The Party Season

Autumn is definitly here. After an amazing week of perfect sunshine in which I actually managed to get out climbing a couple of times, the weather has finally crapped out this weekend. Autumn is the worst time of the year in western Norway. Its getting rapidly darker by the day and it generally rains, a lot! There is not much to do except go for walks in the rain and wait for the ski season to start in December. Becuase of this the "party season" was born.

Its easy to say that you don't need a particular season to go partying and that is true, providing that you have nothing else to do. If however you want to make the most of life which includes boarding and ice climbing through the winter; skiing, boarding, and top touring in the Spring; climbing, kayaking and a bit of biking through the summer; then you probably don't want to spend most of your precious weekends getting mindless drunk until 6am and then nursing a hang-over all through the day. So the party season was great because it allowed unrestricted socializing and helped to get through those grim autumn weekends when you didn't mind being hungover because there was not much else to do anyway.

When I first arrived in Bergen it was hardcore. For the first couple of years there was about 8 weekends of serious partying which always ended with the annual ski trip to Hemsedal on the second week of December. In recent years everyone seems to have moved on or calmed down or both. I guess everyone is getting older and the arrival of numerous babies is definitly a factor, so I was slightly suprised when I went out for a quite beer on Friday night and managed to get rather trashed. It was the first time in ages that I had had a proper night out at the weekend in Bergen and it was fun. So much so I went out again on Saturday for Sandy birthday. Maybe I am not so old, or maybe the thought of impending fatherhood is driving me to one last pulse of adolesence.