Time Lapse

Day 3

Sitting in front of the Royal Palace, I try to recall the feelings of yesterday to write something down. It's funny how the cultural distance between two experiences impacts your impression of the time lapsed between the two experiences.

The ballet was a mixed experience. The Opera House is a great building with sharp angles and querky geometry vaguely reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House. The ballet named 'Back to the Future' was in three parts. The first two seemed inaccessible to a ballet layman as I drifted into a nap (deciding that this was actually a better use of my time). All was not lost, however, as part three (the main event) explored a range of Physics concepts of time - helped significantly by the narration! The concepts seemed disconnected (although in the same vein of time), but in general focused on the depressing nature of time running away from us.

A nice picture was painted: time is a lake, getting deeper and deeper, and we are pondskaters flitting around in the present to drop down into the past when we die. The water metaphor was also used to describe time as a dimension.

On the outside, one can also climb onto the roof of the Opera House, which is pretty surreal and magical. It would have been nice to stay up there longer but it was blitz cold.

The morning was past with a visit to the Nobel Peace Centre and Viegesland Park. The exhibition at NBC was Targets, and showed different nations' depictions of the enemy. There was also a great audio recording of an interview with an ex-Israeli sniper, who interestingly described killing an unarmed person as embarrassing. It must be one hell of a rollercoaster ride being in the army as a killer.

Viegesland Park was a nice park, and the sculptures interesting. They capture different emotions very effectively, but all of them seemed to be unhappy emotions. The theme of the day was actually quite stern. The different elements drove me to infer that happiness is more temporary than unhappiness. Something drives happiness, but unhappiness is the low entropy state that needs displacing. I guess the exact opposite of this is the key to happy living!

Despite the underlying theme, or maybe because of it, Day 3 was another feast of new and diverse experiences! Lovely.