I woke up in Kongsberg.
Not visiting. Not passing through. Living here. First night in the new house. First morning looking out at a view that's now mine to look at every day.
Yesterday was chaos. Moving boxes, logistics, the thousand small decisions that come with transplanting a life from one place to another. Today the chaos is still here — boxes everywhere, nothing in its right place yet — but for this one moment, in the early morning light, none of that matters.
Because it's so quiet.
In Oslo, there was always something. Traffic. Footsteps in the stairwell. The hum of the city that you stop noticing until it's gone. Here? Silence. Real silence. The kind that has texture. The kind where you can hear your own breathing, the house settling, snow absorbing sound outside.
I stepped to the window and looked out at this:
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A Norwegian winter neighborhood. Houses with snow on their roofs. Evergreen trees standing like quiet sentinels. Hedges dusted white. And above it all, that thick grey sky that promises more snow to come.
It's beautiful in a way that Oslo never quite managed. Not because Oslo isn't beautiful — it is — but because this is different. Smaller scale. More intimate. A town of 30,000 people instead of 700,000. Room to breathe. Room to think.
The boxes can wait. The unpacking can wait. Right now I'm just sitting here, drinking coffee that I somehow managed to find among the chaos, listening to the silence.
This is what I came for.
More soon. There's a house to make into a home.