What Ice is For

It is Norway, therefore, there is ice.
The first day in Narvik, as Seth and I were walking up a street, we heard above us a sound not unlike the grumblings of car tires on the wrong side of the pavement. We froze, pardon the pun, and a huge chunk of ice crashed onto the pavement about a foot in front of us.
We avoided one hazard of the ice in Norway.

Being in another country is difficult sometimes. Especially because while you're at home, you have a set balance of things you do. You go to school during the morning, hang out with friends in the afternoon, have dinner and do homework at night, then sleep, etc. Not a routine, exactly, but a pattern, or a balance of what you need to do and what you want to do. Being in another country, the balance gets all out of sync and you feel off-balance. At least I do.
I have been pondering this.
Maybe it's because I am allowed very little range of motion at the theatre. We don't get to do a lot of physically demanding things. So, we just sit around a lot, and it's not boring, but not active. I've decided to start walking a circuit before work every morning, which should help. But when I feel off balance, I try, as hard as I can, to regain my balance.
I was walking around Narvik today after Lupper (Lunch/Supper). I walked up to the top of the point, by the high-school, which is above the air port. The view was spectacular. There are fjords as far as the eye can see. Anyway, near the school was a ruin of something, I imaging, that was bombed in WWII. Graffiti on some of it said, "MORD!", which is death, and several little faces of skeletons. I continued on my way. It is strange to think that almost all of Narvik, a town near the size of Moscow, Idaho, was nearly completely destroyed less than 70 years ago. Almost the ENTIRE town. Everything there now is from the 1950's onward. I mean, trying to imagine all of Moscow being wiped out is horrible. Reflecting on it is rather depressing, but at the same time comforting because the people there have the resilience of survivors. They didn't give up the city and abondon it's smoking remains. They stayed. And they have built it back up again.
On the walk back to the hostel, I fell on ice for the first time this Winter. And it wasn't even a hill. It was a flat driveway to the highschool. I did a classic "swooop" fall, the kind where both feet slip right from underneath you and you land on the softer part of your back side.
I laughed to myself.
And then I was reminded what balance is. Balance is not the tight-fisted grasp of control and poise. It is the slipping on ice, the falling down, and the getting up.
So, I got up, and I tried to surf the ice down a steep hill and promptly fell down again. It was too funny, so I laughed.
Crossing the bridge to the main street, a parade to support the victims of the Japan earthquake and tsunami passed by. I walked for them for a little bit.
I read on the BBC.com site that the leader of Japan said the disaster was the worst to hit Japan since World War II. We humans are always picking ourselves back up. It's nice when there are people who understand that.