Wake of the Vikings: An Evening in Bergen
We arrive in Bergen around seven in the evening, and we don’t even bother unpacking our bags. They will be picked up the next morning to be transferred to the ship, the Viking Sky, while we are touring Bergen. Meanwhile, we are in the most wonderful location, in Bryggen, the old commercial center of Burgen, full of beautiful colored, crooked houses, and areas full of white houses, and all kinds of places which we can reach by walking, which we love to do.
Except that AdventureMan has a terrible cold, and my throat is sore. He is apologizing profusely, but who knows if I caught it from him, or from touching a chair somewhere? Sore throats happen, but we can treat the symptoms, and I saw just the place as we came into town.
Our hotel, the Radisson Blu, is wonderfully located. We walk a short distance and find an ATM where we can purchase Norwegian kroner, then, just past the fish market, we find the China Palace.
As we are going, we hear singing. Across the street, a group of men on bicycles are singing! They are three abreast on their bikes, holding hands, dressed in suits and ties, and singing. It is dusk and it is magical.
We have no idea what it was about. Is this a fraternity thing? Is this a gay group thing? We have no idea, we only know it was delightful.
The China Palace was nearly full, but they found a table for us. We ordered soup and egg rolls; even if the food was really good, we were too sick to enjoy it much. When it came, it was perfect for us, Pekingsuppe and large egg rolls. Exactly right, comfort food. We felt much better.
On our way back to the hotel, the light was that wonderful light just before dark fully falls. The streets are crowded with young people and old meeting up for an evening of visiting and drinking.
And here is what I really love, the Viking Sky is nearby, so near we can walk there, which we do, often, the next day. That’s the Sky in the background.
Wake of the Vikings: Bergenbahn from Oslo
Seven hours of the most beautiful train ride in the world!
The Bergenbahn is very comfortable, and we have nice seats. We are given vouchers so we can eat what we choose from the train restaurant, and AdventureMan braves the line and brings back a lovely smoked salmon salad, which exactly hits the spot.
AdventureMan slept. I took photos. Lucky you, I’ve edited out most of them. The following thousand or so photos (LOL) is the ones I chose to share with you.
The trip starts off rural, with lots of white houses and red barns, lots of fat wooly sheep and green pastures, and then gives way to mountain scenery. In seven short hours (the scenery is not unlike crossing the mountains in Washington State except for the lack of these deep red barns, every single barn is the same shade of red. How do they know what to paint their barns? Is there a rule? We are told Norway has a lot of rules for the good of the community, but I didn’t think to ask about the barn color.
The train car
Norwegian Wood 🙂
(I once had a girl, or should I say she once had me . . . . )
This is the traditional type of tiles used on the roofs, reminiscent of fish scales
A local train stop; most of them were this mustard color, but some were the red-brick color
“Norwegians love quiet, and to be alone, ” the guide said. AdventureMan started looking at me oddly, and as people who have been married a long, long time do, I knew what he was thinking. He thinks I am Norwegian.
It might be hard to see, but the house in the center of the photo has a traditional roof with grass growing on it. I’ve seen this in Seattle; all things old become new again 🙂
Before leaving us in Bergen, our guide, Kathryn, donned her own precious traditional garb to show us. Everyone loved her for it, and took many many photos. With her intelligent commentary, and faithfulness in sharing all kinds of insights and lore, she was a great ambassador for her country.
In the Wake of the Vikings: The Viking Ship Museum in Oslo
I don’t have a bucket list. There are things I would like to do, and to the best of my ability, I just keep doing them, but I don’t worry about checking things off. If I don’t do it, I must not have cared enough. At the same time I am following in the Wake of the Vikings, my best friend from college is walking more than 100 miles on a trip. 100 miles! She showed me her Fit-bit readings, and she is doing like 38,000 steps a day!
You go, friend! (Not me!) There are days I do 10,000 steps, and once I even did 20,000 but I don’t expect those to happen often. I am proud for my friend to do this, and I have other challenges 🙂
Having said that, I really wanted to see the Viking Ship Museum, oh yeh, me and ten thousand other visitors in Oslo, and how on earth do we all end up at the museum at the same time? By deserting my group, and waiting patiently, I was able to get some people-less shots. You can’t imagine how hard that is.
I really like this one, above, because of the parallel shadow; the influences of the early Norse culture live on.
Imagine the patience and artistry it took to carve this piece!
This is a wagon; sorry for the reflection but it is encased in plastic to protect it from all the people (like me) who might like to touch . . . It was interesting to me to see a wheel built out of sections held together with metal clips.
This is a carved sled – imagine all that trouble for an item of daily use. Must be the long, cold, dark winters gave them the time to imagine and bring to reality.
Another sled. So beautiful.
This is a small museum, but inspiring. There is also a movie, which I missed because I wanted to take photos without other people in them.
I find Oslo beautiful. I find their traditional buildings beautiful, even those with grass roofs. How practically beautiful! And the new buildings they are doing knock my socks off! Look at the “iceberg” and at their new Opera and Ballet center!
This might look like the same photo as the above, but the above is to show some of the new high rises going up, where below is to highlight the statue called She Lies. I love this collection of statues. This is another one I would give to high school students and ask them to tell me the story. The body language is so ambivalent, I am sure that there are as many possibilities as there are viewers!
More traditional Oslo; less daring, equally beautiful.
Wake of the Vikings: Oslo City Tour – Vigeland Park
In the last post, I told you AdventureMan and I are not very good about staying on track with a tour. Sometimes there is too much information, and too much time at a location about which I care little. VIgeland Park was just the opposite, for both AdventureMan and I. Vigeland Park was so extraordinary it made us want to come back to Oslo and to walk the streets and visit all the public art we can, and spend a lot more time with these lovely, terrifying, amazing sculptures.
This gutsy sculptor told the city of Oslo that he would do a series of sculptures for free if the city would pay for materials, provide a location, and provide help for the project. After lengthy debate, astonishingly, the city agreed. Vigeland created the statues, the park was completed and Oslo had a cultural treasure.
Vigeland’s sculptures deal with mankind, in all glory and in all despair, in all conditions. I will show you one of my favorites, because I am one of three sisters, and what I read into this statue is sisterhood:
Can you see why I like this statue? You can read so much into his statuary. If I were teaching high school art, I would put out a series of photos of his sculptures and ask each student to choose one and to write about what he or she sees in the sculpture.
There are mothers and fathers with their children:
What do you see? Some saw a man, overwhelmed, careless as he handled his children. I saw a metaphorical balancing act, and don’t children alway find their fathers the most fun because of the risks they take?
Some saw joy in this mother racing with her child. Â What do you see?
This column centers the exhibit. It is full of people and children, surrounded by people, men and women, all nude, all naked spiritually and open for our observation and interpretation:
This park is incredibly popular. I would love to go back when there aren’t a lot of people. This is a park where you can spend a lot of time speculating.
This is a separate pavilion with depictions of the stages of a life, and the transitions back and forth from the “other world” to this world.
I struggle with this series below – I’ve only shown two. It is a woman with a dragon – or is it a demon? Is she fighting with it, or dancing with it? And in the last picture, is he embracing her? Is he devouring her?
These sculptures are like a good book, you can think about them for a long time, and at different times in your life you may come to understand them in different ways.
Wake of the Vikings: Oslo City Tour
If this is your first time visiting this blog, there are things you don’t know yet. One important thing would be that AdventureMan and I love to travel, and the other is that we are very independent. We are pretty awful about tours. We aren’t very good at following with a crowd, we sort of break off, and often disappear altogether. I have pity for the tour guides who get us; they have a job to do and we are not compliant. We ARE good at keeping the guide informed, like when we are dropping off, and assuring them that we will be able to meet up with them elsewhere.
Having said that, this tour of Oslo was very thorough. Much of it was “panoramic” which is travel industry code for drive-them-around-in-a-bus-and-show-them-things, stop-a-couple-times-to-let-them-take-photos. It did that. What I liked was that the guide really knew her stuff, and gave us a lot of cultural information, a lot of local lore along with the “this is the parliament building” kind of information. We got a lot of information, buildings, institutions, and we also got a lot of information about how the locals live and how the locals view things.
As we drove through posh neighborhoods, the guide told us about how the housing costs in Oslo have forced most Norwegians out of the city; that old buildings and new have spaces rented by foreigners and corporations. For the same price as a small apartment, Norwegians can buy a house out of town. The commute is horrible, but many get up at five and are at their desks by seven to avoid the traffic.
She took us to see a famous ski-jump. Now this is one of those things I would have said “I don’t care,” but when I got there, I could see that it was like a DESIGNER ski-jump, curvy and futuristic looking. I also loved it that there were kids roller-skiing (roller-skiing ? ! ?) and adults doing all kinds of fitness running, jumping – it has become a space where people go for exercise and experiencing the outdoors.
I have to stop a minute here – look at the design of this ski-jump. Is that not thrilling, so perfectly functional and so simply beautiful?
At the foot of the ski jump is a forest troll – can you spot him?
People living in the vicinity of the ski jump have a wonderful view of the city and bay:
Wake of the Vikings: Oslo – Bristol Hotel and Surroundings
A quick ride from the airport to downtown Oslo, where we find The Bristol Hotel, and inside a table with Viking local guides, armed with key sets with each passengers name. So easy, so well thought through – no waiting, just pick up your keys and an information sheet (like what time to meet up with your guide the next morning – critical information) and up to our room. Smooth. Efficient. Well done.
The room is charming and welcoming. You would think we would drop all our bags and hit the town, but you would be wrong. We dropped all our bags and hit the sack; slept like the dead for two hours and forced ourselves to wake up and get morning. It works for us.
I loved the spaciousness of this room, and oh, YES, wooden floors. I am such a sucker for wooden floors.
The bathroom was nice enough; I took a photo to show you the teeny tiny shower. I estimated it was about two feet by maybe two and a half feet at the longest, but a door cut across at a 45 degree angle, slicing space out of the shower. The controls were interesting; you control hot and cold with the right lever, and volume with the left. Well, it got the job done, it just felt cramped.
A storage rack and a pay bar in the entry hall.
We ate dinner in the Bristol Library Bar; the most fun was watching the locals gather in groups to have a drink on the way home. It was a busy, happy place, and we decided to eat dinner there and then go for a walk.
Our dinner was a bowl of Norwegian fish soup and an Autumn salad. The fish soup was delicious; we don’t put peas in fish soup in the Pacific Northwest, nor in the South, so it was a lovely addition that surprised me and delighted me. The Herbstsalad had roast duck pieces, and roasted beet, on a bed of mixed greens. The whole meal was lovely.
After dinner, we walked around the shopping area near our hotel, it was a beautiful night and the streets were crowded with a festive crowd. I thought the below was a church, and perhaps it was at one time, but I was told it is no longer a functioning church.
Some public art – Oslo is full of lovely statuary, and beautiful parks.
Oslo is also peopled by these trolls, in infinite variety. I sort of like them, I think of Father Richard Rohr and his message that our dark side is sometimes the way we find our path to God, in our brokenness.
As we walked, more and more people were gathering along the pedestrian way. We would ask, but no one we asked seemed to know what was happening, but all suggested it was probably a political rally with elections coming up soon. It was a very festive rally, not hostile or threatening in any way. Ah, to have such civil politics . . . .
Near our hotel was a store which sold what we called in Germany, “trachten” which means traditional folk-clothing. This traditional folk clothing is still made and is increasingly worn on high social occasions – weddings, important political occasions, National day, etc and is very expensive. One guide told us an outfit might start at $2,000. and then for special occasions, your husband might buy you the traditional jewelry which goes with the clothing.
This is actually my favorite, below. The Norwegian traditional clothing seems to me to have some Middle Eastern influence in the trims and buttons and modesty. No, I am not the least bit tempted; it would not work in Pensacola. It would be too hot and too heavy, and the heat and humidity would harm the valuable wool fabrics.
We slept wonderfully at the Bristol Hotel, and were up bright and shiny the next morning for our tour of Oslo and train trip over the mountains to Bergen.
Wake of the Vikings: Amsterdam to Oslo
Amsterdam isn’t the same airport I transited multiple times every year while we lived in Qatar and Kuwait. I had a routine, arrive, go to the club, shower, get on next flight. Keeping it simple, keeping it real.
Arriving in Amsterdam now, you have to go through passport control, even though you are just transiting! Oh aarrgh! Â But, as AdventureMan said, at least it’s not Paris/Charles de Gaulle, where chaos reigns and it is no-where near charming, it is get-me-out-of-here awful.
We board our flight for Oslo and almost immediately are served a snack. Oh, my Scandinavian blood sings for joy, it is smoked salmon, and it is packaged beautifully!
The packets on the top layer are dill sauce and mustard. Look at the beautiful box 🙂
The smoked salmon excited my anticipation of Oslo and Bergen:
The bread was also packaged – and warm!
Sometimes the little things make all the difference. I love artistic packaging. There were utensils for eating packed into the lid.
The flight was easy, and less than full; Â arrival was smooth. It was a lovely introduction.
A Dramatic Beginning to The Wake of the Vikings
It’s not that I am THAT compulsive, but I do like to plan ahead, and things that happen at the last minute that require attention can disturb my sleep.
This is a trip we’ve had planned for over a year and a half. We didn’t plan for Hurricane Harvey, and we are flying out of Houston. We didn’t plan on Hurricane Irma, another all-time historical hurricane, headed toward Florida, and possibly into the Gulf. Possibly into Pensacola.
We have a wonderful couple who take care of our house and our cats while we are gone. She called the day before we were leaving to ask if we had any plans for the hurricane she needed to know about. Hmmmm. No, I didn’t. I planned not to worry about it. And . . . at the same time, all around me, people are stocking up on propane, and Sam’s has run out of water, and . . . . some people are preparing to hunker down and some to leave home, heading north.
We got moving. I had an hour before my last meeting, and spent that hour figuring out what really mattered to me (photo albums) and putting photo albums up high and in cupboards, and fragile things, like the crystal candelabra AdventureMan gave me for our first anniversary in the safest place I could think of.
Law and Order Man (our son) said he would take Ragnar and Uhtred, our very young cats, to a safe place, if needed.
AdventureMan braced the garage doors with huge specially made steel beams that bolt into place, and we called our contractor who said if it looked like Irma was heading our way, he would put up all the ballistic window and door covers.
It’s not everything, but it’s something. We all felt a lot better.
And thanks to the ‘net, we know that Houston is up and running, and our flights into Houston and out of Houston will fly.
Around eleven, we hear the front door opening (? ! ? ! ? !) Â and it is the couple who are coming to stay with the house and cats; they thought we were leaving at night, not the next morning. We all laughed, got them settled, and went to sleep peacefully.
The flight into Houston was the best kind, uneventful. We love uneventful flights. You can still see a lot of standing water, and water damage, but the greatest part of the upswell of waters appears to have subsided.
“Today is the first day that the airport is 100% up and running,” a Houstonian tells us. We are good listeners, and he tells us that the worst part of all this drama is that the death count continues to mount as rescue-workers go into places where people thought they could shelter in safety. The mold is also hitting hard and fast, and emergency facilities are strapped. They are functioning, and they are prepared, and some things are beginning to run out.
The best, he followed up with, is that “you know how divided we have all been? Once the storm hit, it didn’t matter if you were black or white or Mexican or Confederate, we were all just people, and we helped our neighbors, we helped each other. In that way, it was one of the best things that has ever happened in Houston.”
Who would have thought? Houston-strong!
Eleven years with Intlxpatr
This is the first year since I moved to Pensacola that I haven’t thought about quitting blogging. I’ve given this some thought. I remember when I started this blog, upon arriving in Kuwait. Well, not exactly upon arrival, I spent a lot of time reading and observing before I took that leap. It was scary for me.
On the other hand, I didn’t have much to lose. I was new in the country, didn’t know a lot of people, had a husband very busy putting out fires and starting new ones . . . I needed an outlet, a place where I could learn more about Kuwait. Thus Intlxpatr and Here There and Everywhere was born.
Today is the birthday of my blog alter ego 🙂  I bought myself my favorite flowers to celebrate. (remember, this is virtual world; you don’t have to believe everything I say.)
I’m finding that eleven years later, the blog functions in a similar, but different way; it allows me to express my exasperation with the current regime of greed, robbing the poor to further enrich the rich, oppressing the workers they promised to uplift, spreading distrust, even hatred, of the other . . . and WHO is not the other? “Who is my neighbor?”
Keeping with tradition, you are welcome to enjoy the lavish birthday cakes here to entertain you.  This year, I’m a little focused on the elaborate, and destinations. 🙂
I’m almost afraid to cut this one:
So pretty! I would love to do this one for my little granddaughter when she is a little older:
Our next expedition; AdventureMan says we are sailing into cold temperatures, freezing rain and possible hurricane conditions. Thrills my heart!
Of course, there always has to be a little bit of Paris 🙂
And a bit of the beach 🙂
Thank you for coming by to wish us all well for another year 🙂
Check Writing Nostalgia: No More Slack
Honestly, it’s been a long time since it has mattered, but not so long that I don’t remember. When I was a young Army wife, I always knew I could write a check two days before pay day because it took at least that long for the check to clear.
What was funny, was that when we would leave our post in Amman, Jordan to visit classmates at the embassy in Damascus, we could go shopping in the souks, and checks we would write for gold, or carpets, or beautiful copper pots would clear days before the checks we would write at the embassy for cash. They must have had couriers; my guess is that the checks went by car to Beirut and then were combined with other checks and flown to the USA. Those checks cleared very quickly!
This morning as I was doing some banking, as I checked in to my bank, the first thing I saw was this notification:
We have already seen this at several of the businesses where we write checks; they run the check through and hand it back to us and the money is gone from our account almost instantaneously.
It used to drive AdventureMan crazy. I handled the month-to-month expenses. He would ask how much we had left, and I would say something like “Oh, six hundred twenty two dollars, plus the invisible thousand.” In his mind, the “invisible thousand” was sloppy financial practice. In my mind, it protected me against unexpected emergencies and overdrawing the account. It was worth it to me. We kept track of our checks (oh this sounds so old-fashioned now when I tell you about it, so quaint, so archaic) in a registry, where every time we wrote a check we wrote down the check number, the amount, who it was to, and on those accounts which charged by check, the check charge. At the end of the month, the bank would send you a paper statement, and you had to go through all your returned checks to see if there were any that hadn’t cleared, then subtract those from your total, and your total needed to match the bank’s total. On occasion, I would spend hours trying to find where I might have made a mistake. Mostly, it came out right.
Now, I do most of it online, and the bank keeps a running total for me. All I have to do is log on, and those totals are there, and up to date. I guess they are about to get up-to-dater.
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