norway draft

_posts/2023-06-02-norway.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "9 days in Norway"
+subtitle: "Stillhet!"
+date: 2023-06-02 00:00:00
+permalink: norway/
+categories: personal
+author: Mahdi
+excerpt_separator: <!--more-->
+published: false
+---
+
+First impression of Norway: "Stillhet (Silence)"
+We get on the train from airport to Oslo S station, and on every seat it says "Stillhet, Silence". We are talking as we are trying to figure out where are we going, etc. and we get these looks from the people here. It is strange.
+
+[Stillhet, Silence sign on seats of train]()
+
+At some point during the train ride, a couple of girls are laughing in a low volume (I did not even notice them until this happened), and this old lady (a passenger) gets up, approaches them and tells them to be quiet (I did not understand the words, but that seemed like what she said), and the girls go quiet. The rest of the train ride is very, very quiet. So far, I don't like this environment.
+
+But I was quick to judge, turns out there are quiet zones in trains, and a good bunch of the wagons are quiet zones. Which I actually like, I think. If I lived in a place like this I might personally use a quiet zone when using the train.
+
+[Quiet zones]()
+
+However this seemed to extend to a lot of other places as well, the city of Oslo in general was pretty quiet for a friday evening, not much *seemed* to be happening from the our perspective, and there were no loud noises, except the rare music here and there from bars, but even then not super loud. Coming from Tehran and Dublin which can be quite loud (each in their own way) this was quite novel.
+
+We left for airport to pick up our friend who was arriving late, so we ended up picking him up at around midnight, and then we set off for our first place to stay. Our strongest shock during this road trip middle of night was that at some point we had to stop because a road maintenance truck was stopping traffic, as there was another van and some people trimming grass / vegetation beside the road (outside of the road fence), which was quite surprising to us why they would spend time and resources trimming vegetation beside the road! There was traffic building up behind this (even though this was 1 or 2am at this point) because of this for a while. If you know any reason for why they do this, please let me know as I am very curious. To us it seemed superfluous and a *rich country problem*.
+
+At 3:30am we arrived at the place, and we are lucky because the owner of the place had left doors open for us to be able to get in, so we all went to sleep straight in! This place is beautiful on the eyes, and there is a cute dog here who wants to play ball always.
+
+![First night place]()
+![Dog picture]()
+
+Next day we go for a hike and drone footage of our drive and set for a waterfall and lose our drone there. we have to charge our car until 2am
+We sleep and clean the place. 
+next day rescue mission and more waterfalls and hikes
+next day another two waterfalls, train ride, bridge
+next day a cabin ride, a lot of roadworks, 
+