Beaches and Burglaries

We left the summerhouse on Tuesday evening to head to Oslo for the rest of the week. My time on the fjord was quite refreshing after being on the go for so long, getting to eat home-cooked meals and give my feet a break in the sun. My sneakers pretty much never got put on, and my breathing feet thanked me for that. Tuesday evening in Oslo was pretty chill, considering we got in around 8pm and had to grab groceries for the week. We went to bed relatively early and got up the next morning to go to the beach. Marianne had a package coming between 3-4 on Wednesday, so we went to the beach knowing we’d need to head back around 2:30. It was really hot out – the heat has been near record-breaking in Oslo this past week – so we would alternate lying out on the hot sand in the open sun and hopping in the cold waters of the Oslo fjord. Once we cooled off in the water, we’d hop out and dry in the sun only to get wet again with sweat.


There were tons of naked babies running around (how European), gorgeous Scandinavian couples (I swear there’s something in the water here) and swans unafraid to gather around the humans, one of whom sat guard outside of a baby carriage for a short time (okay I’m actually afraid of swans ever since I got chased by one when I was little). At 2:30, we headed back to the apartment, which is when the real action of the week occurred. Marianne’s flat is on the top floor, and when we got out of the elevator we noticed an oddly familiar sheet sitting outside of the roof access door, which was wide open. Marianne put her key into the deadbolt lock, turning with no success. Then we noticed that there were indentions on the side of the door near where the locks were. “Oh my god someone’s broken in,” says Marianne. 20140726-232817-84497114.jpg There’s no way. I’d left my iPhone and wallet in the apartment since we were going to the beach, had my laptop and passport there. Everything important to me and my travels was sitting inside of that apartment. “They didn’t get in through this door,” I say. “Could they have gotten in through the roof?” I was holding onto the hope that someone tried unsuccessfully and that everything was fine. I climbed up the ladder onto the roof and ran across the hot black ground there to the side overlooking the veranda. The door to the apartment was wide open with the lock busted. I ran back and Marianne was talking to her dad, who had called the police. I go into a full on panic because I’m assuming the worst, that everything is gone, that I’ll have no way to get money or get out of the country, that I’ll have to figure out getting a new phone in a foreign country and have to replace my laptop (which, though small, had a blog post written and ready to go up that I thought I would lose forever). 20140726-232817-84497993.jpg When the police arrived, they couldn’t get the front door open either, so they had to call a locksmith. Marianne’s family – her brother, sister and brother-in-law all showed up. The police were going to take a while, so we left for a café while they took pictures and fingerprints from the scene, and it was more than two painfully nerve-wracking hours before we would realize what was taken. When we got to the café, I used Marianne’s brother-in-law’s “Find my iPhone” app to check for my phone. It said it was still in the apartment, but it couldn’t find my laptop. My laptop wouldn’t have been connected to wifi, so seeing that my phone was still there I had hope. The police called Marianne to survey the scene and tell them what was missing, and finally Marianne’s family and I were able to go back into the apartment. Somehow, all of my things were there except 300 NOK (about $50), which felt like nothing compared to what I thought would be gone. The burglars did manage to steal the Tyvand’s safe, which had silverware and passports in it, and most of her mom’s jewelry and some silver ornaments for their Norwegian national costumes. Things were thrown everywhere and there was fragmented wood surrounding the door to the veranda where they had broken in. After we had checked the apartment, we left to grab sushi and decompress and spent the rest of the evening cooling down in the apartment. We couldn’t be bothered to go into Oslo as we had planned after such a stressful day.