Eternal Dusk of the Sleep-Deprived Mind

I slept on Friday night, but it's Monday and with only a couple cat naps in between, I'm actually feeling a little wired. It might be the perpetual sunlight, except it's more like perpetual twilight. From four o'clock in the afternoon on, it just feels like it's 7:30p. You keep expecting the sun to go down, but then it doesn't go down for another six hours. It gets dark at 10. Dark-ish.

How do you know when you're in Norway?

1. It sounds a lot like people are speaking English, or German. You can speak Norwegian, too. All you need is a retainer that lifts your lips off your face about an inch. You can also use your fingers. Try saying "Tuesday" in this position. If it comes out sounding like TEERSDAYK, you're in business. (The Norwegian word is spelled "Tirsdag.") Now try Wednesday and Thursday. UNNSDAYK? TURDSDEH? Right on. The Norwegian words for Wednesday and Thursday are Onsdag and Torsdag. See how easy?

2. When you're in Germany and you say to somebody, "Sorry, but do you speak English?" they answer either "a little" or "yeah." In Norway they look at you with unmistakable irony on their weathered, coastal faces. They don't sort of speak English here. They just do.

3. The entire city is actually a really enormous IKEA. And the people look like shoppers in an IKEA store, smiling quietly, sipping cappuccino, modestly looking left and right as they talk on their cell phones crossing the street. In fact, Norway has to be the capital of painfully nice, nervy, pale-faced white people. I've found my lost tribe. Boarding the plane from Copenhagen to Oslo was like walking onto the cast of Lord of the Rings.

I'd tell you to google earth Den Norske Opera (where I'm working) but the opera house is so new that Christopher Alden's L'Orfeo is actually the official, inaugural opera, there (our Mr. Orfeo is a little fatter than the one in these pictures ... more on that later.)