The Possum Bistro

We would soon be accustomed to long train rides across Europe, and our first taste of that was a 9-hour journey from Copenhagen to Oslo, Norway. The latter is considered to be the most expensive city in all of Europe - which foretold countless lunches of bread and butter to come.

We managed to get to a hostel situated inconveniently at the top of a small hill which we had to climb in the middle of the night - thanks to the Norwegian who so effusively proffered a helping hand at the train station to guide us there! The Scandinavians are genuinely nice people.

One really appealing factor about backpacking is the sheer variety of people you would meet while bunking at these youth hostels - that very night we trudged and trundled our way across the grassy field and into our room, we met a Taiwanese and a man from Iceland.

Somehow, almost every conversation with a Taiwanese would inevitably - if not inadvertently, deliberately edged towards - end up with their boisterous President Chen Shui-bian. Another topic that came up concerned us: the amount of fighting (which is employed more frequently than verbal sparring) in Parliament - our friend informed us that parliamentarians only slug each other to get on television and earn a reputation for representing their constituencies.

Apparently, voter identification in Taiwan is partially - and strangely - determined by how many blows one can land "for the people", and not so much on policies.

When we mentioned about our country, he had absolutely no idea that the political system was illiberal - just like the innumerable people we had met along the journey who remarked rather consistently that our country is so green/clean/beautiful/small/organised. The government here has done a fine job in ensuring our international image remains untainted by accusations of which may be reserved for regimes like Egypt and China - and international apathy seems to be blissfully tolerant of bedfellows like illiberalism as long as the latter is donning the critic-deflecting robes of economic success.

I posed a suggestion to him: at least Taiwanese seem to be vaguely interested in politics, in contrast to the apathetic malaise that seems to plague our citizens here. He countered with this: more publicity does not necessarily mean less apathy - it is just as easy and foolish to mistake thinly veiled partisanship/nationalism for deliberated concern over issues like independence. I concur - how else do you explain the apparent delusional perspectives of the Democrats as they spew inane solutions that contradict the objectives while trumpeting patriotism?

The Icelander had his own fish to skewer, to put it figuratively. He was lamenting about the fact that Iceland and Norway both have fishing industries as their primary source of revenue, and have shared a common insistence not to join the European Union. Revealing that the bureaucratic ministers in charge of Agriculture would be responsible for taking on the fishing portfolio, it is merely a preview of how idiotic the misallocation of expertise and manpower the lumbering transnational monstrosity that is the EU can manifest under its watch.

Through our dialogue, we had to agree on one thing: no decision that important should be left to clueless bureaucrats who neither serve the national interest nor show any semblance of capabilities of sensible policy-crafting. Kudos to Norway and Iceland for standing up to the feckless transnational progressives!

Apparently, there's no such thing as decorum in our feathered friends' vocabulary.

This reminds me of a prank played by the ingenious people at Just for Laughs - when an entire group of people follow an unknowing pedestrian in a march!

A bevy of bubbly kids at the park - it is compulsory to wear those neon-yellow vests for safety purposes in Norway. One visible difference between Norway and our country is that parents here would never let their kids get so close to potential hazards like this. Think I'm exaggerating? Apparently, sand may scrape one's skin off and thus labeled as "dangerous".

It's Draw-a-guard day!

According to Lonely Planet, their imaginative - perhaps strayed - minds labeled this structure "phallic". It's actually a tower of bodies wrapped around each other, in essence - honouring the same line of thought as those at Lonely Planet - who are obviously quite lonely - an orgy.

This shot - part of a larger statue - really appeals to me: it captures the "Why won't you play with me?" feel nicely. Alternatively, the girl, her brows all furrowed up in irritation and indignation, is protected by the embrace of an adult; the boy looks on in horror, his desperate eyes attempting to plead with the girl not to tell on him.

Recreated scenes of the events leading up to the Third Reich's invasion of Norway, this being in the Norwegian Resistance Museum. The resistance movement was very active during the war, carrying out multiple sabotage operations through the movement MILORG. The government-in-exile worked with these organisations to cripple the collborators led by Quisling, who unreservedly became the Nazis' puppet in Norway.

"Never again" - now, where have we heard that before? Munich was probably etched in the minds of the Norwegians at that time, and one would certainly not have been surprised in sensing deep skepticism as to whether Norway would survive the crises of decades to come - the most relevant then being the sweeping Communist takeover of Eastern Europe. The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia lay right at Norway's doorstep, and the USSR did share a common border with it too. The bristling Red Army and the memories of the recent war could not have escaped the considerations of optimists, realists and most definitely Communist sympathisers in Norway at that time.

From here, we traveled to Bergen - the only city in the world nestled in the midst of seven fjords and seven mountains!