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After spending my first day in Norway sleeping, I roll out of bed and down the hill to the National Day parade. Norwegians are dressed up in their finest traditional clothes or their best suits, everyone is waving a flag, and the sound of a drum corps echos throughout the city. Everyone is out. I hear a Swede complain that Norway is just so much more crowded than where she lives. Bergen on the busiest day of the year still has plenty of room to see the parade from the most popular corners. I lean my bike against a traffic pole, toss my jacket over the bars, and both are still there when I leave two hours later (don’t worry, I had my eye on it the whole time). I love San Francisco but I really wish I could leave my bike on the street and expect it to be there when I return.

Every group has a float; school groups, sports clubs, ethnic associations, military veterans. A group of kids on dirt bikes does a demonstration while some others walk with a perimeter around them, presumably the size of the float they were allowed to have. The boy scout type group marches in uniform with wooden guns while the military band plays Anchors Aweigh. As the parade ends people continue to congregate. Every bar, ATM, and restaurant has a line way out the door. Teenagers are on the amusement park rides in their Sunday finest. People are joking with their friends, eating ice cream in the street. The sun is shining and everyone is happy to be Norwegian. The fireworks go off after the sun sets around 11pm signalling the end of the festivities.

Then it is quiet.

There is no background music playing in shops, no people shouting on their phones. Occasionally you get a group of kids excitedly talking to each other, each progressively louder, but even that is quieter than a typical American group of kids.

The day after National Day I walked around in Bergen. On my walk back to my hostel I went to pull out my headphones to listen to a podcast. Looking around me I realized that no one was wearing headphones. I suddenly felt like even more of an outsider and I tucked them away in my bag. In the US I use headphones to make phone calls while I walk around town but that’s the extent of it. I rarely listen to music or podcasts using them; normally everyone on the street is wearing them and I am the odd one out.

Once, after recalling some random adventure I stumbled onto one day after work my boss asked me how I find these things, he never seems to meet anyone randomly on the street. By not wearing headphones I signal my openness to participate in the environment. Sometimes when I just want to be left alone I’ll put the headphones on, trusting that no one will bother me if they think I’m spaced out in my own little world.

Norway isn’t quiet.

The birds sing all day, the lambs call out for the mothers, the mothers let out one low bah to let their lambs know where they are. The bells on the sheep clang, growing louder as they run away from the big scary cyclist. Each waterfall has its own sound: some are trickles, some thunder for thousands of feet directly into the fjord, some are short but powerful, pushing through boulders before laying still in the pool below. As I climb one of the many hills I hear a truck behind me downshift while waiting to pass me. Riding through farms the sound of farm equipment reminds me that this land that I sometimes curse also sustains me. If I’m lucky, on a calm day, I can hear the water lapping at the beach.

The rain beats down on the cabin roof, the wind races between mountains, whipping up the water as it goes. The gulls squawk as they ride the wind, catching a free ride to dinner. It is loud and foggy as the fjord reminds you that it is in charge, that I’m just a little cyclist who must abide by its rules, yet this is when the land feels alive.

Suddenly, the quiet of the sun beams down and all is forgotten.