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