I have known Sabine for more than nine years. Of which, for the first five she was the wife of a good friend of mine. Now they are separated. He is married now, has three children and two cats. And a wife with a drinking problem. Her drinking problem is related to his gambling problem. And one of the cats is blind. Still, it could have been worse. He could have stayed with Sabine.
Most of the times Sabine and I get along well. By most of the times meaning the times when I manage to keep my mouth shut and not be honest to all her chatter about her ex-husbands (she has been married twice so far) and former or current partners, or other great stories. Because everything happening to her is fascinating and amazing and fantastic. And she tells it all like it is a trifle, but often makes pauses for you to exclaim "wow, that is formidable, you are so interesting". To be honest, it is incredible. Incredibly boring, especially after hearing it all for more than eleven times. Still, it could be worse. She could have children. There might not be enough hours in a day to tell all the wondrous things her children did. Because they would be the smartest, most beautiful and interesting children in the world. She does not have any, though. She only has a chihuahua and she never mentions it, as I passingly mentioned once how I kicked a chihuahua. I also mentioned, still passingly, how much I hate dogs. Which is a lie. Well, sort of a lie. I love dogs, save for those tiny ones that look like they go into fibrillation every time they poop.
If I could have any pet I wanted, it would be a hyena. Then I could invite Sabine to walk our dogs together and I could discreetly ask my hyena to eat her chihuahua. However, owning a hyena is difficult. They are messy, and it is hard to collect bits of flesh from everywhere and wash blood stains off a carpet. Um... a friend told me that. Eventually I would stick to a 'pure-breeds' mongrel; I am not going to spend eight hundred dollars on a single breed when I can get a mix of four or five pure strands for free at the shelter. It would be like going to a mix-and-match candy shop and paying for a single type of Haribo’s when you could get a bit of everything for free, including peanut butter m&m's and chocolate biscuits. Who would do that that? Unfortunately, I know who: my colleague Martin, who accidentally ate a Haribo Cola once and he liked it, but he is too afraid to try anything new. All this discussion about candy has made me a bit peckish, hold on.
(Four minutes and one jumbo-size bag of Haribo’s later...)
Where was I? Right. Any animal larger than a cat could gobble her chihuahua. But hyenas have better personality than cats, are fierce fighters and are able to laugh. Laughter is good. Without it we could go insane at Sabine's stories. Still, it could be worse...
Last month I went on vacation with Sabine. She was between boyfriends or may the current one was unavailable or something, and I was... her last choice in her list of friends but the only one available for that weekend with cheap tickets. She suggested Norway, because she wanted to see a fjord. And the cheap tickets, too.
I was hesitant at first (I always hesitate at her initiatives), but I said yes. When I was in third grade I saw a picture of a fjord in the geography book. I liked it so much that I made a drawing of me on a sleigh at the top of the mountain and I imagined how amazing it would be to drive it (that was the technical term then) all the way down. At that age I did not tend to bother much with aspects such as accelerating for many hundred meters on a steep rocky slope and plunging straight into icy water. It was a fantastic sleigh, but my teacher did not appreciate me drawing on the school's books. To this day, I am not sure if she was jealous of my adventure or the Cockosaurus, a dinosaur with a huge penis that I had drawn on the same page near a bear that presumably lived in fjord-ish areas (another technical term from those innocent days). But a punishment was involved.
When fjords were mentioned, sleighing down on one was my first thought. Now that I am a grown-up I am aware there are downsides to it; I would have to carry the sleigh back all that way once finished. I still wanted to go, despite all that. Including Sabine.
The trip started well, my first fun memory was in the airport. They asked Sabine to pay extra for her oversized suitcase, which was more than the ticket itself. I nodded compassionately to her bitching for the entire duration of Denmark and the Northern Sea while pretending I only kept the noise cancellation headphones for the engine and that I was not listening to anything. My rhythmic nodding almost gave me away during a song or two but in the end, she calmed down before landing. Passport control, thorough exploration of the duty-free (she realised she wanted headphones), car rental, nice drive to town, hotel check-in, walking tour and dinner. Next morning, we were ready for adventure.
Well, not quite ready yet, first she had to get ready for the great outdoors. Make-up for twenty minutes then twenty more minutes to cover in six layers of professional ski and winter clothing. Because Norway is cold. So cold that I also had to put on a light hoodie over of my shirt, there was a light drizzle. But it could easily escalate into a tropical hurricane, according to Sabine's vast experience with urban mountains. When she was done she was so well covered that her make-up had become one of the foundation layers (you see, ladies, I know a thing or two about make-up), beneath two hoods, a scarf, and a polar-expedition-grade hat. Finally, she was ready. Properly equipped, we went all the way to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. And a story about the fifty minutes on the phone in the middle of the night with her ex that still wants to be with her. And the impossibility of escaping such drama. I suggested Silent Mode. I suggested it for breakfast, too, but she did not get it. On the way out, the lady receptionist told us it would be a great day for sight-seeing and suggested us a... sight worth seeing that was a bit further but unreachable by coach. For me it meant no tourists taking pictures on iPads and hopefully no gift shops. I was all in.
Finally, ready for adventure. Well, fist coffee. And another story. Not sure if it was about the same ex or a different one, hard to tell. Then back to her room, she forgot her headphones. Then searched for headphones through the entire luggage and found them on the night-stand. Car. Drive. Incomplete ex story because half-way through she remembered she had new headphones. Like a teenager, Sabine enjoys her bad music at maximum volume, which means I could hear it, too, from her tiny in-ear buds and over the car engine. It sounded worse than the navigation instructions in Norwegian, but it was better than stories I had heard many times before.
One long and beautiful drive and one not very beautiful parking toll later, we were at the top of the fjord. I will not lie, the sight was brilliant, despite the apparent lack of sleighs. The mountains, the trees, the water, it looked majestic. Rain had stopped, and there were just a few clouds to make the sun not so annoying. Perfect, just how I liked it. It was so beautiful that even Sabine managed to shut up for a while. Thank you, lady receptionist! And thank you, headphones! All this splendour and not a single tourist in sight.
Alas, there was still one...
I had enjoyed the sight for a while, and even managed to identify the trekking path to a nearby waterfall. Finding directions is always a challenge for me. I was just about to go when it began...
Can you please take a photo of me? Thanks. Wait, it is blurry! Can you do it again, please? Yes, a bit better. Wait, my face does not appear in the photo! Let me take my hoodie off! Better. Now! And now! Hmm, that should do, I guess. Wait, now take one from the side! Again, I will arrange my hair to look like it is not arranged. Now take one when I'm jumping and in mid-air! No, take it when I am highest in the air! I know a phone is not a professional camera, try to estimate how long it takes and press the button before! Hmm... I will jump from that rock, but make sure the rock does not appear in the photo! Now take one when I'm gazing into the distance! No, a bit more to the side. Try to take in both that tree and the river! Like that. No, it is too much to the side! You never listen! Wow, what a nice bird! Did you manage to get it in the photo? Of course not. Could we wait a bit? Maybe it comes back. Where are you going? Waterfall? Great, maybe we can take some pictures there.
Between each photo there was a pause for walks to and from the camera, criticism and complaints, various changes like making the face visible, rumpling hair, arranging the hair back because it would hide her face, jumping several times with the hands high, knees high and laugher forced, finding a rock, more jumps, moving to and fro finding the best tree (because they do not look the same at all), moving to one side, composing for a serious, meditative pose and so on. The time saved on shorter complaints was used for uploading the picture to Facebook. While internet is fast and coverage is great even in the most remote areas, finding an appropriate message to go with the picture is not fast at all. If you ask me, the message is not great at all, either. But who has the time to ask me? I should focus on taking better pictures.
Finally, we moved on... to shortly stop at every twist and turn in the road that was Instagram-worthy. And in Norway, there are quite a few. Fortunately, the appeal of waterfall photos would set us back in motion quickly.
If I had a target of a minimum number of words in a story, I could simply copy and paste the section from above, replace fjord with waterfall, make small adjustments here and there. And it would not be cheating, because it happened absolutely the same. Setting thresholds for minimum work are not my thing, though; my style is rather focused on avoiding the maximum. To put it briefly, it was like Groundhog Day. The only difference is that there is lower chance to fall in love with Sabine than with Rita. I apologise if you do not know Groundhog Day. You could go, watch it, and come back here if you remember to, and it would still be faster than recollecting the fjord photo session in the context of the waterfall. Bottom line, it was the same. Except that when she demanded an eighteenth meditative photo at the edge of the waterfall I pushed her into the abyss and was surprised to notice how her shrill screaming could briefly cover the thunderous noise of water falling from a height of more than seventy meters. As my phone is slower than her fall from such height, I did not manage to record her fall and the subsequent crash and death. I guess she was right: I am bad at taking photos of people jumping. Well, live and learn. In my case, not hers. What I learned after my trip to the fjords is that maybe I should buy a new, faster phone.
After a lovely and quiet rest of the afternoon in the great outdoors I returned to the hotel. I thanked the lady receptionist for her great tips, it was such a lovely trip. She asked where my friend was, but I did not know her well enough to tell her the truth about Sabine's great "trip". I said instead that she went shopping for a new jacket, which was unfortunately the truth because in reality I did not have the heart to kill Sabine. She is still my friend and very much alive.
Still, there is a silver-lining to this story. Later at the hotel, she got undressed for a shower when her phone rang. It was her current boyfriend and she went to the balcony to talk in private. I do not understand why, because I was not in the room at the time and later at dinner I was served a 40-minutes summary of that 15-minutes conversation anyway. The fish was excellent, though, and what was also excellent -this is where the silver-lining kicks in- was that she got a severe cold when she was in the balcony. Her throat was so inflamed from her coughing that she could barely speak, and her nose was so red and swollen that she did not want any pictures the following day. She only settled for a couple of landscapes she managed to shoot by herself. They were deleted later, during the flight back home; coughing while taking pictures makes them even worse than mine, apparently.
I was a gentleman all the way and took her home and helped with her two suitcases. Now there were two; luggage fees and Norwegian prices cannot stop Sabine from shopping. We were welcomed by her chihuahua. It tried to bite my hand when I accidentally placed one of the suitcases on its sleeping rug. I would not kick a dog, but I think a video of a chihuahua being thrown in a waterfall would gather even more views and Likes on Facebook than Sabine gets in an entire weekend at the beach in a provocative swimming suit.
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