally associate with Norwegian soccer: Kum Ba Ya, the Beatles’ Hey Jude and, oddest of all, Yankee Doodle.
Getting back home was another brief adventure as we walked around the outside of the stadium. And around. And around. We were heading towards a bus stop—one of the security crew members working there told us that taxis were rare after a football match, so we should get onto Route 31 to get toward downtown Oslo. During the course of our discussing what to do, Mom saw a taxi driving towards us as we were walking, so she ran toward the road waving her arm and flagged it down.
Now we’re back at our hotel room watching soccer on TV and wondering what we’ll be doing tomorrow. After all, we’re sticking around town, but after all the walking we’ve done today, just how much walking will our legs want to do tomorrow? I guess we’ll find out in the morning, but for now, it’s time to chill and work some more on getting our internal clocks set to Oslo time.
