Why do you say goodbye, I say Hello?

Mine damer og herrer, today will be another short post on account of I'm dog-tired. So here's the news in brief.

I've just filled in a lengthy application form for Oxford and Cambridge Regional Conferences, which are run by the Widening Access scheme. Basically, Oxford has a reputation for a place where gown-wearing aristocrats sip champagne from crystal glasses and say "Yah". My job would be to stand on a stall and tell people it's not like that at all, though if you are getting full fee remission you get given money to keep, and that's not something to be sneezed at. In all seriousness, when I came up I actually expected people to say "You went to a comprehensive?" as if I'd told them I got my A-levels by impressing a cocaine kingpin with my tumbling as a street urchin in Saigon. I did, indeed, go to a college where teenage pregancy was high, petty crime was high, and ambitions to leave the county were high. I feel like I'm being vaugely unfair (or maybe I mean litigious), so I should point out that people who do well there tend to do very well. Those who didn't get arrested or pregnant were mostly aimed at upper-middle universities like Bath, Bristol and Warwick.

So foruten det, jeg have been mostly getting mere excited about the prospect of going to Norway. Last summer, three friends and I went to Italy, and it was the best holiday of my life. True, it meant three months of describing cheese, recommending cheese, and telling people xactly how much cheese they had bought, but it was worth it. We saw the Colloseum, we visited the Vatican, we rode trains, we fed figs to wrasse in the Mediterranean, we ended up at a town called Sestri Levante and explained why we thought we were going to Milan. We complained about the food in Venice, we asked for Aqua Rubinetto in every restaurant and never got any,and we had the time of our life.

Now, ever since I went to Norway with my parents and grandparents I've had a hankerin' to go back. For some people it's plam trees and warm sandy beaches: For me, it's fjords, mountains, and a climate based on mist. All this was brought back to the fore by a website I discovered. It has the best name ever: Norway the Poor Way.

Did I say brief? Oof.

Song in my head: "Steel Sky" by Naalsund/ Walseth, who seem to have gone by-the-by