It looks as though somebody put the pot on while I was away in Oslo this summer.

You already know medical marijuana dispensaries sprouted up all over Boulder County like, uh, weeds. But I only found out a few weeks ago.

And no, Smarty, it wasn't because I was too busy getting high and watching "The Big Lebowski" to look at a newspaper.

They have newspapers and even The Internet (!) in Norway, but in trying to acclimate, I avoided news of Boulder for fear of homesickness.

I worried that if I read about city tax reports or open mic drum circles, I'd burst into tears right there in the TeaLounge. It was bad enough I couldn't stop checking weather reports, so I ditched the news, missing the beginning of the end of Pot Prohibition.

No matter -- there was plenty of drug news right there.

In the Grunerlokka district of Oslo, I lived about three blocks from a Deli De Luca -- essentially a 7-Eleven with better interior décor and more flavors of Ben and Jerry's. To get there, I navigated a traffic circle and then cut across a park with a little library.

Sounds easy enough, but the walk was often a touch more exciting than you'd think. Groups of lanky men in shorts played ping-pong on the stone table in the rain, massive Rottweilers dragged their owners about and staggering groups of drunks pinballed across the plaza whether it was 3 a.m. on a Saturday or 11 a.m. on a Tuesday.

They'd sometimes stop to talk to me, and they'd sometimes throw themselves on the ground to drink out of a puddle.

Ironically, the one thing I should have been wary of was the one thing I never caught on to: the drug dealers, who were apparently carrying the equivalent of radioactive meth-crack and would give you a shank to the kidney instead of a receipt.

I walked through that park at least once a day every day for 90 days. And in that time, I never figured out which ones were the dealers and which weren't, most likely because I never understood what anyone was saying to me.

But weekend nights, when I became one of the staggering drunks pinballing through the park, invariably one of my companions would mutter in disgust about the neighborhood going to hell. They knew that "Hei, hei" in Norsk meant, "Hi there, I have every drug ever invented in my colleague's coat pocket."

My friend, Kristian, told me they hid the drugs in aluminum beer cans and if I saw a dude milling about on a corner holding two or three red cans stuck together in a plastic ring, the dude was a dealer.

Obviously there's a huge difference between hard stuff hidden in red cans on the street and locally grown medical marijuana at a dispensary.

But now I'm avoiding Oslo news in case the Red Can Man gets into trouble and I lose my composure in the Bookend.

Homesickness ain't cured by weed.

Boulder's Jeanine Frtiz is still recovering from her whirlwind Norwegian summer. She writes about stuff here every Friday.