Stealing a signal in Stavanger
Normally when I go for a walk I do not bring a pocket calculator with me. If truth be told, which it seldom is, often I forget to bring my smart phone with me which is a stupid thing to do given the recent updates to the Geneva Convention that stipulate you must carry a phone with you at all times on pain of death. Should you find yourself wandering around the streets of Stavanger, Norway it might be a question of life or death if you don’t possess a calculator because you might be foolish enough to actually ask the price of an item for sale, in which case you will experience a thrombosis. Stavanger, you see, is no longer the poor fishing village it used to be when fishermen wearing rubber boots hauled in the herring for a living, meagre though it was. These days the village, now a full sized town, is the most expensive town in the world if you don’t count the places where they race camels and shepherds drive Lamborghinis.
The reason for such sudden wealth has nothing to do with any camels. One day experts who know where Grandma hides her Gordon’s gin somehow deduced that there was oil to be found at the bottom of the North Sea, although I have no idea how they knew that, and they started pumping oil into their cars as fast as they could pump money into their bank accounts. The headquarters of the North Sea oil industry happens to be Stavanger and it’s a wonder that they let ordinary people stumble around the streets in a state of awe and confusion at the prices in the windows. If your dollar, peso, bolivar or buck was worth something back home, it sure ain’t here.
The village of Flaam at the end of the longest fjord in Norway is not a good place to buy razors.
If my memory serves me correctly, which it seldom does, I was lecturing aboard an Italian cruise ship, the kind that sinks while the captain is busy boinking babes in his cabin rather than steering the ship. When I say “lecture,” I refer to the bragging and boasting I was doing as I showed awestruck passengers in the theatre who were supposed to be looking out the window at the scenery, slides and videos of some of my more outrageous adventures. I confess I only accepted the gig so I could get a free holiday in Europe which is a fairly expensive place to travel if you have to pay the freight yourself, which I seldom have had to do. I was requested to spend six months doing this song and dance, which I regretfully declined. The deal we made was that I got a free flight and free room and board aboard the ship for a month, or 35 days if you are counting closely, which in retrospect turned out to be about 30 days too long. One day I will publish my story Stuck on a Boat.
The cruise started in Southampton, England, which is a nice place to go if you want to be bored brainless. The city was bombed to bits during World War Two and what is left of it should have been bombed as well just to make it look better. The late spring cruise was an excuse for the cruise line to make some money between seasons, winters in the Caribbean and summers in the Mediterranean. The cruise line offered dirt cheap rates for a week, a clever ruse that allowed the British passengers to drink all their savings away in the ships bar as they are known to do. The ship then stopped about 30 kilometres outside of Amsterdam so they could fleece paying passengers to take a shuttle into the city, itself a lovely historic destination with more bicycles you have ever seen in your life and an active demonstration of the phrase “overtourism.”
From Amsterdam the ship made its way to Oslo, where passengers received their first shock of currency exchange. Surprisingly it is free to walk around the streets of Oslo and look in shop windows, and you may even see some tourists buying souvenirs without bothering to ask the price. Given that the WiFi on board the ship took about an hour to connect and cost more than the cruise itself, the first task attempted by all and sundry onboard to find an Internet café or similar destination where it would be possible to sneak a free WiFi connection. Let me assure the aspiring visitor that after five visits to Oslo it is not possible to secure a free connection. My basic rule of thumb is that I drop into a McDonalds in every city I visit, not to eat the food because I would be dead by now, but to compare prices. In order to obtain a password in those days, you needed to buy something. Translating from kroner into Canadian dollars, the cheapest item on an Oslo Arches menu board is a small cup of juice, which runs about $12 Cdn. I did all my eating and drinking on the ship.
The architecture in Oslo runs heavily to Victorian brick and granite, with a lot of statues. The architecture in Stavanger is fairly dated as well, but the downtown tourist trap is fairly well preserved, including cobblestone streets that lend it some charm and lots of twisted ankles. Should you wish to enjoy a couple of quick chuckles, have a look at the menu boards posted outside all the restaurants, then keep walking. If you arrive via a cruise, remember to pinch a banana from the breakfast buffet for lunch before you leave the ship.
Directly in the middle of the main plaza, which is hard to miss since its right across the great big Gothic church, the astute traveller will note the bright cheery sign belonging to Burger King, or Burger Death as I prefer to call it. Stand outside the window and pretend to read the menu as you keep a sharp eye out for a table of teenagers getting up to leave. How teenagers can manage to afford to eat in a restaurant in Norway boggles the mind, but keep in mind they live in Norway and possess Norwegian kroners so the prices seem normal to them. There is a secret to obtaining a signal at Burger King which I will share with you if you promise not to tell anyone else.
On a previous trip I had met a fellow Canadian on board the ship (I am carefully keeping the name of the shipping company out of this story because I don’t want a lawsuit) who seemed woefully depressed. When I asked him why, he said he had taken his family to Burger King for lunch. That did not seem to me to be a reason for sorrow, unless he had eaten at a Burger King before and lived to tell the tale, but he explained that he had not converted the prices from kroners into dollars and a family tray full of burgers and fries and shakes had set him back almost $200 Cdn. This is why you bring a pocket calculator with you, I explained. But he also shared with me the vital information that you do not need a password to access a signal in Burger King, information well worth to me the expenditure of his $200.
When the teenagers leave their table, simply dart in and preserve the leftovers before the extra neat Norwegian servers clean the table. This will create the illusion that you are actually a paying customer and you may also with luck find that the kids have left behind some fries but now I digress and run the risk of ruining my reputation. With luck you may be able to read all your email before someone fetches you a stinkeye, but resist the temptation to catch up on all the global news or you will spoil the secret for the next freeloader.
There was a second lecturer aboard the ship, a very friendly standup comic from South Africa who had been enjoying a free ride for many years aboard cruise ships by telling jokes and a fount of useful information he proved to be. The local neighbourhood library will always have free access to the Internet, he confided, so I looked up the location and went there to find him already there reading his own email. I was worried that I might have to sign up for a library membership and the jig would be up, or a password was required, or I might have to eat a cheeseburger, but all you needed to do was push the “translate” button to English which even I could do.
On my fifth and final trip to Stavanger I finally figured out the best way to obtain a free Internet signal. Instead of rushing off the ship in front of the madding crowd, many of whom were also desperate to find a signal, I simply de-planked and waited on shore for the crew to debark. A group of them finally appeared, Filipinos I think, and I casually followed them down the street, the opposite direction to the tourist centre. Not a block from the ship appeared a café in an industrial area where the crew all lined up outside the window and fired up their phones, poaching a free signal without having to buy any herring and fries. It was raining hard but there was an awning over the window that kept all of us penurious cruise line employees warm and dry.
Speaking of awnings, you never know when one will come in handy. The selling feature of the entire cruise was the famous Norwegian fjords. At the end of the longest fjord in the country is the postcard pretty little village of Flaam. There is not a great deal to do in Flaam except goggle at the incredible scenery or buy a ticket for a train ride up to the top of the mountains at just slightly less what it cost to put a man on the moon. There is a trailer by the wharf where you can rent a bike for an hour for the same price as it would cost to rent a villa in Spain for a month and then go for a spin up the valley, which is so beautiful it looks like a stage setting for the Sound of Music.
Should any form of exercise like biking not be allowed in your personal religion, you can go to the grocery store and buy essentials for a picnic. As I always say, “you won’t believe me unless I have the photo,” so I include here for your edification proof that a razor (should you have forgotten to bring a fresh one in your bag) cost 187 kroner, which works out to be about the same what it would cost to play a round of golf back home in Tuscaloosa. I saw a family of four from the cruise ship enjoying a picnic on the picnic table in front of the grocery store, including a six-pack of beer, and was sorely tempted to ask for what it all cost, knowing full well they had never asked the price or they wouldn’t have bought anything, but I assume the six-pack of beer cost more than the cruise.
My deal with the unnamed Italian cruise ship company included one hour of free WiFi connection every week aboard the ship, which I think was dial-up technology since it took at least an hour to even connect, so I was required to resort to other methods. In Flaam I must confess this proved difficult. Apparently the only connection was located at the one and only hotel, where I was intrigued to inquire the cost of a room but lacked the courage to do so, but buying a cup of coffee in order to acquire a password was $17. Since it had been a week since I had heard a word from my lovely wife, I was sorely tempted to buy a cup but caution prevailed. I knew there had to be a better way.
Sitting on a bench watching the traffic go by, I noticed several RVs. Going by, so I immediately deduced there must be some sort of hostel nearby where such vehicles could park and not get arrested for Norwegian vagrancy. So I trudged up the highway a few miles, ignoring the gout in my right toe that caused even my teeth to hurt and my conscience to regret that I had ever been born, and found what I thought I might find, an international hostel protected by a whacking huge fence to keep the bad guys out. Without a doubt such an international business would have a way for international customers to interface with friends, families and creditors back home?
Like any other drive through, a vehicle was required to go through a gated entrance, so I hid behind an RV as the driver negotiated a reason why he should be allowed to enter the premises, and snuck in while the driver continued to plead his case. I snuck around the corner of the building where my criminality was not in full sight and flicked on my trusty netbook, which has found and filtered email messages on several continents, and was pleased to find a signal was available to be apprehended without a password, the only problem being that I could not read the screen in full sunlight. I squinted and held my hat over the screen to no avail. It had been raining for weeks and now full sunshine.
In alpine climates the roofs of buildings always have an overhang to allow the snow to fall off and keep the custodian off the welfare rolls in the off-season and so too the Flaam Hostel. I held up the netbook with one hand underneath the awning into the shadow. I confess a lot of squinting was involved. Looking over my shoulder to make sure I was not about to be arrested, I was able to find my email account and log in, no password or $17 coffee required. Who so sad as me to find not a single email, even one asking me to pay overdue accounts. I didn’t owe anyone any money, but I was so proud to have secured a signal I would have been pleased to pay something. “Nothing ain’t worth nothing but it’s free,” once sang Kris Kristofferson, but you have to wonder what that amounts to when converted into Norwegian kroner.
Should you be interested in going to Norway, start saving your pennies in advance. Better yet, make that dollars, lots of dollars. Do not transfer the dollars into kroners before you go or you may decide to go visit your in-laws instead. Whatever you do, make sure you bring a camera and take photos of the prices because you don’t want friends back home to call you a fat-faced liar, do you? I will wait here for you. It’s cheaper.