Post by Grubb.
Yesterday, in the morning, it was umbrellas in the rain. Nothing lashing, just a steady patter. We googled our way through busy inner city streets in search of the Intercultural Museum. At one point, as we were cutting through a plaza next to a tiny amusement park (carousel and kiddy rides), I noticed this woman in an overcoat arguing with a guy whose sodden knit cap seemed to be sliding off his head. The guy shouted back at her and then spun around to lurch towards a well dressed man coming through the plaza. Mr Cosmopolitan, looking stately under his umbrella, stopped in his tracks, as the bedraggled unpleasant Apparition rushed up and gave him a quick upper body frisk. Mr Cosmopolitan, momentarily stunned, backpedaled as the unhinged Apparition, coming up empty handed, moved on, but not as fast as I was moving on, having immediately decided to divert from Google’s blue dot. Take that, Knut! Nothing laid back about that encounter! The Apparition could have been straight out of Hamsun’s “Hunger”.
The theme of the major exhibit at the Intercultural Museum was a twist on the famous line from the Communist Manifesto where, as a description of capitalism run riot, “All that is solid melts into air” is modified to predict the future in Oslo where, due to climate change, all that is solid will “melt into water”.
Norwegian kids were asked to create murals of what the city will be like a hundred years from now. Their answer, not only wet, but submerged.
