The funny little coincidences on my real trip to Oslo

Writing the story

I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that “Nonstop Oslo”, the story, was inspired by my great admiration for the Norwegian super band, A-ha, and a tremendous crush on its lead singer, Morten Harket.  I had just locked in my ticket to the Oslo concert on April 30, 2016, bought my plane ticket, and made my hotel reservation at the Comfort Hotel Xpress Central Station on Expedia, and I was as excited as excited can be.  We were in October 2015 and I was sitting in my bed in the middle of the night at about 3:30 AM Haiti Time, about 10:30 AM, Oslo Time. I was too excited to go back to sleep, so naturally, I started daydreaming about my trip to Norway six whole months down the line.

Of course, what else would I be daydreaming about, if not to finally meet (and shag) my longtime crush, Morten, and shake hands vigorously with the genius, guitar virtuoso, and lead songwriter for the group, Pål Waaktaar-Savoy, and the charming boyishly playful keyboardist and second songwriter, Magne Furuholmen, also known as “Mags”?  I let my imagination soar and when things started heating up, I suddenly realized that I would have forgotten all of my meanderings by sunrise, so I grabbed my laptop and started typing madly away, my mind going much faster than my fingers could keep up! But it was important that I not lose one second of that juicy fantasy.

The funny thing that I noticed was that while I wanted to jump into the salacious scenes with sexy Morten Harket right away, my brain wanted to do things in order.  So, there I was landing at the Oslo Airport at Gardermoen, quietly anticipating my wonderful 4-day stay in Norway, while every single fiber of my body screamed kisses and sex!  But my brain is a pretty powerful machine and order took over.  I found myself describing what it must feel like to land in that beautiful Nordic land and interact with the natives, starting with the airport people.  I started thinking, “how do I get to the Comfort Hotel in downtown Oslo?” and I, right away, saw the need to do some research about the place so that my story could be as authentic as possible, even though I knew darn well, that this fantasy story was for my eyes only. But that’s the perfectionist in me, so, what can I say?

So, with my imagination at work and Google and Wikipedia at my fingertips, I launched into a pretty solid story. The pace was great.  I couldn’t wait to come home from work every day and add a few thousand words (ok, hundreds) to the story.  I really don’t remember how long it took me to write the story but it felt like it was just one long exciting essay, with everything flowing nicely.  I only stopped to do research whenever I needed to know something in particular for some part of the story, then I started typing away again.  What made it easy was the fact that the story was all about me, and when my brain finally allowed me to meet Morten, I decided to have a more realistic approach to the story.  I knew that, at the beginning when I started thinking about the story, my thoughts were driven by pure lust, but when I found myself face-to-face with my longtime crush, I somehow couldn’t just jump his bones.  My sense of decorum would never have allowed me to do that!  So, the real, and very shy, me showed up, and I started to take things slower. I’m not the most experienced person when it comes to sex, despite being in my early fifties at the time of writing the story.  I’ve always had some hangups about it, perhaps because it was never a satisfying experience for me like the ones my girlfriends talk about, or the ones that I read in most romance novels.  To me, sex was more of a chore than anything, but I dreamed about it being so much more to me.  So, I approached that part of the story, and the getting to know Morten part, with care so as to create a deeper bond that would give the sex meaning.  I approached it like I was on a psychiatrist’s couch.  This would be an opportunity for me to work out some feelings of fear and inadequacy when it came to sex.

Anyway, when it became apparent that this book might actually get published (because my friends with whom I eventually shared the story threatened to never speak to me again if I didn’t publish it), I went ahead and changed some names. I became Vivienne, Morten became Logen, and the great A-ha band became Eureka. (See what I did there? ;-))  Although A-ha became Eureka, the band still exists in the story because I couldn’t bring myself to completely do away with it.  So, I tweaked them in in a way that spoke of their greatness.  Now, that’s loyalty!  I also changed the names of friends and family, but some names of other well-known musicians and producers I left as is. I thought it added a level of authenticity to the story.

Arriving in Oslo

My story was pretty much done when April came rolling around and I boarded the flight from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to Oslo, Norway, by way of Fort-Lauderdale Airport and Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. The first thing I noticed after I got off the plane and went through Immigration and Customs was that I didn’t have to cross the street to catch the express train (Flytoget) to downtown Oslo like I had originally thought.  Everything was accessible from inside the airport, and the train did not travel above ground through the countryside but mostly underground and often through residential neighborhoods whenever it came up for air.  So, having noticed lapses like that, and so many more little things throughout my stay, I couldn’t wait to get to my computer at the end of each day to fix these little errors, and add more vivid descriptions.  What I ended up with was quite authentic.

My arrival in downtown Oslo did not happen as smoothly as it did in the book.  First of all, once I arrived at the Oslo Sentralstasjon, the train station in the downtown area, it was already way past 10:00 PM and I didn’t know which of the many doors to exit from, the place was so huge.   I did not know which way to leave the station and, even less, which way to the hotel, and nobody I asked directions to spoke English!  What a dilemma I was in!  I was really getting desperate until I noticed a couple of police officers just outside the main exit (as it turned out), and they pointed me in the right direction.  I, then, saw the luminous hotel sign looming over the lower buildings at a distance and I breathed a sigh of relief. I dragged my suitcase down just a couple of blocks, and voilà! I was finally in the safety of a very small hotel room.  I had never seen one so small, yet  it was very comfortable.  Realistically, I could not have invited a guest there because there was not much room to move about.  But in my story, I made every one fit in that small space!

I had also thought about bringing a bottle of Haiti’s famous award-winning rum, Rhum Barbancourt, like I did in the story, but decided against it last minute.  That seemed too silly and desperate, and too naive.

The funny little coincidences

Though some of things I wrote in the story were slightly off, many of the happenings were amazingly coincidental.  Three of them come to mind.

First coincidence. In my story, Vivienne (me) meets musician Kenneth Gutterup in the hotel lobby before she catches up with her friend Maggie to head off to the Eureka fan convention.  Vivienne tells Maggie that she had just missed the musician, and Maggie answers, “Oh, that’s OK. I know him quite well, we had dinner last night.”  In real life, when I met my new friends Debbie, Clara, and Leanna (their real names…LOL) from the A-ha Great World Fanpage Group on Facebook, at the fan convention center, we started talking about the band Kelner, another terrific, but not very well known pop duo from Norway.  In fact, that group disbanded a few years later, to my dismay, but their beautiful music lives on on YouTube, so I revel in it whenever I’m nostalgic.  This group was made up of  physician turned lead singer Kenneth Gutterup (“Dr. Kelner” in the story) and keyboardist and lyricist JP Paulsen.  Both of them, terrific talents.  Apparently, the ladies had been trying to promote Kelner in the United States, and they casually informed me that they had had dinner with them the night before!   How freaky is that?!  I did not know any of that!

The freaky “Helena”, the boat that took us to go see the fjords while in Oslo.

Second coincidence.  In the story, Maggie knocks on Vivienne’s hotel room door and invites her to go see some of the the fjords that Norway is famous for; she declines the invitation because Logen had already made plans for him and her to visit the fjords.  Logen takes Vivienne on a private yacht named “Saint Helena” to see the gorgeous sights.  In real life, my friends Debbie, Clara and Leanna invited me the next day, the day of the concert, to go see the fjords.  Of course, I gladly accepted the invitation because Morten was nowhere in sight (LOL), and when we arrived at the boat in Aker Brygge harbor, it was named…. “Helena”!  Oh my God!  How weird is that?!  My heart almost stopped.

Third coincidence.  In the story, Vivienne wakes up to a note left to her on her pillow by Logen. In his message, he announces the day’s adventures and signs the note with his first initial “L” with an exclamation mark.  Of course, that note was originally signed “M!”. Now, I had never seen Morten sign his name like this.  It was usually his first name scribbled out on posters and albums or whatever he autographed.  In real life, when the ladies and I boarded the freaky Helena, Leanna and I sat next to each other.  She showed me where Morten had signed his name with a black marker on the back of her hand one or two nights before. (Where the heck was I????) She had called her husband back in Canada to tell him that she was thinking of having Morten’s signature tattooed on her skin over the original one so she’d always have it, and he told her to knock herself out.  (Sounds like a very understanding husband.) That also sounds like something I would do if something like that ever happened to me, though I don’t really like tattoos.  Anyway, when she showed me Morten’s signature on her hand, it was…. “M!”  Well, knock me over with a feather! I was done!  I couldn’t take another emotional shock.

Conclusion

So, sitting on the Helena’s deck, and freezing our pants off,  I just had to tell the ladies about all these coincidences, and as proof, I emailed them my manuscript that very evening so they could see for themselves.  Well, their conclusion was, after we had all returned home, that, in the face of so many weird coincidences, I probably did meet Morten, didn’t recognize him (as in the book), and missed the chance of a lifetime of becoming Mrs. Harket!  Now, how devastating is that?!  And probably all because I didn’t bring that bottle of rum.