Room and Board

Homecoming: Day 4-

“American men: Free room and Board!”- Christian's dad 'advertising' to all travelers, as long as they work their asses off.

So, you might have noticed that I don’t have many photos posted yet and the reason is simple: they are freaking huge. You can thank my preference of high-quality photos for that (and Pentax). The small amounts of pictures that have been posted on the blog are those that were taken with my iPod Touch, a size-format much smaller than my camera. I bring this up because this post will be smaller because I really only did one thing: work. Because of this, I will supplement HUNDREDS of words with a few pictures (and maybe video) that I took throughout the day.

Now to it: this was a rougher day than the last time I worked because instead of chopping wood that had been previously harvested, today we did the harvesting. How it worked was 3 men (all of them Wathnes) used chainsaws to bring down the mighty wooden beasts and then, while the beast was down, dismembered it into even smaller, less heavy beasts; this is where I came in. I was the “carrier”, or the dude that collected the chopped wood and stacked in on the buckets of the tractor. It sounds easy, I know it does, but when those normally 40-50lbs chunks of wood become frozen, they can weigh up to 60lbs each (I say “can” loosely because there were only a few that were ~60lbs)! There was also the task I had in which I need to get the wood from up the hill-across the hill, down the hill, down the path, and on the tractor; the repeated action of this exponentially increase the weight of the wood simply because you get effin tired. But, since I wasn’t getting paid and Christian’s dad is giving me room and board for a couple of weeks, the least I could do is work as hard as they did, which turned out to be very hard and very long.

[Editor’s Note: Farfar, Christian’s grandfather, is a freakin’ savage. He hardly rested, resisted help from his son, and only took a 10minute lunch, which consisted of 1 hotdog [pølse, “pouls-eh”]. Like I said- freakin’ savage]

We ended up only doing 3 loads but those three loads took a good 6hours. Honestly, the hard work felt good. Living in Seattle for the last few years, I’ve forgotten what good manual labor can do for you. Sure, I was exhausted and sore, dirty and soaked to the bone, but:

Extremely brisk fresh air + positive feeling of productivity + home-cooked traditional food =

Fan-FREAKING-tastic.

Farmor, being the champ she is, cooked another traditional meal for us, called løpskoss. It essentially consists of steak, carrots, potatoes, parsley, and other fine ingredients to make a thick sort-of-soup-but-not-exactly-a-soup-soup. It was damn hearty and damn delicious; the perfect end to a good day of work.

I ended up going to bed early this night simply from exhaustion, but couldn’t sleep after about 2:30-3am because I was so excited for...

….Oslo!!!

Fra Norge med Kjærlighet