Author: John Burk

The ramblings of a physics teacher.

We found our apartment

Before I give away the details of our apartment, I need to share the backstory of how we found it. Finn.no is the craigslist of Norway, and every apartment for rent ends up posted there along with a used bikes, skis and a ton of other stuff I’m sure we’ll take advantage of in the future.

Finn.no is a quirky site, there’s a map you can search to find apartments by area, and Google translate does a respectable job of translating most everything on the site, but I’ve learned quite a bit of real estate Norwegian from having to translate the bits that don’t work, like number of bedrooms, furnished, and a few others.

Back in February, I set bookmark to show me the apartments that were new each day, and would then try to write any apartments that met our criteria (2 bedrooms, close to the kids school, not crazy expensive). As it turned out, there are next to no rentals in the town we wanted to live in, and for the first few months, I would never hear back from the owners. A few times, I got emails telling me about the dozen or more respondants, all of whom were likely local Norweigians, with Norwegian bank accounts, so I began to think seriously Norway’s Right to Roam and how it’s free and legal to pitch a tent on the side of the road.

Luckily, in late May, one landlord did write us back to let us know that her furnished two bedroom apartment in central Bekkestua was available for rent. Really, it was a dream come true. We are set to sign the paperwork and move in on Tuesday, and today, while wandering around Central Bekkestua, Diana and I did our best to figure out where exactly our apartment is.

Here’s a panorama of Bekkestua SenterIMG 0214

At first, we only had an approximate address, so we had no idea which apartment was ours, but after looking carefully at the post, we zeroed in on this place:

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And getting even closer

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I’m a bit flummoxed by the meaning of Bekkestua Handelshus. Google translates it as “trading house” and my Google fu seems to indicate this whole building is atop some sort of parking deck. Annen-Etage (Another Floor) is some sort gift and interior store that we will likely never shop unless we find a need for $15 bars of soap or $700 handbags, but the really astounding news is that we are right above a grocery store (awesome), and next to the train station, which means it should take me about 20 minutes to get the University and central Oslo.

Eagle eyed viewers like my daughter, Maddie, might notice that I missed one more sign:
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If you look just up the stairs, you’ll see ThomasLeker is TOY STORE.

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I haven’t yet told Maddie that she lives next door to a toy store. I’m saving that for the next day or so when she’s missing her mom, but I think she and Ada are going to agree that they’ve found the perfect home for the next year.

If you’d like to do some scouting of our new home, here’s the link on Google Maps. Please report back if you find something cool we should check out.

The Nobel Prize

Before the day took a turn for the worse, we did get to see the Nobel Peace Prize at the Nobel Peace Center. Of course, when Maddie learned this wasn’t the “science” prize Marie Curie won, she instantly wanted to go and visit where the “science” prizes are, so maybe a visit to Stockholm is in our future.

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A sad day and a change of plans

Today, when we were riding the ferry to Hovedøya, Diana got a call from her sister letting us know that Diana’s mom has taken a turn for the worse in the hospital, and is now in the ICU (Diana’s mom had gone into the hospital last week for stomach pain that was discovered to be pancreatitis). After rushing back to our place, a lot of phone consultations with family, and scouring travel websites, Diana is booked for a flight back to Atlanta tomorrow and should be home by around 9pm. It was a really tough call for us to decide whether or not John, Maddie and Ada should join her, but some good news later in the day made us think it would probably be better to wait and not subject the girls to a long flight back the states. Please do keep Diana’s mom in your thoughts and prayers.

It does mean that we will be cancelling our trip to Athens which was supposed to begin on Wednesday. Diana won’t be able to volunteer with A Drop in the Ocean, but hopefully we’ll be able to reschedule that for next summer.

For the next week or two, I’ll be doing my best to get settled into Norway with the girls, and Diana will be helping her mom to get well. With any luck, Diana will be back here before we know it, and we hope Diana’s mom will be booking tickets to visit us in Norway, too.

Today also happens to be our 12th anniversary, which is a great reminder of the power of love and the meaning of “in sickness and in health.”

We made it!

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Wow! We made it. Navigating the airport with 3 carry on suitcases, a duffle bag, 4 backpacks, a stroller and two kids who don’t really want to schlep suitcases through the airport isn’t something I really want to repeat, but everything went far more smoothly than I could have possibly imagined. Really the biggest inconveniences were just how hard it is to squeeze down an airplane isle when you are carrying a duffle bag and pushing a suitcase loaded with a backpack. Here are a few photos of the fun we had on the flights.

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The photo above was taken at 1AM just before the airplane finally turned the lights off. Our kids got pretty silly up so late at night and we all fell promptly to sleep at 1:15AM when the lights finally turned off.

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The one causality of our trip was forgetting the $8 umbrella stroller we brought along. I just overlooked it in grabbing all of our stuff from the baggage carousel. Since the airport is over an hour away from where we are staying and train tickets are much more expensive than $8, I think we’ll be donating that stroller to the airport. I’ve got to give huge props to Flyo.no, the transport company that we prearranged to meet us. It was awesome to see my name on a sign as I exit the airport and then have a driver easily load up all of our luggage into a huge Mercedes van for a comfortable ride to our AirBnB in Bekkestua.

Our AirBnB in Bekkestua is wonderful—our fabulous host, Eric met us along with his 3 year old daughter, Julie. Maddie and Ada quickly discovered that Julie has an older 6 year old sister (how perfect!) and it seems like jumping on the trampoline is a universal way to make friends. Maddie is already referring to her “friend who speaks Norwegian and shares candy with her.”

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After that, we took a short walk to the center of the city, purchased some delicious strawberries from a farm stand—the strawberries are small and delicious here, and apparently, a big thing in Norway. We spent more time at a playground I knew the kids would like when I visited back in March, though everything was covered in snow back then.

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We then had our first foray in a grocery store to purchase pasta for dinner. The Norwegian grocery store is true to everything I’d heard—starting with expensive. Our simple pasta dinner, 2 bagles and cream cheese ran 154 kroner, or about $20, which is steal compared to what dinner would have cost at a restaurant.

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The other thing we are having to get used to here in Norway is that the sun doesn’t set until very late (10:40pm, yesterday) and it rises at 4:01 in the morning. Though it didn’t really truly get dark last night. This, on top of the timezone change, meant Maddie and Ada really have no clue what time it was, and thought 10pm was a great time for a dance party just as their parents were ready to drop dead from a lack of sleep.

Today, Diana and I celebrate our 12 year anniversary by exploring Oslo with the kids and maybe doing some stroller shopping on Finn.no, the craigslist of Norway.

Why Norway?

A lot of people have asked why we’re choosing to spend our sabbatical in Norway. It’s true, Norway is one of the happiest countries in the world, but that’s not exactly why we chose it.

At first, we just knew we wanted to live abroad for a year. We wanted to enroll the girls in a local school and get to know one place really well, which ruled out homeschooling and traveling the world. When we researched how to go about getting a residency permit to spend a year abroad, it initially seemed quite daunting—work/residency permits weren’t easy to come by for many of the countries we considered, and just about every European country in the Schengen Agreement requires you to spend 90 days out of the Schengen Zone (basically all of Europe) after 90 days of residency, which isn’t well suited to attending school.

After reaching out to a good friend who holds a joint appointment with both Michigan State and the University of Oslo, I was able to connect with some wonderful people who run the Center for Computing in Science Education at the University of Oslo, and they were very supportive of the idea of me spending a year at the university as a visiting researcher.

In March, I took a short 50 hour whirlwind tour of Oslo to visit the University and scout several possible schools for our daughters and came away convinced of many things:

  • Norway is a stunningly beautiful country.
  • Oslo is an incredible city with an infrastructure 50 years beyond anything I’ve seen. It’s going to be a joy living for a year without a car here.
  • We can adjust to the cold.
  • We found a great school for the girls.
  • Norway is amazingly eco-friendly.
  • The city is expensive (this is just about the first thing everyone tells you about it).

So that’s about it. We had to fill out a tall stack of paperwork to process our visa applications, and visit a website of available apartments every day for a month until we found an apartment that would work for us, but we eventually found a wonderful furnished apartment 5 minutes from our daughters’ school.