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“You know, The World is in Bodø today”. My ears are still buzzing from the flight from Oslo, but Edvin, my host for the next 24 hours, is in a chatty mood. “The world?” “It’s a cruise ship, very luxurious. You can buy an apartment and join the cruise anytime you want. Must be very expensive though” he adds in his sensible tone, just to be sure I don’t grab my backpack and run to the harbour to join them. In front of us, on the table, there is quite a spread: smoked salmon that he just bought from the market, warm pastries and something that resembles a toothpaste tube, but is in fact cod roe, matured, smoked and turned into a salty sandwich topper. I look behind Edvin, a bright oil painting of a red Plymouth is hanging from the wall, souvenir from his trip to Cuba. The rest of the apartment is grey with Scandinavian DIY-style furniture. Grey like my host’s hair. A retired transport sector employee, he spends his time monitoring plane and ship traffic in real-time on his smartphone. That’s how he knows The World is here today. “I used to travel a lot with my wife. Now I rent the spare room and let the world come to me.” I want to ask him about his wife but there is no pause between his sentences. “ I’ve met so many people like this. Just before you came, a Chinese lady around 38 was here. She left her husband and two kids back home and is now travelling around Europe for a few months. How unusual! She told me that next year is the year of the Pig and that’s her sign according to the Chinese horoscope. And then something big is bound to happen to you, can be good or bad, you can never know. So she decided to travel as she always wanted to see Europe.” I look around the living room-no pictures of his wife. After hearing the story of his last guest, I feel like I’m in Murakami’s book “Men without Women”. He pulls a picture from the drawer and shows it to me. Another guest, German, in her mid 50’s, travelling the world in an old Mercedes, Edvin tells me. My stomach is rumbling and I make a move towards the pastry. I haven’t touched anything yet out of politeness, but the pastry won’t make it to my mouth just yet. “Do you have any stories?” my host asks with sincere interest. I hesitate for a few seconds, then I finally manage to string a sentence together only to instantly regret it. “Actually, I recently realised that I was in love with my best friend, who also happens to be a woman, and I got so scared that I decided to run off and travel for a year instead of telling her”. To begin with, that is not a story-it’s a summary. And I’m coming out to a 68 year-old man I barely know. “Hmm”. Edvin gives it some thought. “That’s not unusual at all. But it would have been a better story if you had told her, no?” In the afternoon, feeling a little disappointed with how unimpressed my host was by my confession, I take a long walk across the harbour. At first glance, Bodø is not pretty. It looks a bit rundown and stuck in the 70’s. But it has a pier where couples, friends and families with kids take their evening stroll, a rusty shipyard and sunsets into the ocean that render the sky purple. I stumble upon the public library, a surprisingly modern building made of glass and wood with a view to the sea. I check out the titles. There are books on everything, even a book about the history of the telephone devices in Norway. “A celebration of the technology that diminished distances...” I read on the back. My phone is buzzing. It’s a text from her asking if I arrived safely. I walk back to the end of the pier, and among the curious strollers admiring The World, I reach for my phone and decide to call her. Maybe Edvin was right.