What to do on a Sunday.

It is Sunday. My dad always tells me one should have a nice dinner on Sundays. His idea of a “nice” dinner corresponds quite nicely with my idea of a disgusting dinner. However, my dad is a solid 8 hour drive away and I’m sprawled out on my very own sofa, legs over the back of it and the rest of me buried in pillows. I’ve never had one of these before so I’m enjoying it greatly. My stomach is very empty and I want a kebab. I think about going out and getting one, but then I get wary, and then I think I can’t afford it. I am just about to settle for another meal of banana and yoghurt when I stop to think. I do this a lot these days as I’ve started to notice the amazingly impressive amount of bullshit that passes for thinking if I don’t keep an eye out for it. Something doesn’t add up about my reasoning. That stupid kebab costs less than half, or even a third of what I spend on an average trip to the grocery store, getting… just about nothing… maybe something very mildly useful if I don’t misplace it. This isn’t about money; it’s just something I tell myself. I’m actually just a bit jumpy about going out and getting it I realize. I don’t know why, because I don’t think twice about going to a store or anything, maybe it’s just out of old habit.

In the car on the way there, I’m worried. But why? What’s going to happen? I visualize it to see how bad it might be. I find this very useful, when I can manage to make it sufficiently laughable. Like that scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the one with the boggart. The scenarios are endless and I dramatize them abundantly for added effect. The place is closed and the manager hangs around to tell me: “It’s Sunday for fuck sake! We’re closed you stupid bitch!”… or it’s open and I try to order a kebab and is yelled at for my ignorance to the fact that they have none left… or someone finally goes and says what everyone around here is probably thinking: That I have a completely incomprehensible dialect and they cannot understand a word out of my stupid mouth. These mental pictures make me laugh as they play out in my head. Even though these are worst case scenarios, they are quite tame, mainly because it’s wildly inappropriate behavior that could easily be shrugged off and, when laid out in full detail, I don’t believe for a sec that this is actually going to happen. If people act like shit to me for no reason, it’s not about me and I’m getting increasingly good at grasping that. I have had people act extremely rude to me before, someone does something infinitely inconsiderate or stupid and is all up in my face about how I’m stupid for no apparent reason, or someone is in a difficult situation and goes out of their way to let me know that this is somehow my fault. You probably know the sort. It usually just ends with me staring unwaveringly at them without a word till they get uncomfortable to the point of just stalking off, in which case I win. I have decided that this is the perfect way to tackle this sort of thing because then they have nothing on you, you give them nothing to go on. Also it has the added benefit of requiring absolutely no mental capacity, should it be in short supply. Last but not least, it messes with people’s heads. I never snap at people in this sort of situation and I think it is just as well. There needs to be two sides for there to be a fight, and you have to be motivated out of your mind and through the roof to fight with someone who doesn’t respond in any way to what you say to them. Also, I can never really think of anything clever to say until later anyway.

10 minutes later I’m sitting on the curb, waiting for my food (yes, it’s that sort of place). My scare tactics has not been needed. I used to get very self-conscious just sitting around alone, but I don’t anymore. “This is good” I think “it’s actually great”.

Luster Sanatorium... again.

Soon after my first visit to this peculiar building, I decided I wanted to go back again. Fall was nearing and time was pressing since I was moving away for school, so just over a week later I’m on the road again, ice coffee in hand to compensate for my lack of sleep the night before, also ‘again’. This time I have brought a friend of mine along. Though I expect she is not as entranced by this place as I am, she seem to have some level of genuine interest.

It was only this summer that I happened upon the term “Urban Exploration”, though I have been aware of the phenomenon as a somewhat unusual pastime before. It sort of came to me in the form of a radio documentary on the subject. I realize that what we are doing can hardly be described as such, as this place currently has an owner who has not abandoned it and we even had an appointment with him. This was hardly exploration of anything, except of the mind. I wanted to see who I would be in this sort of place. I expected I would be scared shitless to be frank. After my first trip to this place I had played with the idea that I would be unafraid and unfazed by the undeniable inherent creepiness of an old, decaying hospital. I quickly dismissed this idea though, reminding myself not to get all high on my little victory of last time. “I know myself better than that” I thought.

Back on the subject of Urban Exploration (UE), the documentary (which you can download from P3.no) thrilled me immensely. I have been a sucker for photography ever since I was a little kid and knew nothing about it, but lately it has gotten a bit old. When I first got my beloved Canon D40 4 years ago, I took a lot of pictures. A lot of nice ones even, but mostly they were quite plain. It was pictures of sunny days and flowers, the stuff the general public love to see depicted in great quantities. My style soon got darker. I would take sunshine photos too, but the ones that pleased me the most was and still is the darker ones. Now days I mostly take my camera out for rain, fog and storms. When I first heard this documentary I could easily relay to the idea that decay and imperfection can be some of the most exciting and beautiful things you will ever see. I believed it so much that the depictions of Detroit in said documentary moved me to tears. I might be a bit touchy feely, but at least I won’t lie about it. These things can be surprising and shocking and disturbing in a way that is quite mentally stimulating. It makes funny things happened in my head. There need always be some disturbance in your life or you will surely be bored out of your mind. I once hear that the human brain is so nicely suitable for problem solving, that if you don’t present it with any, it will happily make them for you.

Once we arrive at the Sanatorium our car is nearing the boiling point. The fan is working furiously to cool the overheated engine long after we’ve stopped it, similar to the time when my late Hyundai Getz was leaking coolant. We are driving my parents’ Citroen Berlingo, which used to be a descent car before someone messed up the engine and which they have now forced on me to spare the Ford Focus another go at the messed up road. After having a look under the hood to assess the state of things, we decide there is nothing we can do to help it out of its misery (this car is a bloody mess) and finally take off to locate our guide.

A little while later we enter the basement of the building. After the sunlight outside, the basement appears almost pitch black. Ahead of me I can still see the contours of the guy we are trying to keep up with. Being surefooted and all, I manage pretty good, but I keep peaking over my shoulder for my friend Janne as I am worried she will fall behind. The guy ahead of me says he will show us where not to go and where not to photograph and then we can have a look around on our own and take pictures, and this worries me even more. This is, as expected, quite scary, at least for a little while, and I hadn’t expected that we would be alone in here. The seemingly extremely relaxed nature of our guide soon wears off on me to my great surprise and when we enter the higher levels of the building it shows a softer side as the sun enters trough the big windows and breaks the ice. I have been in places that have unsettled me deeply for no apparent reason and places that have felt strangely soothing. This place belongs in the last category. It actually felt unbelievably calm and quiet in there. I don’t know why. By the time we are left on our own, after having promised to stay out of the buildings soft spots quite literally, my nerves has settled in the corner after having to give way to my curiosity, which is a force to be reckoned with. After having been made to check out one of the soft parts of the floor, I was excited enough by the feeling of it that I still can’t help but giggle stupidly every time I remember it, though I expect it is quite exaggerated in my head by now… I can almost feel the whole house wiggle though I’m sure it didn’t. I could now see that this would be worthwhile, even if I had freaked out and had a panic attack (which has been known to happened though it has been years) in which case I might have gone through the floor. This experience was looking to be very bright and colorful in my mind, and not something I would be without if I could help it. We trothed around cheerfully and just a bit astonished by the look of it all.

The feeling is like that of the apocalypse. This massive structure that was once invested a lot of money and work into, is now crumbling in slow motion all around us. Not even something as vast and strong as this can hold up forever on its own. People often say that things don’t last, but do they truly understand the gravity of it or is it just another fashionable thing to say? Some would say this is ugly, but there is something undeniably true, raw and real here. No one planted the mold and the moss. No one pealed the paint. Decay is the truest story to be told because nobody has bothered to cover it up. Still we are here to marvel at it because it is nothing but the undeniable truth. Outside, a few stories down, more people have arrived. More people come to see, to take it all in. As I’m looking down at them from a third (?) floor window I remember standing down there, staring in amazement a week earlier. This is so surreal. A woman spots me I think. Wonder if she thinks I’m a ghost?

I guess people come for various reasons, but quite a few of us come here to find new stuff, to dig something out of the undiscovered corners of our minds. To see something that isn’t there. Not in the house anyway, and not in us probably, but somewhere in the interaction between the two. I had decided in advance that I would do so, just not in such thought trough terms. These things always come to me in retrospect, when I’m curled up in the soft sofa by the open window in the cozy room that I rent in an old mansion. Inspired by the bright pink paper bag of candy from Sweden and my massive Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary on the table, I put it all into glossy words in an attempt to be very poetic about it. I used to think I should be able to come up with this shit on the fly, but it always comes after.

As we reach the attic we are getting a bit worried about the floor, as it was said to get increasingly bad further up. Out of old habit, I’m a little unsettled by the looks of the long corridor, but it loses its grip almost at once when I set foot inside it. We walk slowly, carefully assessing the state of the woodwork under our feet as we go along. Now we just look through the doors and instead of entering the rooms. Suddenly, I feel a light, cold breeze. We’re all thinking it aren’t we? GHOSTS! But strangely, somehow this was only a lazy afterthought to the more rational “gjennomtrekk” (a quick Google-search turned out the word “turnover” for this expression, but it basically means wind that goes through something, like when you open two window and you have a wind tunnel on your hands). I almost jump in astonishment as I don’t recognize this cold rationality. It might be a call for action (or institutionalization) that I analyze my own thoughts like foreign objects, but this was unbearably peculiar. This should be scary… it really should! I mention this to Janne, and she agrees. Either we have actually taken on the personality of the guy who left us on the second floor an hour earlier and who seemed largely unafraid of anything this building has to offer, or there are something severely calming stuck in the walls… or it’s just nothing, absolutely nothing. No scary things come to mind.

I wanted to see new stuff when I looked through the over 300 pictures I had taken. At first it was a bit of a struggle. Then things started happening, slowly but surely. Little twinkling stars of ideas started to appear. Little sparks that soon started to catch on. I will not be so bold as to say that my pix are great, but to me they are stuff that I have not seen before, which is good. When I start to inspect them and work on them, so much movement and life appear in dead things. There are no ghosts in them though; I don’t even bother looking for them.

All the pictures below has been edited quite heavily.

Luster Sanatorium

Last summer I was driving. It is late, it is incredibly warm and we are on a summer holiday. My mum was in the passenger seat, my dad was sleeping outstretched in the backseat. Suddenly, I spot something. I pull over. What on earth is that?! I’ve spotted something massive and white on the hillside across the fjord. It appears to be a building of sorts, but I cannot imagine what it would be doing up there. After all, we are in the middle of nowhere in one of the least densely populated areas in Norway... by my estimation at least, and this thing is in the middle of the forest up on a mountain. I grab something from the backseat that turns out to be my dad’s leg and not the 55-250 mm zoom-lens for my camera that I had meant to get. Having awoken him anyway I start to question him about this building he was on about earlier, that I had paid little attention to. Hadn’t he said there was a Tuberculosis sanatorium turned mental institution turned home for refugees in a remote location somewhere around here? Could that be the place I wonder aloud as I carefully mount the more appropriate lens on my camera. He agrees that it probably is. I point my camera in the right direction and zoom in to get a good shot of what looks disturbingly like the Overlook Hotel, straight out of the Shining, and so terribly misplaced that it is in fact wildly fascinating.

For the remainder of the evening and the following day I talk enough about this to inspire my mum to ask the manager of the nearby hotel we stay at if he knows what building it is. He identifies it as Harastølen aka Gamle Luster Sanatorium and I get something to go on, water on my mill if you will.

As soon as we get home and I am reunited with my beloved computer, I start to research this place. I come upon massive amounts of images and quite a bit of information on the history of the place. Almost a year later (in May I think), I still haven’t forgotten about it, and neither has a friend of mine who’s ears are probably still recovering from my talking about it and the surrealness of it. She sends me a link on facebook. It’s a news story about how the sanatorium is going to be demolished. Now we need to get a move on if we want to see it.

By the end of the summer the sanatorium is brought up again, and still not by me. I’m really stressed out after having to be the boss of my lazy brother at work all through the summer, which starts with him actually doing as he is told, goes on to him being rude and obnoxious and me being a total doormat, before culminating with me telling him to fuck off and do as I say and ignoring mean comments on how I handle things. Quite a bit of growing up in other words. This leaves my mum very uneasy and a bit desperate to pull me out of the bad mood that I have settled in. She finally comes up with a solution. We are to go on a road trip of my choice for the holyday that I have been intending to force on her all summer. “Maybe we can go and have a look at that house even?” she suggests while carefully monitoring my gloomy face for any sign of change. “What house?” I ask, genuinely puzzled. “You know, the one we saw last summer. The one you wanted to see!”. As the realization that she is actually talking about the sanatorium start to materialize in my brain, I gradually start to light up a notch.

The next day, I start planning the trip. Someone more capable of rational thinking might think it useful and smart to lay out a plan of each day in equal amounts of detail, but not me apparently. For the second day, the plan was that I had the road memorized from last year and therefore we would go there. For the third day I had sort of memorized a few of the major shifts in direction I could see on the map and my plan was mostly to go on sheer luck and road signs as I had never been in the area before and find the GPS increasingly annoying. I can still hear it going “Sving til venstre. Sving til venstre! ...snu når det er mulig!” and “ta en u-sving!” implying that it is very wrong of me to stop at a gas station. The first day however, was not to go wrong in any way. By the help of various forums, Google Maps and NAF Veibok (the Norwegian Car Association’s Road Book, or something to that effect) I had mapped out the road in my head and calculated the time it would take to get there as accurately as possible. Google Maps gave me the estimated time needed to get to Luster and I could even decide where to leave the main road by help of Google StreetView. Though the little Google-car hadn’t bothered going all the way up, I read somewhere that the road up is about 7 km long and have suffered some serious decay. With a somewhat optimistic assumed average speed of 30 km/h, this should take about 14 minutes. Had I been as good a shrink to myself as I sometimes pride myself on, I might have seen in advance that this trip was basically over after the first day. My assumed average speed was indeed a bit optimistic as the road had an incredible amount of dents in it and our all too low Ford Focus just wasn’t built for this sort of treatment. I managed to keep my cool while my mum was growing slightly panicky in the passenger seat, and couldn’t help but smile a bit at the ridiculous road. It really was almost surreal that this road would go on for 7 km in this awful condition, let alone actually lead somewhere! It was quite entertaining.

When we finally caught sight of the large white building I was ecstatic... and was a little bit out of it after having to work so hard on keeping the underside of the car off the ground. It turns out we are not alone though. A car is parked by the building and there is a group of 4-5 people around my age that seem to have just arrived. They look as if they’ve been caught red handed and watch us verily as we pull in. I figure they are out in the same errand as us and put up an effort to act disarming and quickly get out my camera, hoping to calm them down since I’m of a very sensitive nature and their nervousness is almost painful to see and effectively wearing off on me. We all soon calm down and start to venture along the impressive length of the building. It soon becomes clear that the sanatorium had grown to massive proportions in my head and was slightly less massive in reality. I actually, quite unfounded, felt that it was a bit small, though it obviously wasn’t. Another thing that had grown out of proportion was the scare factor. When we neared the end of the main building we spot a man coming out of it. This turns of to be the owner of the building that informs us that there is no chance of having a look around inside today but we are welcome to have a look around the outside so long as we stay clear of falling tiles and bricks in order to keep ourselves from being beheaded. While my mum stays around to chat with the owner, I take off in search of something. I search around the front and later around the back for the fear that felt so tangible and real while I was anticipating it at home in front of the computer screen. It has been a year since I first lay eyes on this thing from afar and ever since I’ve been imagining how scared I would be just being in the presence of such a vast abnormality. Maybe my homemade therapy consisting of taking long walks alone in the dark on a daily basis has paid off? I don’t think that is it. As I pass by my mum and the owner again on my way to the back (this is one of the few buildings I have seen that actually has a distinguish front and back) I am told that there is no ghosts and that this place is as calm and serene as anything. No way! How can this be? But clearly the guy is right. He should know. Deep inside I know I wouldn’t be walking around on my own like this if I were as entrance by the scariness of this building as I had almost planned to be. Even the fact that the second floor lights are on is explained as easy and logically as the flick of a switch by a fully human hand. What a bummer. Despite the raw beauty of such a massive structure falling apart bit by bit, I feel strangely cheated by my lack of fear. This leads me to feel very unhappy that I would not be able to see the inside of it. This place was as serene a cemetery in the afternoon. A cemetery is only scary with darkness to go with it and properly seasoned by an imagination that blows new life into the ground and gives every movement as natural as can be a taste of messages from the beyond. Believe me, I should know about cemeteries working the summer job that I do. I even accidentally locked a woman in a church once, and she wasn’t even scared.

I still don’t think my great fearlessness is responsible for this experience that was at first almost annoying. Just a week earlier I had been getting very jumpy just nearing an old decaying lighthouse that I keep feeling compelled to come back to for some abnormal reason despite feeling so strongly repelled by it when I actually get there that it feels almost like a physical wall in front of me should I dare to venture just a few meters away from the others (I’ve found that going there alone is futile) and I am in the very annoying habit of almost immediately starting to inquire about whether we are going to leave soon.

I could only be annoyed for so long though. Now I gleefully enjoy the fact that it wasn’t scary. Especially on a day like today when everything is so great I’m almost jumping up and down. The whole experience was weird and interesting and fresh and unexplained and unexpected, like I’ve found a little glitch or a bug in the universe that no one has thought to sort out. What could be better? Just look at me writing this text! I started just past midnight and was going to write for half an hour tops. The next thing I know it’s 4 am! I feel like I could write a book about this place!

Here are some pictures that I almost forgot to add between thinking to myself what a great day this:

I very strongly felt the need to add something that might have been scary had it been real or at least remotely realistic looking:

It still almost made me jump out of my chair when I accidentally opened it on my computer and then made me laugh at my own stupidity. Those eyes are murdering me! :P