NORWAY!

As we mentioned in our last entry, we took an overnight ferry from Copenhagen to Oslo with the plan of having a full day in Oslo to explore. After a scrumptious smorgasbord on the boat, we headed to our cabin and got our bathing suits on and headed to the pool for an after-dinner Jacuzzi…..only to find that it was closing in 3 minutes, and so back to our cabin we went.

As for the plan of having the day to explore Oslo, the next morning Noah had a fever, and his tonsils were inflamed and nasty looking. So from the boat we went straight to a clinic, as the following day we would be heading to the interior. Noah got checked out and was prescribed penicillin (with a script to spare in case someone else in our gang came down with it). In the meantime, the rest of the crew brought the luggage to our apartment, which turned out to be a 20 minute cab drive out of the city – the only kind of sucky place we stayed in all trip…let’s just say, it’s amazing what you can do with a fish-eye lens to make your teeny apartment in some way-out suburb look like a spacious location near the action!

Getting waived on - On several occasions in Norway, particularly in the first few days, we didn’t have any Norwegian crowns to ride the buses. The bus drivers just waived us on. Note on one occasion we did see a guy get kicked off of a bus for not having a valid ticket, by the same driver who had waived us on.

Linens – What’s up with Norway and not always including the linens in the price of a hotel room?! On two of our stays, both in totally lovely places, we had to rent linens….weird.

Our first stay after Oslo was in the area of Voss. We did two fabulous hikes here – one up above the tree line, and the other overlooking spectacular vistas of the fjords. For that first hike, we needed to get back for the very last gondola at 5:00 p.m. We had a great hike, but by 4:40 we were still about 40 minutes away. Rob decided to go ahead to try to stall the gondola operator until the rest of the group would arrive, but he missed a turn off. He quickly realized it, but not before the rest of RANAD got ahead of him and arrived at the gondola first, worried about where Rob was. He arrived within 5 minutes, and we did make it onto the gondola. But the gondola operator who, along with the rest of the group, was a bit worried for Rob said to him, “Well…You should know that your wife loves you very much!”

Norway – it’s like Switzerland except inhabited by Newfoundlanders. Seriously. Norway is a spectacularly gorgeous country with snow-capped mountains, glaciers, gorgeous vistas and a stunningly prohibitive cost of living (a pizza dinner for the 5 of us easily cost $150-$300).

That’s where the Swiss analogy ends, because unlike the Swiss (sorry to our Swiss friends reading this ☺), the Norwegians are unbelievably friendly, helpful, and flexible (like Newfoundlanders). That gondola operator we just mentioned…when we were headed up the mountain, we expressed mild concern that we might be late for the final ride down, and in response, he spontaneously gave us his cell phone number and told us to call him if need be (….like if one of us took a wrong turn!) On another occasion there was construction and so our GPS could not get us to our trailhead for a hike. We asked for directions from a man, and he told us to follow him. He hopped in his car, and drove us several minutes out of his way to get us to the parking lot and pointed out the trailhead as well. And of course there were those bus drivers who waived us on.

Bergen is a town on the southwest coast of Norway, and accesses the fjords. It is also where Edvard Grieg the composer was from. Coincidentally, there was a free performance of Peer Gynt (Grieg composed it) in the town square one of the nights we were there. It was greatly abridged…..1 ½ hours, down from the original four. Ibsen, Norway’s great playwright was the author of the storybook for this piece. It was an amazing, funny, and moving performance, all in Norwegian!

OK….one week into the trip we weren’t all fluent in Norwegian, but we had quickly read a synopsis of the play before the show (thank you Wikipedia!), and the actors were so expressive we actually could follow along.

In Bergen we also enjoyed the fish market, where young people from all over Schengen (almost all of the EU countries plus other countries in Europe like Norway,Iceland, Switzerland…) come to make a ton of money, working 16 hours per day for 4 months of the year in order to get paid Norwegian minimum wage. Oh wait, they don’t have a minimum wage here….but the de facto minimum wage is the equivalent of about $35/hour.

Next stop, we stayed in a cabin which the Danish would describe as “huugli” – cozy, charming, friendly…… It is a “typical” Norwegian experience, with no electricity and no running water, and an outhouse. Ours was overlooking a fjord and we absolutely LOVED it!

For further reference, check out this video about the cabin experience by the Norwegian comedy group Ylvis (pronounced Ulvis). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ua1FAlHt_Ys
After watching the video, you will be pleased to know that we had spaghetti 2 out of our 3 nights in the cabin!

Once again we did a bunch of hiking from the cabin. For Rob and Diane’s anniversary, we made it to the Pulpit Rock; this despite months of Diane ruminating about whether or not she could manage this hike…given her fear of heights.

The pictures don’t quite capture just how high up it is, and the massive drop (in 2013 a Spanish tourist did accidentally fall off). The tentative plan for the hike had been for Diane to pull a Moses – go most of the way up and then just gaze at the Promised Land from a distance…. but lo and behold, we all made it!

Speaking about scary things, despite their inordinate wealth (oil money has allowed Norway to build numerous tunnels through mountains), the vast majority of the “highways” we drove on in Norway were barely two-lane, and yet you are allowed to drive 80 km/hour much of the time…..while making hair-pin turns on cliff’s edges.

Diane’s startle response got quite the work-out while Rob was driving and she was almost banished to the backseat on several occasions!

Oslo – so our first encounter with Oslo, as you’ll recall, was a medical clinic and suburban blah. For our last two nights we returned to Oslo, avoided medical clinics, had sunny weather and stayed in town this time. We toured the city on a very good bike tour and really enjoyed it. In particular we saw the famous sculpture park. This artist named Vigeland basically got carte blanche from the city of Oslo for 21 years, from the 1920s to the 40s, to fill the park with sculptures. The pieces are all very expressive, about life and real human relationships.

One odd thing on our arrival in Oslo was that we were coming in quite late, and so our host for the apartment we had rented was not there to greet us. Instead, he advised us to stand outside to be let in to the building by whoever happens to show up. We arrived with all of our bags, skeptical about this plan and worried what people would think having to let in 5 strangers with luggage at midnight. When a woman and her little dog finally showed up, Aviva improvised and “continued” a conversation by saying “well, I don’t think we have anything left to discuss, let’s go in there and tell him”; so as not to seem as though we were just sketchy people loitering around waiting for someone to open the door for us.

Our last night on holiday we went out to a funky restaurant that embraces the new Nordic dining style (we make it sound like we thoughtfully planned this out. We didn’t. We stumbled upon it with some help from Yelp). It was really really yummy, organic, local…all that boring crap we RANADs seem to get all excited about.

At the moment we are 30,000 feet above the globe somewhere over the Atlantic bumped up to “economy-plus” due to a glitch in our flight home. Our regularly scheduled flight on a to-remain-nameless-American-carrier (for further reference, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo ) was delayed and we are supposed to have a layover at Newark, so they switched us to SAS and we are being treated very nicely indeed!

Till next time….
XOXO,
RANAD

HOLLAND AND DENMARK

Hi again! We are now reunited with Noah, who was not part of the first leg of this trip in France and Belgium. He was on a 4-week canoe trip up to James Bay instead! So RAAD became RANAD once again on a train platform in Brussels. Of course we provided Noah with a care package of chocolates from Belgium and then we all hopped on the next train to Amsterdam.

In both Amsterdam and Copenhagen, we rented bikes to use for transportation. This allowed us to see a much broader range of both cities, and to get out of the city for a day in each. The bike lanes in both cities are really everywhere. We all had to get comfortable with bike traffic, merging and changing lanes, as well as keeping up with the pace in the bike lanes. On a couple of times we got yelled at, and in particular in Copenhagen on the last day, Rob got yelled at for passing someone too slowly. Oops.

Of note, in Copenhagen, the traffic lights are timed for the cyclists, so that you really do have to keep up with the pace so that you can keep getting the green lights (and not piss the other riders off).

In Holland, we cycled up to Edam…yep, like the cheese – all on bike routes that are extremely well marked. We were able to take an alternate route back that had us cycling on a 10 km dyke next to the sea. Beautiful! We saw lots of windmills along the way – the modern kind.

In town, a couple of locals had told us about this brewery (Brouwerij) on the edge of town (and on the ride back to our apartment). There we stopped for amazing beer, sheep’s cheese and ox sausage!

On another occasion, on the recommendation of our friends Steve and Sandy, we stopped off for pannenkoeken (pancakes….actually more like crepes if you ask us) one evening for dinner just before we headed over to the Anne Frank House.


Of course the Anne Frank house was very moving. They have done a beautiful job of conveying a very sad and disturbing story. In parts it’s a bit sparse, but this is in part to honour the wishes of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, but it also allows one to focus more on the personal story and not overwhelm most people, particularly those who might be new to the information.

Last thoughts on our time in Amsterdam – we took a great walking tour to get some of the history and checked out the Van Gough museum, another sad story. We trekked through the red light district a few times but did not have any of the “coffee” in the “coffee shops” while we were there. We know some of you might be disappointed, and for that we are truly sorry. For those who don’t know what we are talking about, uhhhh, think Amsterdam…..??

Next we flew from Amsterdam to Copenhagen, but not without getting into some trouble first. We were in row 5 and early to board the plane. Suddenly an announcement came over the PA system asking passengers to be seated once they found their assigned seats, and then specified, “Would the gentleman in aisle 5, please be a darling and sit down and stop stowing away his baggage, so other people can get on the plane.” It turns out the darling he was talking to was Rob.

In the state of Denmark, nothing was rotten (#shameless Shakespeare reference). And we all agreed, the people are really quite striking. We cycled through Copenhagen (after another amazing walking tour to get the history etc.). On the second day there we went to a neighbourhood called Christiania, a hippie commune started in the 1970s in an abandoned military post and around a small lake.

A few of the rather makeshift buildings there were covered with grass for insulation; there was a market-place with a lot of crafty stuff, and aging hippies at the cafes. There are two rules in Christiania: No photographs and no running. The no photographs made sense….too many marijuana deals going on. As for no running, we can’t figure that one out…safety conscious hippies?

On our last day in Denmark we cycled to a small fishing village south of the city, called Dragør, which was apparently one of the coastal towns involved in the saving of over 95% of Denmark’s Jews during the Holocaust. They were smuggled across the straight to Sweden in fishing boats and various crafts. From Dragør we had a clear view of the new bridge to Sweden.

We took an overnight ferry out of Copenhagen to Oslo – also not without getting into some trouble. Aviva decided to pass some of her time aboard the ship doing a mock business presentation in the conference room. She wrote pie charts and time lines all over a magic board when suddenly one of the head honchos came in and scolded Aviva (and Diane, an innocent bystander).

Latest pet peeves:
1. It started in Belgium (we first noticed this in a restaurant in Brugges, when we met up with our friends James and Laurie for dinner), and continued in Holland and Denmark. Namely, when in a restaurant, servers refuse to give you tap water, forcing you to purchase bottled water or some other beverage. At least in Holland, once you buy a beverage, they will give you tap water, but in Denmark, one server told us, “I don’t sell tap water!” We told her we didn’t need to buy it, she could just give it to us….she declined.
2. Also to do with water – why do some Europeans still insist on showers with no curtain/door??! In Holland and in Normandy our apartments did not have any way to keep the shower water from spraying literally all over the washroom. Even when they do provide an enclosure, the shower floor is flush with the rest of the WC, so the water seeps out all over the floor. At least, they provided a squeegee so I guess you get to clean yourself and the WC – a sort of 2 for 1.
Our conclusion…in North America, we’re spoiled when it comes to how we handle water.
So next stop, Oslo, or as they say in Hamlet in a minute, “Norway’s taking over this bitch!”

Love,
RANAD

France and Belgium!

Question: why doesn't Paris smell like pee anymore? Answer: Because they have ingeniously instituted free, public washrooms. I guess that's our way of saying, we began this summer vacation in Paris. For those of you who don't know, we kyboshed our plan to go to Israel for obvious, but nonetheless sombre, reasons.

Our arrival and departure to and from Paris were fraught with unanticipated costs. We were told there would be traffic, what we didn't expect was that we'd be zipping along at an average rate of 5 km an hour for about two hours with the metre running. Eventually, our cabbie, who'd missed his son's speech pathology appointment for this, took pity on us and stopped the meter.

Our way out of Paris was no less harrowing. We rented a car to drive us to Normandy, and parked near our apartment and ran in for two minutes to grab our bags...Okay maybe those two minutes were more like forty five. When we came out with all our bags we could've sworn we'd misplaced the car. We should've known better- this is the second time our car has been towed in France. A shop-owner saw a tow-truck take our car moments earlier, and directed us to a pound claiming he was "1000% sure it's there". As Aviva said: "never trust someone who is 10 times more certain than the maximum amount possible". As we now know, in Paris they'll tow your car away for just about anything, they'll tow your bicycle away, they'll tow YOU away if you're not careful.

Paris itself was lovely as always. Still the smells of cigarettes and espressos; still the scenes of wine and cheese at the seine; still vendors with questionable permits selling mini Eiffel Tower key chains; still the police chasing them into the metro. We ate beautiful meals and did another fat tire bicycle tour of the city. It became evident to our tour guide that Aaron, our resident history buff was quite knowledgeable about French history, and he ended up turning to him as his "fact-checker".

When in Paris, we decided to do shopping, because quoi d'autre? Aaron tried to find jeans, and the shortest length he could find was 38 inches length, with a 24 waist. This would be appropriate if Aaron was an anorexic basketball player.

We finally made it to Versailles, a place none of us had been to before. The palace is ornate, massive, and truly breathtaking. It's amazing the scale of what you can build when you're using the peasants' taxes. But the gardens are a very pleasant public park now, though that was unlikely Louis XIV's idea.

For the most part, our waiters have defied the "snooty Parisian" stereotype, but for our waiter in a cafe in Versailles. It's not customary to tip waiters in France. After our waiter made it eminently clear that we were nothing more than irritants throughout the meal, this was the only waiter who felt it necessary to explicitly say that we CAN leave a tip simply by leaving it for him in cash.

In Paris, shocking amounts of: graffiti, begging, and homelessness. There seemed to be a small impoverished village living underneath a highway overpass. And...guerrilla subway performances where mediocre musician enters subway car and subjects captive audience to an impromptu concert. These were highly variable performances, followed by the expectation of money in the hat.

After retrieving our towed car from the pound, we drove west to the beaches of Normandy. We stayed in a small coastal village, Luc sur mer. There we went to the newish Canadian museum at Juno Beach that gives a Canadian perspective on the events of D-day.

We got an excellent tour of the beach and the German bunkers by a co-op student from university of Waterloo! He really knew his stuff (and he figures he knows somebody who knows somebody who knows our nephew/cousin, Andrew).
The next bit is actually kind of upsetting. We had a picnic lunch outside the museum and while we were there we witnessed a family doing some pretty abusive stuff with their young child. Actually it was the grandmother who was being abusive and the parents didn't intervene. She actually said to the father, "why do you keep asking me questions? What are you, the FBI?" Aviva went to the museum employees to try to advocate, but soon after that the family had left.

On a couple of occasions in Luc sur mer, Rob went to buy stuff for our breakfasts and lunches. He saw these amazing sausages with signs that said, "Duck", "Rabbit", "Bison" & "donkey" - yes, donkey sausage, you can actually buy that in Normandy; yum. When Rob dared to ask whether any of these were free of pork, he got a lecture on how all sausage is made with pork, otherwise it isn't sausage, no exceptions! Needless to say, we passed on the donkey/pork sausages.
Another time Rob and Aviva inquired in a fruit stand about where we could get some fromage (cheese). They were point blank told, "There is no fromage in Luc Sur mer!" Dumbfounded, they replied, "No fromage in the whole town?!" The fruit seller pointed to be fromage sitting on a shelf in his shop and humbly said, "Well there's that fromage over there, I can sell you" - which turned out to be absolutely awesome.....as has been the other food here:

On from Normandy we took a train to Brussels where we took another bike tour. We thought we were supposed to meet the group in front of the Beer Temple. Not surprisingly, that turned out to be the meeting place for the beer tour! And so we had a mad dash to meet our group around the corner.

Later that day we did make it to a lambic brewing company (the beer is naturally inoculated with yeasts that are in the air. It makes for a very sour beer, Aviva and Aaron actually liked (especially the stuff flavoured with raspberries or sour cherries). Ironically, Rob, who loves beer, hated the stuff, while Diane said, "I hate beer, but I don't mind this one.

In Brussels we learned about the EU and the Eurocrats who make decisions in Brussels and then have to travel to Strassbourg in order to vote on them. We saw the sites – it’s a bit of a dirtier city, but also a very playful one. After all, this is the home of Tintin, the Smurfs and Manneken-Pis (the little boy fountain/statue who is peeing water - and twice a year he pees beer).

Here’s our section on cultural differences we’ve observed. WAY more B.O. here. Like seriously smelly people on the subway that are very nice and reasonably well-dressed. Oh, and the other day we saw a fine-upstanding looking grandma clutching her 2-3 year-old grandchild as he made a very large bowel movement, right there in the middle of a park. It gives “doggy bag” a whole new meaning!




We went to Bruges and biked around that way-too-pictoresque city

and finally had Belgian waffles…YUM! Now we're reunited with Noah, after his adventures on the Missinabi River. He flew over to Europe and we've headed off to Holland for more adventure.....

More updates to follow love,

RANAD