Sweating For A Sweater Was Buying Lusekofta Worth The Hassle?

Where sane shoppers would have waited for their next paycheck or decided Swedish sweaters looked just fine, Signe, my girlfriend, and I decided buying a genuine Norwegian Lusekofta in Norway with only $250 in our pockets (the price of two sweaters) would be an opportunity to make shopping a challenge. Translated, this meant we would have to hitchhike 300 miles each way, find someone in Oslo to put us up for the night, then hitchhike back home.

The first obstacle was getting a ride in Sweden, a country that welcomes hitchhikers like Jerry Springer welcomes normal people. Swedes tend to look at hitchhikers funny, or not look at them at all. Some are scared and others just don’t think people should be bumming rides when the government ensures that everyone has enough money to buy a Turbo Saab.

We made a sign reading “OSLO,” each letter in a different bright color, to help convince drivers we were not psychopathic killers. Still, this sign did not seem to work, so I hid in the bushes until a car pulled over to pick up Signe, who, from most angles, is much better looking than I am.

If you can get a ride in Sweden, the upside is that just about everyone drives a nice car. Each Swede is either a Saab person or a Volvo person. It’s as decisive as being a dog person or cat person, a Coke person or a Pepsi person, a pierced-nose person or pierced-navel person. It took us three Saab people, one Volvo person and eight hours to get to Norway. Once in Norway, it only took two rides to get to Oslo.

The first order of business was to exchange our Swedish stash for Norwegian money. This was a disheartening experience because Norway is one of the few places on the planet that’s even more expensive than Sweden, where a big crinkled-up wad of dollars is worth approximately one pistachio nut, provided it’s in season.

We bought our lovely Lusekoftas immediately, which left us with roughly $10 each. In Oslo, that’s not enough to make a local phone call. I know this firsthand because one phone booth ate $3 while we were using directory assistance. I was dropping coins like Pete Rose at a slot machine and had to hang up before I even got the number because I wasn’t going to have enough cash to make the actual call.

To find a place to stay, we went straight to the hospital. As a medical student, Signe figured the global community of overworked med students might take pity and let us sleep on someone’s couch, or in a hospital room. This time I hid behind a Coke machine in the hospital cafeteria.

One at a time, Signe approached each person who looked vaguely like a med student, until she found Anna, a fourth-year student who, in one of the most amazing acts of blind trust I’ve ever witnessed, handed us the key to her apartment and said she’d spend the night at her boyfriend’s place.

Anna even gave us access to her refrigerator. We tried some of her special Norwegian cheese, mysost, which is similar to goat cheese, only it tastes like it came out the other end of the goat. It reminded me of the time, many years ago, when I put some Playdough in my mouth, then gagged and spit it out on the floor.

We woke up early the next morning, bought a few daisies for Anna and left to take in the local sights. The first thing we did was walk to the Vigeland sculpture park, where you can see more than 100 statues depicting people of various ages and sizes performing many acts of normal life in a very realistic way - except they’re all naked! Understandably, this is the single most visited tourist attraction in Norway. It just seemed a little out of place since Norway is the temperature of a frozen waffle for the better part of the year.

We spent our last kronor visiting the Kon Tiki Museum, which celebrates the voyages of Norwegian supercelebrity Thor Heyerdahl. Heyerdahl has spent much of his adult life with other grown men drifting across various oceans on small rafts as buoyant and durable as SOS scrub sponges to prove that equally adventurous lunatics could have done this many years before.

We didn’t have any trouble hitching out of Oslo because, in our new sweaters, we were mistaken for Norwegian skiers (or innocent, dopey tourists). A Volvo person took us from the Norwegian border to Gothenburg, where we spent the night with a friend and made it home to Malmo the next day, where we found the same exact sweaters for sale in a specialty shop. The good news is, we saved $15 by going to Norway. The bad news is, we saved only $15 by going to Norway. It was a good excuse to travel, but next time I’m using mail order.