Potholes, Strangers and Randomness in Stavanger

Whenever I walk on the streets of Europe, especially the inner streets where people live, I am always on a mission - to look out for old and beautiful pothole covers. Well, maybe I am exaggerating here, it's not so much of a mission, but more like something I often notice. But exaggerations can be fun. Ya ya ya - like the Norwegians say.

Some pothole covers outside home

It's quite an odd day today though. As we walked into our charming little house an old man hastily waked away from the mess he had created on the front porch - lots of water and dead leaves. What was even more odd was that there was no electricity at home. For me this was actually quite unthinkable - no electricity in Norway, especially in the oil capital of the country. But life goes on.

While others ate cold sandwiches, I decided to wait. Eating cold meals at all times in the day isn't exactly something that I fancy, so waiting to eat something cold was the only option I had. It was already six and I was quite dead with hunger (well blame it on the past few weeks in Europe).

The window getting washed...

The mysterious man who had made a mess outside our house reappeared, and we decided to catch him as we felt that he must be responsible for power failure at home. With much difficulty, due to language barrier, we managed to tell him that we were living without electricity in Norway. Visibly alarmed he came in and checked. Rather embarrassingly for us a switch had tripped and he came home and corrected that. I felt stupid and sheepishly said thank you to him. To feel a bit better with the day we made Maggie and topped it with unnecessarily large number of cheese slices. But it was at least tasty.

It was 6.30 and the day was perfect for walk near the lake. And that's exactly where I went and saw seagulls and crows looking for their dinner. I felt bad and good for them; they don't need electricity to eat their meals. They were as privileged or unprivileged as their counterparts in India.

The other window where we found the mystery man again :)

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This is a part of my mini-series, #StavangerDiaries - tiny stories of daily life from the Oil capital of Norway, Stavanger. And what am I doing here? Well, mostly working, but also collecting these snippets of life.