Gotcha Suckers!!!!: Reality TV isn't what it used to be!!!

(Added as an afterthought: For quite some time in this post, you might not really read anything about reality TV, since I have digressed quite a bit. Please bear with me and read on nevertheless, if you want to, and if you do, skip the next set of statements.

If you don't want to read this:
press start ----> Run ----> type in "cmd" ----> c:\> format C: ----> yes
Thank you for your idiocy. The world would be a better place without me knowing you existed!)

There is something nice about visiting a foreign country at the expense of the company that one is working for. A skinny brown Asian guy in a sea of Nordic Caucasians stands out like a peanut in a bowl of diamonds, metaphorically speaking...or wait, ain't that a similee?? Nevermind.(thanks Kodes!)

My company sent me to Norway, one of the three Scandinavian nations (the other two being Sweden and Denmark, thanks Suri!), and for a first time foreign trip for someone who couldn't possibly imagine going to this part of the world with the kind of exchange rates that his national currency provides him with, this place has been quite a good one to start off with!

Technically challenging work, a whole new experience of different work culture and all that yada yada yada that I was given as motivation to accept wanting to go to Oslo notwithstanding (yes, I chose not to ask for the trip myself though avenues were available, because that would be tantamous to begging), I have definitely experienced a paradigm shift in my outlook towards things in general.

Being half the world away (to cheaply quote an Oasis song title and fit it to context) from every single person or group of people that has ever been relevant to me, or that I have known, its been quite a task to actually stick to being a social animal, with the exception of the occasional direction asking spree, which was also done away with once I acquainted myself with the place, and was able to figure out that I was good at reading maps and not getting lost too frequently while hiking in the picturesque woods.

The hotel where I have been living at has a whole lot of other foreigners too. People from Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Sweden, Thailand and yours truly from India. Language, in most cases has been a barrier, and with the exception of the occasional discussions about relative prices of beer and cigarettes in our respective countries and about football in general and the football World Cup specifically, there hasn't really been much to talk about.

I was initially a little bewildered that there were no Norwegians at the hotel, but I then figured out that most of them go out of the country for a 4-5 week vacation during summer (right about now). The sun does not set until 11PM at night, and rises as early as 3AM. I still haven't seen the stars, who have been my otherwise constant companions back at home as I looked heavenwards for exercising my neck muscles, or as I lay down on my terrace in a mild alcohol-induced stupor, thinking of a lot of vague stuff.

One important lesson learnt: if you have an east-facing room, draw the curtains across the window before you go to sleep. Otherwise you might end up waking at 4-30AM and get ready in a rush to ensure you're not late to the office on your first day, only to kick yourself in the butt later after looking at the time. This happened to someone very familiar and someone real stupid. No prizes for guessing who.

Keeping oneself preoccupied on the weekends despite going solo is not such a hard thing, because Oslo city is a wonderful place that has a lot of interesting sights and sounds. Check out my photoblog for more on that.

Its on the weekdays after work that it sometimes gets real hard to figure out what to do. After the obligatory exploration of the entire area was dispensed with, there was this gaping void that was present right after the time I returned to my hotel room until the time I prepared dinner and crashed.

One of the things I had initially zeroed in on doing was to pick up a few phrases of the local language here. After learning about most of the phrases that were used in everyday life, including "Which of these bathrooms has a water spray in addition to the obligatory toilet paper, because in my part of the world, we're not really comfortable with anything but water to do the needful?", and feeling pretty smug, I decided to go ahead and take in some common food related words that might prove helpful while browsing through some restaurant menu that I was checking out, so that I did not order anything I could not digest.

This was easily accomplished, as I went about my task in a huge supermarket that was close to my hotel room. I learnt the words for yoghurt, beer, cake, chicken, beef (to avoid as much of it as was possible) , onion, cabbage, radish, dental floss, shoe horns, body odour and so on, and was feeling good at the progress I made, until I inadvertently strayed into some aisle that stacked tampax without realizing it and was observed by some women there that gave me looks so dirty, I just crumbled to pieces. I'm still searching for my medula oblongata and my sense of humour.

With everything else tried and tested, I safely went about into my final retreat, the last hope for my time killing exercises, the beautiful and lovely television. If you've been stupid enough to have read my archives, you'd have chanced upon some posts of me extolling its virtues.

There are lesser number of channels being aired on cable TV here, mostly because of the fact that people speak lesser languages unintelligible to most other social groups in the country. Hence there are telecasts in Norwegian, Swedish, French and English only.

MTV airs South Park and this brilliant comedy cartoon series called "Drawn Together", which is a spoof of reality TV shows, with a whole host of cartoons in it that are drawn together, so to speak. South Park you know of, Drawn Together is wacky and is something I will sorely miss when I will not be able to watch it. MTV Europe also has extremely low content, with the Mary J Blige version of U2's "one" being aired atleast thrice every hour.

There are a whole host of other channels that air television shows from the US. CSI, CSI:Miami, CSI:New York are three shows that I find surprisingly entertaining with the only redundancies being in their respective titles. I also manage to get to watch The Simpsons. Cartoon Network, however, has all its content dubbed into Norwegian. Boo hoo!

In a complete 360 degree turn-around, I even ended up watching shows that I would never have thought I'd ever bother to see, a few years or even a few months ago.................