The view from the train window, just before we crossed the Norwegian-Swedish border.
I’ve now been on the train for four hours, and I haven’t achieved a thing. Why, a reader might ask, do I even need to achieve anything? I’m on a train, heading back home to a traineeship where I’ll have plenty to do, soon enough. Why not take this opportunity to not do anything at all? Well, because I feel completely useless, and uselessness makes me apathetic, and that in turn creates a vicous circle that is very hard to get out of. Especially since I had planned to do things during these 19 hours comfortably traveling through this oblong, coniferously forested native country of mine. I have to write my traineeship journal from the Bodø meeting. I have to write reading notes for two novels that I finished three and two weeks ago, respectively. I would like to transcribe a passage from ”The Golden Notebook”. And I should definitely finish my travel journal.
What I should not be doing is watch Source Code, a movie I found on my computer, left from last summer, when I saw it while traveling by train somewhere in Germany, I think. It is not even a particularily good movie, but it has Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan, both very beautiful people, and it’s easy to just disappear. A stranger telling you that you’re kind and beautiful and brutally honest, and then, with the knowledge that there’s only eight minutes left before the train we’re all on is blown up, he chooses to kiss you. Of all the things one could do during the last minutes of one’s life. To be honest, I feel a little bit insecure and out of place right now, and that kind of easy love story calms me.
There is a little romantic in me. I resent her and try to shut her up as much as I can, but sometimes. She just needs a little what-if-you-died-in-8-minutes-rhetoric.
Luckily, I’m in a all-women compartment, and all the others in here are middle-aged. Definitely nice-looking in their way, but not kissing material for my little parasite romantic.
Later, south of Gällivare:
A woman got on the train and is supposed to sit next to me in the compartment. She asked me to move my bag from the luggage shelf, just because she preferred to have her bag there instead. I moved it, of course, no need to start a fight, but seriously. People are weird.
And I can’t stop thinking about food. Since Bodø I haven’t really eaten anything proper, except for the amazing breakfast that they had in Kabelvåg hostel. I had pasta, oatmeal and soup in a bag with me, you know, the kind you bring on hikes that you mix with hot water. Nuts and dried fruit. Norway is expensive, and Lofoten even more so, and since I won’t be earning any money this summer, I thought I would try to travel as cheap as possible. And it’s worked fine, until I reached Kabelvåg and went in to that hamburger restaurant where the hamburgers cost 150 kroner. I didn’t buy one, but I really wanted to, and as soon as I got to Narvik, the urge became even more pressing.
I bought a sausage rolled in bacon for breakfast. I couldn’t even stay vegetarian! I’m so ashamed of myself. To be honest, I couldn’t find a fast food place that served anything vegetarian for less than 150, so that’s why I bought the sausage, but still. I so badly wanted something warm, cooked, greasy. A falafel would have been perfect, but I guess they haven’t reached as far north as Narvik yet.
I have plenty of points on my SJ (Swedish railway) membership card now, though, so in a couple of hours I’ll go to the train restaurant and buy all I can get for my points from my Uppsala, Copenhagen, Kiruna, Norrköping, Narvik and Härnösand trips.
Later still, the birches, spruce and pines outside the window are gradually getting taller:
Maybe I could tell you a little bit about my Narvik experience, then. My couchsurfing host Jimmy took me on a guided tour of the city in his car, down to the sea and up on the mountain, and that was basically it. Some cute wooden houses, some quite ugly mid-19th century buildings, a new tall hotel in the middle of everything.
In the morning, before having to catch my train, I walked around a little bit in the center, but didn’t find that very inspiring either. Some statues and a sex toy shop advertised for in huge letters, that’s all. Narvik as a town is nothing that could draw anyone’s attention. It’s the surroundings. The sea and the snow-covered mountain tops. And the soft Norwegian spoken by the locals.
Peace is promise of future
What hit me there, the same as in Bodø, was the presence of World War Two. In monuments and also in the fact that basically the entire town was bombed to rubble way back when, which means that almost everything in the town was built in the mid-1940’s or later. That history is present there, in the same way as it is in Finland and the rest of Europe. It’s only Sweden that has this untarnished past, free from rubble, that makes it so easy to forget that there ever was a world war. Having the war present as it is in Narvik or Bodø might make forgetting what led up to the war harder. Or, I don’t know. It was just something that I reacted on.
Narvik is the northernmost stop in the Swedish railway system, from what I understand built as a means to transport iron from the Kiruna mines to the Atlantic. When I got on the train and entered my assigned compartment, the train seemed completely empty. But some other hikers were getting on. Standing in the door of my compartment, I suddenly stood face to face with Jonas. My brain didn’t react at first, I just stared at him, us standing about two decimeters apart, him looking about as flummoxed as I felt. My classmate Jonas, from the Resilience Centre! Of all the places to run into someone! He and his girlfriend Erika were going to sleep in the compartment next to mine. They had been biking on Lofoten. It took more than half an hour before we got over the chock.
But now everything has calmed down. I’ve been moving back and forth between my compartment (that eventually got filled with middle-aged women) and theirs (that stayed empty, except for them). The train ride from Narvik to Stockholm takes 19 hours, it’s always nice with some company. Especially if it’s people as interesting as Jonas and Erika.
Katja Malmborg 