Shameless Self-Aggrandizement

Maxwell

2012-01-20T16:18:00.002-07:00

I think Maxwell as a name for the new car is appropriate.

This is what I've been doing while driving my car.

Wheee! Wee-wee-weee! Wheeeeee!!

2012-01-19T22:31:00.005-07:00

It's rather amusing that this post, months after the last one, is about the same thing -- went to test drive the John Cooper Works Mini Coupe...and drove home in a brand-new, super-spiffy car!

This is not an actual photograph yet (too dark to actually take one), but it's just what my car looks like. Adorable, no? And plenty speedy, to boot.

Now it just needs a name, apparently (according to the Mini dealer, everyone names their car). Something suitably British, I think. Clive? Bertram? Reginald? NIgel? Ian? Make a suggestion, we'll see what sticks!

Good news? Bad news?

2011-10-15T23:24:00.002-06:00

Is it good news that the Very Tall husband fits into the car that I want?

Best Science Class Evah

2011-09-07T08:37:00.003-06:00

Poached shamelessly from Pharyngula-- wouldn't science class be way more fun if all the lectures were like this? Brilliant!!

Just checking in

2011-09-02T11:11:00.002-06:00

I'm out in Vegas staying with my dad for the week, while Pat has a much-needed vacation. We're doing well, although I've managed to get sick and sound like a deranged squeaky chipmunk.

But I ran across this cartoon this morning, and it made me laugh until I wheezed.

A little perspective

2011-07-30T09:45:00.003-06:00

Ran across this today, and though it might put this ridiculous posturing about the debt ceiling in perspective:

Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) displayed a chart on the Senate Floor that shows each president, starting with John F. Kennedy, and their respective raises of the debt ceiling. The information is quite telling.

Kennedy raised the debt ceiling 4 times
for a total increase of 5%.

Johnson raised the debt ceiling 7 times
for a total increase of 18%.

Nixon raised the debt ceiling 9 times
for a total increase of 36%.

Ford raised the debt ceiling 5 times
for a total increase of 41%.

Carter raised the debt ceiling 9 times
for total increase of 59%.

Reagan raised the debt ceiling 18 times
for a total increase of 199%.

George H. W.Bush raised the debt ceiling 9 times
for a total increase of 48%.

Clinton raised the debt ceiling 4 times
for a total increase of 44%.

Georg W. Bush raised the debt ceiling 7 times
for a total increase of 90%.

Obama has raised the debt ceiling 3 times
for a total increase of 26%.

Not quite a ...bad idea, but...

2011-07-01T09:09:00.003-06:00

I'm married to a man who has,in the past, cooked frozen chicken patties in the toaster. No, not a toaster oven, the toaster. Just dropped them in the slots and heated them up.

(I should point out, of course, that he's not the only one who has thought of this, and in fact there is a toaster-bag sort of thing to make grilled cheese in the toaster -- you can get them from Amazon). However, I do try to draw the line at cooking meat in a toaster slot. It's a fire hazard, at the very least.

Which is why I laughed my butt off when I came across this old ad on the web.

I mean, sure, it's bacon, which make sit good almost no matter what. And I've been known to buy pre-cooked bacon on occassion from the grocery, or cook a pound at a time in the microwave, so I know that bacon is a pretty versatile kind of food. But in the toaster? I can only imagine that the Adorable Husband will think it's a grand idea! I wonder if they are still making it somewhere...

IN the next house...

2011-06-27T19:17:00.002-06:00

Yes, stairs are too difficult, and since you can't usually get a house with one of those fire-poles to slide down, this will be the option we install in our next house. Besides, doesn't it look fun?

I think it will go perfectly in the Scottish castle I intend to buy when we finally win the lottery. What else are those round towers for?

Lovely Norway

2011-06-22T12:33:00.002-06:00

How predictable

2011-06-22T12:19:00.002-06:00

Oh, look! The half-term governor has quit yet another high-profile gig. Apparently, the "lame-stream" media that she complained were always following her around and not focusing on all that important stuff in Washington...stopped following her around.

Amid diminishing media interest, Sarah Palin has quit her high-profile bus tour halfway through and returned to Alaska with her family, according to RealClearPolitics.
The move puts a damper on widespread speculations that Palin’s “One Nation” bus tour, which launched on Memorial Day, was a potential precursor to a potential White House bid for 2012. Palin never made it to her scheduled stops in the key primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.

Without an audience and media attention, she simply can't be bothered. And people actually considered her a viable candidate for president?

Don't worry, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of her. This next election season is going to be a treasure trove for the comedians, I bet.

Hardanger Lefse

2011-06-21T19:42:00.003-06:00

Oy! I almost forgot. Here's the recipe for the "sweet" lefse that we had at the Oslo Folk Museum, which we were told was common in the Hallingdal area.

Norwegian "mørlefse" (soft and sweet)
2 eggs
250 g sugar
125 g melted butter/margarine
1/2 liter buttermilk
1 ts baking powder
approx. 1 kg wheat flour

barley flour
butter, sugar, cinnamon

Mix eggs with sugar and butter, and stir into the milk. Mix the baking powder with some flour and stir into the blend. Mix with so much flour that the dough is easy to roll. Barley flour makes it easier to roll out the lefse. Bake the the lefse on a griddle or in a dry frying pan.

Lefse are fine to put in the freezer. Serve with butter, sugar, and cinnamon on top.

(Just a note, in the whole recipe, the word "lefse" was always in quotes. Not sure why. Also, the recipe is not clear, the barley flour is used to flour the worksurface and the rolling pin.)

This was very tasty, indeed, but very unlike the potato lefse that we are used to making. It it much thicker, for one thing, just shy of 1/4" thick, and was much more like a pancake in texture. Very, very tasty with butter, though!

Pause in travel

2011-06-19T07:44:00.002-06:00

Sitting in the British Airways business lounge at Heathrow, between our flights from Stockholm and to Denver, contemplating a glass of wine and eating ginger cookies.

What a great vacation.

I loved the old part of Stockholm, watching all the bicycle commuters in Copenhagen, the gently leaning medieval buildings in Helsingor and Ribe and Roskilde, the stunning scenery of the Norwegian Fjords, and the monumental architecture of St Petersburg. Nothing disappointed. We met some terrific fellow travelers, stayed with family who made us feel as if we were part of the family, stood on the subways with commuters in each city, and sat at sidewalk cafes to watch the people -- locals and tourists -- go by. It was spectacular.

My favorite thing? The Vasa Museum, I think. It was just so stunning and mind-boggling that I remember clearly the first moment I walked into the dimly list building and saw the totally unexpected and improbably ship. A close second was the fabulous little town of Ribe and the night-watchman tour around the old houses. Or perhaps, becoming part of the huge crowd in St Petersburg listening to the concert in the palace square that we could almost see.

My least favorite thing? Well, the floods that scoured southern Norway while we were there should be on the list. Fog and rain dogged us for a few days, but even with those, we were awed by the spectacular scenery. We had, for the most part, spectacular weather -- sunny nearly the whole time in Stockholm, sunny during every day in Copenhagen and rainy only at night, a beautiful sunny afternoon in Bergen, of all places, and even two hot days in St Petersburg. We're spoiled.

We ate a lot of street food (bacon-wrapped hot dogs are a favorite) and ice-cream cones while walking around the city streets, and bemoaned the fact that Scandinavia seems to shut down entirely at 6pm, so you'd better eat and early dinner or risk having to eat from the local gas station. We tried a few local specialties, but still managed to avoid pickled herring. We ate pizza far too often, but it was quick and good. We probably didn't drink enough beer, though.

But I'm ready to go home and sleep in my own bed. We're waiting for the announcement that they're boarding our flight (9 1/2 hours) back to Denver and should be home sometime around 7pm. We're both tired, variously achy and broken, and ready to be home!

Back to Sweden

2011-06-18T08:58:00.003-06:00

Travel day. Up at the crack of 9:00, breakfast, and off to the airport to fly back to Stockholm. We arrived at the hotel about 2pm and we've been lumping about and whining that we should do something this afternoon (beyond going into the airport concourse for an ice-cream bar), and that it's a lovely day and we ought to go out into the world to see something we missed...

..and so far, we've managed nothing. Well, not quite nothing -- we did repack and distribute the tchotkes that we have bought (including a boatload of Russian chocolate) into the various bags and such, and checked in to our flight.

Now we're sitting in the nice, cool hotel room in complete silence. Mark is playing his iphone bird-flinging game and I'm browsing the interwebs randomly. This may describe our entire day. Except we might actually get motivated enough to nap.

Tomorrow? Home. Airline flights all day, but home to sleep in our own beds.

St Petersburg 2

2011-06-17T12:41:00.003-06:00

Lots of walking today, and as a result I am once again sunburned and my hair hurts a bit. Oy.

We met our guide, Katya, this morning and almost immediately changed her planned itinerary, since we had already seen the St. Isaacs cathedral last night and wanted instead to see Kazan and some other buildings. But, no problems, with just the two of us in tow, so off we went to get a walking history of St Petersburg, Nevskiy Prospekt, and the various bridges, palaces and museums.

Kazan Cathedral is a slightly smaller copy of the basilica in Rome (on purpose, of course) and inside it is a lovely building -- but it still used for Russian Orthodox services, which were in full tilt this morning. We heard the choir singing, and the long line of head-scarfed women standing to greet the priest. It was a quick visit, we didn't want to bother anyone. Katya was a little anxious because she didn't have a head-covering, so we bowed out quickly.

We walked along the canals to the Church on the Spilled Blood -- a fantastical array of onion domes, mosaic tiles and niches and alcoves on the outside and even more impressively covered over every inch inside with glass mosaics. It's stunning--the mosaics are so finely done they look as if they are painted, and they cover every interior arch and dome. There are photographs of the restoration work that was necessary after WWII (it took longer to restore the church, even though it had not been physically damaged much, than it did to build and decorate it when it was new). Included the photos is the picture of the artillery shell that was lodged, unexploded, in the main dome and only discovered during restoration in the 1960s. The exterior is actually not that much more detailed than the Russian Orthodox church we photographed yesterday (and boy, do I wish we'd been able to go inside that one!), but the interior is jaw-dropping.

Onward towards the Hermitage (Winter palace and a variety of other buildings).We walked around the stables and the Marble Palace and the various other buildings along the Neva river to the entrance of the museum. The mint-green and white painted facade is impressive (if a bit...green) and a number of the state rooms in the main part of the museum are still intact -- and, of course, there is the art. To even glimpse everything in the collection would take 9 years, they say, and it's a 10km walk to even go through every single room in the four buildings that make up the state museums. So, of course, we can only hit the highlights -- impressionists, post-impressionists,Dutch masters, Spanish and Italian allegory, Picasso, Van Gogh, Renoir, Rembrandt, Titian, and da Vinci. And a dozen others that I can't rattle off immediately. It's an amazing collection (although I think there was some sort of weird attraction to giant vases from someone in the museum's past; there are a bazillion of the things.

I'm fascinated by the Dutch realist painters, and less impressed by Monet and Matisse and the like. Anyone who can paint a picture that I have to check twice to make sure it's not a photograph...that takes a level of commitment and talent that I can't even aspire to.

I only set off the alarms once, leaning in too close to see the delicate lace painted on a lady's dress in an 8x10 painting,I didn't actually touch anything, really! I might have breathed on it, though, which is more likely to be a horrible infraction.

We spent most of the day at the Hermitage. It's larger than the Louvre, which I thought was just enormous,and we only saw a tiny fraction of the art displayed, in only a few of the hundreds of rooms. I wish we could have stayed longer (or that it's open longer, so we could go back in after dinner and walk around more). It was interesting to go through with a guide, though, she was very well informed and really kept the place from being overwhelming.

Afterwards, we walked across the Palace Bridge and visited the Peter and Paul Fortress (and cathedral), on the original island where St Petersburg was founded (Rabbit island). The cathedral here is very plain, very simple, really -- and houses the tombs/mausoleums of most of the tsars and tsarinas. Surprisingly, the caskets for the all of these emperors and empresses are very plain as well -- white marble, gold cross, gold nameplate. With only two exceptions, really, the caskets (and they aren't really caskets, they have no bodies in them...what are those called? Eh, it's escaping me) are small and plain. Compare that to the almost grotesque over-wroughtness of the tombs of the scandinavian kings and queens, and it is even more notable. No giant four-poster altars with life-size statues or writing dragons and angels here. Just a gold nameplate.

We took the subway back to Nevskiy Prospekt -- not one of the really cool subway stations, but it was worth the trip just to ride the escalator down to the subway platform...it was, by far, the longest escalator that I have ever seen. The metros here are the deepest of any in the world (to get under the various canals and rivers) and it's impressive just to stand on the moving staircase and go down and down and down and down. The subway trains also move very fast compared to what we've been riding lately in Sweden and Norway. We're considering taking one of the red-line trains tomorrow, just to see the spectacular Art Nouveau stations - we'l see if we have time.

Had our anniversary dinner at a local restaurant called Gogol -- excellent food, attentive and very Russian service, and now we are completely done in. Bed, and possible sleeping late, are the only things we can manage, I think. We've been encouraged to get up at 1:25 to see the raising of the bridges, but I think we'll sleep through the alarm!

Tomorrow? Perhaps a quick foray out to see metro stations or one last glimpse of the buildings along the Neva, but we have a driver to get us to the airport at 11am and we're back to Stockholm.

St Petersburg

2011-06-16T13:21:00.006-06:00

St. Petersburg is a very cool city -- love the architecture, love the canals, it's been fun to just walk around randomly within the Strelka and people-watch in the parks and on Nevsky Prospekt. The fact that it's currently 11:30pm and it's light outside s if it were 11 AM is still a bit weird.

Great day, though. Started off a bit gray, but we were inside looking at overly-baroque palace rooms (tons of gold leaf, I swear) and then it cleared up and got sunny when we had a chance to go to the gardens at Peterhof. By the time we got back to the city at 5:30, it was a perfect sunny day, felt like it was noon, and we headed off into the city to look at stuff.

The palaces were really amazing, and definitely grand on an imperial scale. We spent a few hours in the presence of hundreds of pounds of gold leaf and silk wall coverings, all painstakingly recreated and restored to Tsarskoe Selo and Peterhof after the WWII. We saw some of the pictures of the palaces right after the war, and the Germans left them in utter ruin. Just brick walls, with caved in ceilings and floors, most of the walls crumbling and bombed-out. They destroyed everything. And yet, within a couple of decades, much of the palaces was rebuilt, restored, re-gilded, re-painted, re-everything'd. It's really quite amazing, considering the financial position of the USSR after WWII. But it was, apparently, a priority and they've done a truly fantastic job at both palaces. Using descriptions, photographs, and whatever they had managed to put into hiding before the palaces were taken over by the germans (they did manage to save a lot of the artwork, etc), they have a dozen or so rooms in eah palace completely restored. I guess it'snot really restoration when you are making reproduction stuff from scratch, but they were very careful to match what had been there. LIke I said, it's a roccoco-confection sort of place. Makes Versailles look quite plain, actually.

The Amber Room is a huge draw, too -- a large room entirely covered in amber mosaics and carvings. It's one of the most-visited rooms at Catherine Palace at Tsarskoe Selo, and it is a bit jaw-dropping. (No pictures, though, hmph). It is, of course, an entirely new Amber Room from the one initially installed in the palace -- the Nazis took the entire room away and it has never been seen again, our guide told us. When the Russians attempted to take down the panels to save them and hide them away, they fell apart and so they put their efforts towards other rooms that could be saved. Even knowing that it's all new (an opened in 2006, I think), it's pretty cool.

We visited Peterhof second,

and walked through the two parallel sets of rooms leading to the ballroom and reception rooms. If anything, this is an even grander palace, with rooms from each of the periods represented -- baroque and neo-classical, with oriental rooms and french-inspired salons. And the gardens! Mark says that he actually thinks they are more spectacular than Versailles, mostly because the huge fountains and canals and statuary are all up against the palace. The view from the garden terrace up to the main building is a collection of spraying fountains, dozens of bright gold-leafed statues, and terraced stone. It's quite impressive. The fountain - Samson and the Lion -- is the tallest fountain (In Russia? I'll have to look it up) and all the dozens of fountains in the palace gardens work without any pumps - they are all entirely gravity-driven.

We only had a half-hour or so in the gardens before we had to leave -- traffic is abominable in the city due to this conference, so we had to head back. It would be easy to spend a day there and see the various buildings and planned gardens in the huge park.

On the way out, though, we stopped to take pictures of this spectacular church. I have no idea what its name is, and other than the fact that its a Russian Orthodox church, I know nothing about it. It was just such an eye-catching thing that we had to stop!

We napped for a grand total of 30 minutes before I was too antsy and wanted to head out and look at things. The sun is out, everything looks spectacular, and we needed food, anyway.

St Isaacs Cathedral is half a block away - we walked over yesterday to take a look, so we went back today to climb up the 265 steps to the colonnade and walk around for some very nice views of the city. The church is technically a museum (it was a museum of Atheism for awhile, then that was moved to another building) and there are a lot of icons and paintings inside. But mostly, the inside is enough to gape at all on its own -- fourteen kinds of marble, soaring ceilings, a huge dome, and tons (probably literally) of gold both inside and out. The church is almost too big to see from the outside, hemmed in by traffic.

The streets are absolutely packed tonight, and so we decided that since tomorrow is our anniversary, so we'll have a nice dinner, today can be our McDonalds day (you know the drill, once in every country we have to eat at McDonalds, to see if things are weird), so we tracked one down and...oy! It was like Mosh-Pit McDonalds. Absolutely PACKED with people, ten or twelve deep at the six registers, people yelling and pushing and in general in complete chaos. We did manage to squeeze to the front to order our two Royale Cheeseburgers with fries ( it really is Royale Cheeseburger -- pronounced that way and written рояль чизбургер. )

We escaped with our lives, brown bags and diet-cokes clasped in our sweaty hands, pushing our way back out of hte building through the hordes coming in. We decided to risk drinking the diet-cokes, even though they're made with St Petersburg water, water that even locals boil before drinking it) - the filters and such should be enough. We hope. We've never had issues before, even in Egypt. I'll let you know. We're sticking to bottled water for drinking and tooth-brushing.

We walked back along the Neva river, admiring the buildings and the truly astounding number of people. Why? Ah-hah! There is a Sting Concert in Palace Square tonight. There are thousands of people streaming in to the square and lining every street nearby to try to get a glimpse. We pressed up against the barricade and watched -- the sound was good enough that everyone in the park could hear it. Very cool!

Still listening to the concert, we walked out along the river, across the bridge to view the canals and snap some pictures of the very cool buildings (mint green seems to be a popular color, and pale lemon yellow). We tried to walk directly back to the hotel, but we got stopped by one of the hundreds of police and militia (some with riot gear) who are out in force tonight for the concert, and had to loop around and try to get upstream to reach the street..I felt a bit like a salmon trying to swim upstream, but we did make it.

There are police of at least three different flavors out tonight, mostly trying to keep traffic moving, I think. The regular police, the militia/paramilitary group, and another sort--they have different uniforms and badges, but I'm not sure what everyone does. They manned the barricades and kept people out of the streets, but it was still a traffic mess. Lots of people partying tonight (with the concert and white nights), so we decided to retire relatively early -- and still didn't get back to the hotel until 11. And it's still bright outside. The sun doesn't set until nearly 11 and it's up again by 3-something. It never really gets dark. I can't quite get used to it.

Tomorrow? Meet our guide and go to the Hermitage, Peter and Paul Fortress, Church on the Spilled Blood and wherever else we want to go. Just walking, so we'll see where we end up!

Two of my favorite girls at my favorite place

2011-06-15T12:56:00.002-06:00

Yup, still makes me giggle.

Добро пожаловать в Санкт-Петербурге

2011-06-15T12:37:00.002-06:00

Welcome to St Petersburg!

Today was mostly a travel day, to get us from Stockholm to St Petersburg. Pretty uneventful, actually -- the hotel in Stockholm is storing our luggage so we can fly with just a small carry-on, and it's a short flight. Waited in long lines as passport control at the airport, but everything was in order and our driver met us at the arrivals hall to get us to our hotel.

Lucky thing, too -- while quite a few people do rent cars and drive in the city, the traffic is absolutely atrocious today. Tomorrow is the first day of the International Economics Forum (the name is something like that) and politicians and high-ranking people from all over the world are arriving...which means that streets are shut down while police (with sirens blaring) excort convoys of black Audis through the city to the hotels, and it's wreaking havoc with normal traffic in the city. Streets are one way, or closed off, or completely blocked.

I didn't mean to schedule is in St Petersburg at the same time,I didn't realize until after we'd gotten tickets and started visa stuff that the timing was bad. Well, not bad -- just busy. We aren't driving anywhere in the city after tonight, so we should be fine except for crowds at the major sights. Our tour company has already gotten tickets to the Hermitage and other main museums, so we dont' have to worry about getting in (apparently people who waited until later are having problems getting the scarce tickets since so many poeple are in the city.)

We checked into the hotel, which is half a block from St Isaacs Cathedral and a block off Palace Square, near the river and a block off Nevsky Prospekt. It's a very nice hotell and our room is HUGE. Seriously, we're going to feel like hockey pucks sleeping ion the bed in one end of the room and the windows at the other end. Oy -- we ended up in a deluxe room since that was all they had left (see conference, above) and it's very nice. We could play handball in here. I'll ask Mark to take some pictures in the morning.

We didn' want to go out right away since we'd handed over our passports to the hotel for registration, and even though there is a two hour timeshift to come to St. Petersburg from Sweden, we're hungry. The hotel has a restaurant (Baron) that is actually pretty highly rated, and they have advertised a Real Gypsy Folk Show with "an almost real bear"...how could we possibly pass that up?

The bear is stuffed, of course, but the live folk music was great and the food was excellent. We spent two+ hours dawdling over dinner, accompanied by Russian beer and (a slightly less spectacular choice) Russian wine. It was nice to slow down, listen to the very good music, and relax. We've been go-go-go- for weeks.

However, dinner over at 9:30 and it's still light outside so we took off from the hotel to wander around a bit. Walked around the block to the cathedral, and through the gardens along the Neva, and up Nevsky Prospekt a bit, then back along the canal (and through some streets that aren't facing "the world" and are a bit less polished) before heading to the hotel. I only got a little lost, but figured if we could find the Admiralty (by the huge gold spire) or the enormous bulk of St Isaacs, we could see the hotel from here. Hah!

Tomorrow? Tours of Peterhof, Tsarskoe Selo and Catherine's Palace (I think that's the third one). We're sharing a car/driver with another couple for the day,which is nice, and we'll have a day to ourselves on Friday for sightseeing in the city center (Hermitage, Russian Museum, etc).

Cross Country

2011-06-14T11:51:00.002-06:00

Our goal today is to get from Oslo to Stockholm. Yeah, the itinerary didn't quite work out perfectly, but I had the airline tickets and started the visa process before we swapped around the direction of our trip...so instead of looping around and ending up in Stockholm at the end, so leaving from there would make sense, we went round the other way and had a long drive from Oslo back to where we started.

Good day for driving, though -- foggy and gray. I fell asleep in the car almost immediately. Mark, fueled by several cups of coffee, was raring to go.

We drove to Uppsala to see the cathedral there, which is amazing.. and huge. It's the largest church in Scandinavia,e ven bigger than the cathedral in Trondheim (which was on purpose, of course). It's a brick church, not a stone one, so Trondheim still claims to be "the best". Mark says I should visit some of the big cathedrals in Germany and France before I'm too impressed by "the biggest". I can't even wrap my head around 500+ foot-tall towers, like at Cologne.

Just north of the modern city (which is a university town -- and college students everywhere are the same, I swear) is Gamla Uppsala, the old (original) town. We stopped to see the small stone church there (the oldest stone church in sweden, apparently) and got an impromptu organ concert. The organist was practicing, so we hung around a bit to listen. Just next to the church are three burial mounds that date from the Viking age.

The car goes back today, so we're staying at the airport, actually -- the hotel is part of one of the terminal buildings. Convenient, and surprisingly comfortable. We cleaned out the car, hauled everything up to the room to repack and winnow thigns down so we can have only carry-ons to Russia, Mark returned the car, and we're done for the day.

Tomorrow? We fly out to St Petersburg for three days. Hopefully we'll have wifi!

Oslo 3:On Holiday

2011-06-13T11:13:00.000-06:00

I didn't realize that today was a holiday in Norway -- Pinse (whitsunday, or Pentecost). We had to look it up. We were walking along the main drag in Oslo and there hardly any people, and only a few of the shops were open...must be a bank holiday, we thought. Nope - national holiday where everyone in the city heads off to be in the countryside (which is why it was such an issue on thursday with the flooding).

Most of the tourist-y stuff is open, of course. We got up early to wander around the Vigeland sculpture park, which is absolutely gorgeous in the morning sunshine. it took only a few minutes for the tourist buses to show up, though; we managed to stay ahead of the hundreds of people who tended to stop at the tops of stairs and in the narrow gates. The park is really great, and the sculptures are oddly compelling -- as is the story of how it came to be: more than 20 years working on the project obsessively. The column--the centerpiece of the park--is fascinating. We even managed to get a picture of the crabby little boy, who is so popular that the bronze statue is rubbed shiny. My notes say that the rumor is that Vigeland gave the little boy chocolate and then took it away...

The tram loops around to the harbor again, so we hopped on and rode back to Akershus fortress and the military museum. Mark started out a bit 'meh' about it, but the exhibits on WWII are really, really good, with lots of photos and a collection of artifacts that the museum has just recently rediscovered and displayed. It was surprisingly absorbing.

There's not much exciting going on at Akershus fortress, to be honest. While it's still used for state events (they can host huge banquets, etc), the rooms don't have much in the way of historic details that make them interesting. There are some collections of period furniture, of course, but beyond that, the rooms are plain and undecorated for the most part. You can only get into the tower wing, so we walked through and back out to wander the grounds, which are open as a public park. The views out over the harbor are good, though, if you can see around the enormous cruise ships that are tied up just outside of the fortress. Seriously, those things are HUGE.

Once again, we were thwarted in our attempt to go inside the cathedral -- since it's a religious holiday, there are services all day and so popping in as a tourist is a bit gauche. We decided to walk up and down Karl Johan's Gata instead, and people-watch from one of the sidewalk cafes. There were only a few people, though --it had been much busier on Saturday, today...it all seems deserted. We grabbed lunch at a deli and sat in the sun for awhile anyway.

We're driving back to Stockholm tomorrow, so an early start!

Oslo 2

2011-06-12T14:08:00.004-06:00

Off to the Bygdøy peninsula today for boat museums -- which prompted us to try to figure out how that is actually pronounced (yes, we should just ask someone, but we have to do something to amuse ourselves on the metro...). Is it big-doy? Big-day? Buy-doy? Buy-day? I did look it up, btw, and it's big-deuh with that particular Norwegian o-sound. C'mon, I can still reduce myself to giggles pronouncing the Swedish town of Boarp, ok? I'm easily amused.

At any rate, we caught the early ferry today over to he Viking Ship Museum and looked at remarkable Viking ships and the stuff they have found in them. The ships here are burial ships--they were found as part of burial mounds with grave goods and funerary huts and the like. This is quite different from the ships in the museum in Roskilde, Denmark; those ships were sailing ships that were scuttled to protect the harbor, not buried carefully. Two of the ships are well-preserved and look as if they could sail off at any moment, the third is just the skeleton of a ship, a few ribs and keel. There isn't a lot of information about the ships, really, just a short blurb on each one. It's the "finds" wing of the museum that is fascinating, though -- tons of detailed wood work, funerary goods, decorations, goldwork, and mundane objects that were found in the ships (even after they'd been grave-robbed in antiquity). The museum is very stark, just a white-plastered cruciform building, like a huge church. In fact, that seems very appropriate.

It's a short walk to the Fram museum, which was a surprise. I expected a polar-exploration museum (which it is), but I didn't expect the whole ship to be there! They basically built a museum around the dry-docked Fram ship, intact. The three-story museum has dozens of placards and photos and "lantern slides" (I had to go look up what a lantern slide was) of the various expeditions to the pole. Images of the dogs, of the men on the boat, of the depots and sledges, accompanied by the diary entries from Roald Amundson. I was surprised to learn that they didnt' take a doctor on the voyage (and they were very pleased not to have needed one) and that they killed enough seals and walrus to store 210,000 lbs of meat in the various depots they set up for supplies. And, of course, that the decision to head to the south pole was a last minute decision aimed at stealing the thunder of Cook and Peary, who had reached the north pole. He didn't even tell the crew and his backers until they actually underway, that they were heading to the Antarctic and not the Arctic.

Clustered near the Fram are the Kon-Tiki museum, and the Norse Maritime museum, so we just rounded the corner to see the Ra II and a replica of the Kon Tiki raft that Thor Heyerdahl sailed (floated?) to Polynesia, and later to support his idea that the papyrus boats the Egyptians built were seaworthy. We watched a few clips of the 50's movie about the Kon Tiki, and looked around a bit at the various exhibits about common boat design and environmental concerns. It didn't grab either of us very much, to be honest, so we crossed over to the Maritime museum in search of lunch and ended up looking at the dozens of perfect ship models in the museum. I love the little ship models--some of the complicated ones came with a plaque describing who made it and how long it took, I can't imagine spending four years building a single model, complete with tiny pulleys and ropes. I don't really want to make them myself, but I d love to look at them. I love architectural models, too--those maquettes of historic buildings can keep me occupied for hours.

Oslo has a large "folk park", like so many of the cities here in Scandinavia--large outdoor collections of antique buildings moved to an open-air park, usually with costumed docents and various activities. Skansen in Stockholm is a huge one, and there are a few others scattered around. Norway has half a dozen, I think. This one is actually very well done and interesting, with the houses and outbuildings grouped in regional areas, so you can see a typical farmstead in Sedesdal or Hallingdal or Telemark. Information about the buildings is a bit thin on the ground (I imagine they have more people staffing the various buildings later in the season), but it's a great place to wander around on a sunny afternoon.

We even watched a demonstration of lefse-making at one of the farmhouses. We were surprised at the results -- it was thicker, sweeter, and more cake-like than what we consider "lefse". What we are familiar with is potato lefse, the thin potato crepes. This is 'sweet lefse' that was commonly made in the Hallingdal valley for celebrations-it's rolled out in barley flour and is more like a buttermilk pancake with butter, milk, and cinnamon. Yummy! We ate it hot from the griddle (over the fire!) and grabbed the recipe. We'll have to try this at home. We have all the right equipment, of course - the girl demonstrating it was using lefse-turning sticks that are just like ours. Of course, we aren't making them over an open fire on a flat cast-iron pan, so her process was far more difficult than ours is!

And, we saw a exhibition of folk dancing which had absolutely adorable little kids in bunads bouncing around in the traditional dances of the regions -- lots of clapping and stomping and kicking, whilst going around in circles. Some of the older couples danced the more complicated stuff, which we decided looked very much like the boys showing off for the girls, and the girls testing out each partner until they found one they liked. I've been looking online, too, for an answer to a very pressing question: why does the men's bunad have a huge leather patch on the butt?

Opting not to get back on the bus (earlier, we had a very exciting bus ride with jerky stop-and-starts as it barreled around this tiny neighborhood) we walked back to the ferry stop and cruised back to the main pier. Mark wanted to see the Armed Forces Museum, which was supposed to be open for another hour or so, so we walked through Akershus Fortress again and discovered that the museum is closed (no notice, so my little booklet must be in error). It was a lovely walk, though, with ice cream to make up for the missed museum. We walked back through the main part of town to the metro station, and back around to the hotel.

It was a lovely day--sat in the sun, walked around in the pretty recreated villages, had ice cream. Tomorrow? Up to the ski jump to view Oslo, out to Frogner Park to see sculptures, and a walk through some of the neighborhoods in town. At least that's the plan.

Oslo 1

2011-06-11T15:00:00.005-06:00

Got a bit of a late start today (Mark apparently tried to wake me up at our normal time and while I said I was getting up, I apparently promptly fell back to sleep for an hour.) We're staying a bit outside of Oslo, but there is a T-bana station right outside the hotel, so we headed into the city this morning after breakfast. Convenient!

It's always a bit confusing the first time we try whatever public transport is in the city -- where to get tickets, how to handle the passes we have, that sort of thing. We've had city-cards in Stockholm, Copenhagen, and now Oslo that cover all busses, trains, trams, and metros. So we can pretty much get on and off as we need to, once we figure out the schedules. We used the metro all the time in Stockholm (it's a breeze), but we tended to walk more in Copenhagen since the stops didn't match up with what we wanted to do. Using the busses or metro in Oslo is a must -- we're pretty far out from the city center, too far to walk anywhere. I get a bit panicky about bus/train/tram travel (yes, I know, a grown woman with an irrational fear of public buses, mock me!) so knowing where things go and what the actual schedules are helps. Oslo relies much more on bus and tram connections than Stockholm did, so it's not just "get on the metro, get off when your stop comes up", it's "get on the metro, swap to this bus, get back on the metro...." so we spent

quite a lot of time deciphering the colorful systems maps. I'm still not sure about things.

We were a bit flummoxed by a tunnel closure that truncated the metro line we were on -- but we figured out the right bus to get on to make up the difference and walked around the National Theater. I'm glad we didn't try to walk from the metro station we got to -- Oslo is a big, spread-out city. While the central part of town is pretty small and easily walkable, there are outlying areas that are way out there. But -- we did get an impromptu concert on he train, with trumpets and drums.

The Historiske Museum here is great -- lots of Viking history and bits and bobs from the middle ages, including the doorways from a number of defunct stave churches. The best-preserved Viking helmet is part of the collection, along with tons of decorative pieces. I love wandering around the glass-box displays looking at pins and brooches and sword hilts; the museum attempts to connect it all together by theme: art and home and social customs. And, it's in a great old building!

We walked along the main street to the imposing (and controversial) Radhus -- a huge, twin-towered building that looks wierdly out of place in all the Neoclassical and Art nouveau buildings downtown...rather like a large soviet office block, to be honest. It was almost universally reviled by people in Oslo when it was built in 1950, but it does kind of grow on you. Inside, it's decorated with murals on almost every single wall that celebrate Norway. It looks very much like the city hall in Stockholm, we thought. Very familiar.

In the courtyard outside are wooden sculptures that illustrate some of the norse myths (also quite controversial when they were installed). We walked along the harbor behind the city hall so Mark could peer at the ships and then walked up to the Norwegian Resistance Museum, which is fabulous. It details the events that began April 1940, when Germany invaded Norway, using original letters, video, and artifacts to explain how the Norwegians resisted the occupation and how they actively sabotaged the german forces. It's fascinating (and I'm not usually one for WWII stuff) and really worth a visit. Very sobering, too, to realize how many Norwegians were sent to german camps and executed for refusing to cooperate.

We ducked into a rather authentic-styled Irish pub for lunch (yes, weird, but they seem to be pretty popular in norway, at least) for fish-n-chips and lamb stew and a pint. It's still pretty gray outside, and raining in intermittent spurts, so warm lunch and Guinness were a welcome stop. Kind of weird, though. Neither of us wanted a foofy lunch today, and while cafes and restaurants usually have great food, it tends to the foofy side -- lots of sauces and artfully arranged salads at lunch time. We've tried the popular open-faced sandwiches for lunch (they are common in all three countries) but it's been cool enough outside we want something hot, most days. Half the time we grab lunch at a stall somewhere and eat while walking or driving. Whoever thought up hot-dogs wrapped in bacon was a genius!

Mark totally humored me by going to the Architecture museum (I love the little models of buildings). It's a great space in an old bank building, and the current exhibits highlight new norwegian architecture (a lot of the viewpoints and tourist road stops have been designed in the last few years). I have to admit, I really don't get "modern scandinavian design". Perhaps it's a lot like modern art--either you get it, or you don't. I just don't see the beauty in some of these houses or office buildings; geometric boxes with random windows...nah, give me an overly Baroque apartment house in town any time, with ornate windows and curlicues everywhere, that I get. The avant garde stuff is interesting, but ultimately it's not homey to me, I guess. The exhibits did highlight the efforts to renovate and update building in the city, and we walked along Kongsgate to see some of them on our way back to the hotel.

For a Saturday afternoon, there aren't actually that many people around -- apparently it's a long weekend holiday, and the city residents all take off for the countryside, so everyone in town are tourists, like us. I have a feeling that Monday will be a bit more bustling and "normal". Of course, this is also the week of Norwegian Wood -- the huge rock concert series in Frogner Park. Eric Clapton kicked off the series this week. It attracts thousands of people, but I'm not sure where they were today - certainly not in the city center. I'm sure the park (and the campgrounds near it, etc) are crammed full of concert-goers tonight, though.

Tomorrow? Off to see the Viking ships and the Fram museum, for a start. It's supposed to actually be non-rainy tomorrow!

Adventure Girl returns

2011-06-11T14:45:00.002-06:00

Mark reminded me to post the Continuing Adventures of Adventure Grrrl -- leaning over barriers, leaping over (short) fences, and risking death at every turn!

Here she is, leaning over the road barrier to take a picture straight down at Trollstigen, after leaping from the car at one of the passing places:

And here, hanging over the glass barrier at the Stegastein Viewpoint on the Aurlandsvegan road, looking down into the Aurlandsfjord.

Wreaking Havoc

2011-06-10T15:09:00.003-06:00

Miserable, oppressive, pouring rain all day has left both of us in foul moods -- we drove from Laerdal down to Flam, hoping things would clear enough to warrant taking the ferry into the fjords, but it was no use. The fog and clouds have melded into a gray mist that obscures everything, but we drove out on the Aurlandsveien road (high mountain pass between Laerdal and Aurland/Flam) anyway, hoping that the breath-taking views would be...well, visible.

Not really. We drove up into the snow fields and marveled at the snow-markers that are the size of telephone poles, but mostly we drove through the Generic Norwegian Scenic today: fog. The hairpin turns coming down into Aurland are quite fun, though. All of the guidebooks keep telling us that the Aurland pass, and the Troll's Staircase are "hair raising" and scary...nothing has been as hairy and twisty as the road up and down to Lysebotn on our first day in the fjords. Now that was hair-raising.

We passed through Flam -- it was raining hard enough that we could barely see the fjord, so we decided to pass on the ferry and the railway (which is part of the quintessential Norway-in-a-Nutshell tourist trip) and just drive long the fjord for a bit,then head towards Oslo. We did drive up the narrow road to Undredal to see the tiny stave church there (the smallest church in norway, they claim) and along the side of the Naeroyfjord for a bit before turning around. We headed south before the new Laerdal tunnel (25km through the mountain, replacing the Aurlands pass that we drove over this morning). A technological marvel, perhaps, but we drove south through the mountains instead.

At this point, we realized that the lovely scenic Oslo-Bergen route was not going to be very scenic. Why? Torrential downpours, floods, mudslides, and closed roads. Hah! Well, when we travel, we never do anything in half-measures -- rain? Sure! Bring on the worst rains in years! Rain a months' worth in two hours! Do it two days in a row! Yeeha! I'm seriously hoping that my weather-powers haven't short-circuited and caused massive chaos and havoc.

It's funny in a depressing sort of way. The mountain passes and views over the fjords would have been stunning, I'm sure, had we be able to see any of them. As it was, we had some great views of enormously swollen rivers roaring down into the farmland, and normally-sedate waterfalls shooting out from the mountainside to hit the rocks below. Most of the rivers -- usually blue or blue-green -- were brown with whipped up farm fields and full of broken trees and bits of other things picked up. We got stopped onthe road for about half an hour because a mudslide had blocked one of the lanes (there were TREES standing upright in the road, still embedded in the dirt) and the road was flooded in running water (usually only a few inches deep, if that) in a dozen places. Made for interesting driving, even if the grayness was wearying.

And it's supposed to continue raining tomorrow. They actually warned people who were planning on travelling out of Oslo to just stay put until the congestion eased up. And what are we doing? Driving across half the country. We did stop in Krodsherad, to look around the town where Mark's grandfather came from (neat railway museum, btw) before finally driving down into Oslo.

We finally arrived at the hotel in Oslo about 11pm. Mark is tired and crabby, I'm tired and crabby, and right now I have no idea what we're going to do tomorrow. It's going to rain, so nothing with a lot of outside wandering around, I think! We've had enough of walking around dampish.

Glaciers and rain and flooding!

2011-06-09T12:17:00.002-06:00

We got an early start this morning to hike up to the Briksdalsbreen Glacier, which is a small arm of the huge Jostedalbreen glacier, just south of Stryn, where we stayed last night. The hotel was lovely, by the way -- breakfast was a bit meager, but nicely served and I even got to try BaconOst!

I loved the hotel--although I'm sure a lot of people would not like the old house, to be honest. It's a bit faded, and worn, and some of the decor seems right out of the Home Depot (the walls in the hallways are inexplicably paneled with pale wood, in 4 x 8 sheets), but everything is meticulously clean, and the rooms are quirky and interesting. We got the "Bridal Suite", since we were the only couple staying at the hotel; two small balconies, a sitting room off the bedroom, and an enormous bathroom across the hall. Definitely going to give them a good review on Tripadvisor.

I've been trying to do reviews for all the hotels we stay at, and I've got a list of the places we've gone, so i can rate them, too. The reviews on Tripadvisor were invaluable in picking hotels to stay, and prioritizing other things. And you know me, I never pass up an opportunity to share my opinions!

At any rate, we spent breakfast looking at the map and deciding how best to visit one of the many glaciers in the area. We decided on Briksdalsbreen, although we can't quite get up to the glacier face without having to swim, since it's reasonably close and doesn't require us to drive in a giant circle to get to a spot that's only a few miles from where we are -- just across the glacier, but a three to four hour drive. Oy.

We hiked up in the rain ahead of three giant busloads of Japanese tourists, trying very hard to stay out in front and not get engulfed in the horde. It's an easy hike, although by the time we reached the top we were soaked and then it started raining in earnest -- we snapped a few pictures of the blue ice (and unfortunately didn't get as close as we wanted to, since the glacier has retreated and we would have had to wade out into the shallow lake. We surrendered, and slogged our way back down. We were both soaked--my jeans were wet from hip to ankle and my shoes were squelchy. Fortunately we both have good rain coats and waterproof shoes. My shoes were soaked, but my feet were dry. We sat and steamed in the car and watched the continuing rain.

It was an easy decision to not do the fjord cruise up the Naeroyfjord today. It's one of the most scenic (it's the cornerstone of the Norway in a Nutshell tour, which we aren't really doing), but there is enough fog that everything is nearly hidden, and the rain is coming down hard enough to make things miserable. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit better and we'll try again before we head off to Oslo.

Instead, we drove down along the fjord and a few lovely lakes to Laerdal and the Borgund Stave church. We drove alongside the river in Laerdal nearly the whole way and it's obvious that things are much, much higher than normal. Lots and lots of water, the waterfalls are shooting out from the mountainsides and the river is far over the banks (there's a park bench about 30 feet out into the raging torrent, and trees along the edge are in the water up to their leaves). We discovered that today, in the space of only a couple of hours, they got 44mm of rain--a whole month's worth--and blammo! Flooding. Most farm fields on the riverside hadn't been inundated yet, but there were a couple of places where the road was under a bit of water. It's pretty impressive..

The church is very cool -- Borgund is the best-preserved stave churches in Norway and it's currently wrapped in scaffolding as they replace wood-chip shingles and repair the lead flashing. It's rather jarring to see the bright pine shingles mixed in with the old, tarred ones on the roof. They're making each one by hand, as far as we can tell, so they match exactly the old, damaged shingles that they replace. Inside, it's tiny and dark; I was once again surprised by how small these churches are, and lit only by tiny round windows way up on the wall. Without a light (or flash),you can't see many of the details inside, including the inverted-viking-ship roof. We walked around the outside a bit, looking at the original posts that still hold up this church.

There's an interesting museum across the street from the church that explains how these churches are built, why they are so rare, and what is being done to save the few remaining churches in Norway. In 1650, there were over two thousand of them, two hundred years later, there were two hundred. Now there are 28 that still stand. We're planning on stopping at a few others on the way down to Oslo, just to see some more examples.

We followed the historic route (which was once a goat path!) back to Laerdal, alongside the still-rising river, stopping every few miles to walk out onto a bridge and stand in the spray. But we decided to call it a day and just check in to the hotel, eat at their buffet, and crash. The rain seems to have stopped, which is a good sign for tomorrow, perhaps, but now I've had too much food (and actual vegetables, which have been a bit lacking in our diet for the last week or so) and I'm lumping in the bed, watching tv, and listening to my stomach gurgle. Fun!

Tomorrow? Into Flaam (imagine aa = that a with the o over it) to take the train to Myrdal and, possibly, to cruise on the Naeroyfjord (on the car ferry, most likely, they are slow and easy!) if it doesn't pour down rain. Then, across to Oslo on the Oslo-Bergen road (at least some of the way!)

Over Hill and Dale

2011-06-08T13:52:00.008-06:00

I woke up in a foul mood, and looking out at the fog which enveloped the hotel and the ferry and the rest of the world made my outlook on life even more miserable. Sure, another day in beautiful Norway, and all I'll see is FOG. Hmph.

I apparently was quite toxic for about an hour this morning, and the dismal breakfast at the hotel didn't help (the only criticism of the hotel, btw -- they were otherwise fantastic, but breakfast was quite awful) and I was in full-on Grinch Mode by the time Mark jollied me into the car to drive into Alesund proper and see all the neat architecture. I'm fairly certain I flounced out to the car and grumped. Not even the promise of good wienerbrod made me even remotely happy.

Don't worry, it's temporary, and gone by the time we had walked around the teensy little harbor in Alesund to see the perfectly planned town that Kaiser Wilhelm paid for in 1907 (nearly the entire town burned to the ground in 1904 and the program to rebuilt it was designed and planned as a completely cohesive, harmonious development.) Some of the buildings in town are really lovely -- Art Nouveau is not usually my thing, but the floral and geometric decorations are great, and some of the big old baronial-style stone buildings are quite cool. The main streets are lined with buildings that were designed by Norwegian architects and master builders -- all in stone and brick, to avoid the problems with fire that plague nearly every town in Norway. It's a rather fetching town, but I don't quite see the "planned" aspect of it, in most places. And, of course, modern (ie., 1960s) architecture has intruded quite rudely.

At this point, the sun finally peeked out and my crabbity moode evaporated with the fog. Of course, we still have no place to stay tonight, and I'm at least a little nervous that we'll end up sleeping in the car or in a hut somewhere without sleeping bags....but, we'll deal with that when we figure out where we're going to end up after today's adventures.

From Alesund, we drove over to Andalsnes and the Trollstigen -- Troll's Ladder, a windy road that climbs to the top of a mountain pass in eleven hairpin turns -- including a small bridge under the Stigfossen waterfall. The drive is actually not that hairy (the road down to Lysebotn was acttually much steeper and convoluted), but it's fun to do -- people in caravans (RVs) and even huge tour busses make the climb (10% grade) and eleven narrow turns...although most of them do just what we did: stop every half-step and leap out of the car to take pictures of the rock face and

waterfall and other cars and the steep drop-offs at every turn. It's not quite a game of bumper cars, but with everyone making stops at random, it can get interesting!

At the top, we paused to look back over the steep hill, and plunged down the other side to get on the ferry to pick up The Eagles Road down into Geiranger. Another eleven hairpin turns,and some absolutely breathtaking scenery of the Geirangerfjord.

At this point, we saw the ferry chugging its way into the fjord (past the enormous cruise ship which was belching out blue-ish smoke and hazing up the whole fjord) and decided that we'd try to catch it. Serendipity, of course -- but the car ferry here from Geiranger to Hellysylt is one of the most scenic trips on the fjords, according to a number of guidebooks, and we sort of tripped into it. Pulled into line in time for the ferry guy to sell us a ticket, drove on board, and we were off. The sun decided to disappear as we got on the boat, of course, but that didn't diminish the stunning views from the ferry of the waterfalls, farms, and cliffs on this small fjord. It's only a little over an hour, but it's a really impressive hour!

The sun peeked out again just enough for me to get one of those perfect mirror-image photos (well, about two dozen of them, really, I sat on the bank and clicked away for a few minutes) of the mountains, the trees, and the smooth, still water.

We did finally call and find a hotel for the night -- on our first try, which made me feel a bit better. We're staying at the Vinsnes Hotel in Stryn,which is just a bit south of the end of our ferry trip -- a lovely old turn-of-the-century hotel with all the quirks and creaks we've come to expect of an old house. It looks like a lovely place, I'll let you know tomorrow.

And tomorrow? We're not really sure. Probably a cruise on the Naeroyfjord and the Flam railway, but if the weather sucks, we may drive out east to see a string of Stave churches. We'll see!

North to Alesund

2011-06-07T13:23:00.001-06:00

Woke up early this morning to drive up the tourist road (E39) from Bergen to Alesund (and perhaps beyond). We started off fine, but almost immediately took some detours...which is entirely typical, we haven't ever gone straight anywhere on vacation.

It drizzled a bit this morning, but mostly stopped raining and the fog set in. Serious, pea-soup type fog that sank over the tops of the mountains and wreathed the fjords in clouds. It was impossible to tell how tall anything was, since only about a hundred feet was visible above the water, if that. The rest? Hidden in the dense fog. So, we should have known. Today was going to be a gray, fuzzy sort of day.

The drive to Alesund should take about six hours,including ferries. It wasn't half an hour in and we were ignoring the GPS and driving off into the hinterlands on a tiny road with a "scenic viewpoint" marked on it. Cool! A beautiful scenic! We drove 45 minutes out of our way to weave up a little, hairpin-turn road and the fog got more and more dense...it got harder and harder to see...eventually, we could see about ten feet in front of the car. Some scenic view!

We drove over an hour to see something awe-inspiring...and this is what we got:

that's mark, btw, standing about 15 feet away in the fog. Any further than that, and I couldn't see him at all. We drove on, and every time we'd read one of the road-turn offs that signalled a 'scenic viewpoint', we laughed all the harder. All the scenics are the same: gray, fuzzy, and wet. It wasn't until we drove back down to fjord-level before we saw anything at all in the fog! So yeah, sure, Norway is sooooo scenic...hah!

I joke, of course. Norway is jaw-droppingly gorgeous most of the time, and even in the fog, the fjords and mountains and valleys are pretty enough to cause accidents, with all the tourists stopping their cars by the side of the road to gawp. (Us included). The drive on E39 follows the coast some of the time, up valleys for others, and in general is a panoramic view of Norway all in one fell swoop. We spent a bit of time on the road much closer to the coast, turning off to towns with interesting names or with the little brown signs that signal a landmark or tourist site.

Lots of tunnels today. The Norwegians seem bent on replacing all the ferry services with bridges over or tunnels under the fjords. I'm a little freaked out by tunnels under the water, but after awhile, the uniformity of the tunnels is sort of reassuring -- they are all the same width, all the same height, only the length (anywhere up to 24km in some cases) is different. It's like they just plug in the Norway Tunnel Machine, tell it how far to go, and it produces this lovely tunnel like a worm eating a hole in an apple. Some are lined (we think with some sort of rubbery stuff) to eliminate the drips, and most are lit. I say most - there are some tunnels with no internal lighting. It's a bit disconcerting to drive into a dark hole in a rock face. Headlights are enough, of course, and it doens't appear to be related to the length of the tunnel--some short ones are lit up like a carnival right, some long ones are entirely dark and have only reflectors. Weird. It doesn't help that I forget to take off my sunglasses when we drive into tunnels, so I think they're black as pitch!

We kept taking little side-roads and detours to drive around this or that fjord or lake or see a waterfal...until we noticed that the countdown on the GPS had us arriving at our hotel at about 8pm, and we still had three ferries left to catch. We stuck to the standard tourist route from Forde on north to Alesund, we caught the ferry across the last sound just as it was leaving at 8:50 -- we drove on, the gate came up -- which saved us an hour wait for the next one. Actually, all day, we arrived just in time for ferries, we never waited more than about 10 minutes from the time we drove up to the time the ferry left. I think that this might be Mark's superpower.

Dinner was hamburgers bought from the stand at the ferry terminal. Not bad, actually, but not the first choice. We keep forgetting that most towns around here, even the large ones, roll up the sidewalks and close entirely by 6pm. A few restaurants may stay open until 8 or so, but cafes and everything else? Not a chance. Restaurants in Bergen were open until 1o, perhaps, and you can always find a Pizza-Kebab-Sausage joint open until 11 or even midnight in the bigger towns, but in most places...after 8pm, you are stuck with what you can eat from the gas station, if you haven't planned well.

And what it is with Pizza-Kebab-Sausage-Burger joints? They always come as one combo-restaurant here (and in Sweden and Denmark). Never just a pizza place, the menu will have various sorts of Kebab or Gyro on it, and three or four kinds of sausage (including one sort of long hot dog wrapped in bacon, and plates of fries with "chopped meat". There is an odd habit of eating pizza (with, say, ham and pepperoni and bacon on it), with piles of lettuce and a sort of salad dressing drizzled over the top. We can't quite figure it out, but we do chuckle at some of the combinations of toppings (cucumbers? lettuce? really?) . They must think we're weird for ordering just pepperoni. Ah, well.

Our hotel tonight was a brilliant surprise -- from the outside, it looks a bit sketchy: directly next to the ferry terminal (and I mean directly - you drive into the little parking lot directly from the ferry, the hotel is maybe 100m from the boat), and with a sort of washed-up, beach-front sort of look to it. We were a bit apprehensive, and the frazzled and slightly ditzy desk clerk didn't help that impression...and then we saw the room. Completely redone, big bed, couch, chairs, table, enormous bathroom, walk-out balcony. Absolutely BRILLIANT!

Tomorrow? Off to drive on twisty roads up and down mountain passes.

Just a few photos

2011-06-06T14:07:00.002-06:00

Posted a few photos on Flickr, from the trip so far.

Regular, normal Bergen

2011-06-06T09:14:00.003-06:00

...which means rain, and lots of it, apparently. My weather superpowers have failed. At 4am, there were a few wispy clouds, but by 7 it was raining. Ah, well. We have good raincoats and we aren't going to melt.

Our first goal today,though, is to get our laundry done. There is a self-service and drop-off laundry about five minutes away, we scoped it out last night. But, we missed the little sticker that said it opened at 12, and not at 10, so we walked back and joined the walking tour of Bryggen instead.

It's really interesting-- Bergen has a very long history of trade and fishing, and a big chunk of that was controlled by the German Hanseatic League. They populated the wharf, ran the trading, and in general defined society in Bergen up until 1754 or so. They dictated the rules about living arrangements in the wooden tenement houses -- including the rules about fire: as in, there will be no flames, at all, in he tenements. The only buildings allowed a fire or candles or lamps was the common house at the end of the alley (called the Shotstuene) where they ate communal meals and gathered for warmth in the winter. The Hanseatic museum is a preserved house for the apprentices, journeymen, and managers of the League; it's a fascinating building with surprisingly colorful decorations. The cupboard-beds for the journeymen and apprentices are tiny -- quite like sleeping in a small, coffin-like box. Ugh.

At the end of Bryggen is the Bryggen museum,which outlines the archeological efforts around salvaging and protecting the existing wooden buidlings. Its only been i the last fifty years that everyone agreed that they should be saved -- prior to this, they were a hazard, an expensive curiosity and most Bergen residents wanted them razed and repalced with "modern" buildings. Luckily, after the huge fire in 1955, the cultural finds and remains under the foundations were cataloged, analyzed, and renewed interest int he history of the area as Norwegian history (and not just german history) ensured that the stretch of buildings is conserved. It's cool to walk down the narrow alleys with the buildings leaning inwards, the third-story winches hanging over the shared path,andthe second floor galleries open to the weather. There are some huge new braces holding up a few of the buildings, and cables holding some of them together, but they are working to stabilize the buildings.

They build on the rubble of the fires, you see -- every time one of the buildings was destroyed, they simply pushed the rubble and wood into the harbor and built the new house on top of them. Now that the groundwater is seeping through to the wood foundations (instead of the flow coming from the sea, where the sea-water actually preserved them), the wooden piers and beams are rotting and the buildings are collapsing. They are hoisting up the facades and replacing the rotted parts under the water level. I wish they had more information about the restoration project, but only a single plaque on the wall and beams and cables are any hint of what's going on.

We ducked into one of the original common houses at the back of Bryggen for lunch, which was a collection of "norwegian tapas" (hey,their description, not mine!) -- small plates of traditional norwegian foods. We tried fish stew, akavit-marinated salmon and asparagus, smoked mackerel with apple compote, marinated sausage, potato salad, and bread with bacon butter. Yes, you read that right: BACON BUTTER. I had no idea there was such a thing, and it is delicious. It was an interesting (and eye-wideningly expensive) lunch, though. Although we've still managed to avoid pickled herring, or herring in any of its many forms. Hm....

We cannot get into Hakon's Hall, which is a shame. They have closed it for a music festival, so no one is allowed in whilethey set up. It's supposed to be a cool building. We did climb through Rosenkrantz's tower, although the really interesting part of the tower is the exhibition on Hakon's Laws -- the city codes and rules that defined where things could be bought and sold, how to buildhouses, how to handle crime, and how the city should be run. We made a quick walk around the bastions in the rain and then headed back to the hotel when we really started getting wet.

Rain I can handle, but when it's coming down hard enough that the fronts of your pants get soaked, it's time to call it a day and dry out. We're watching Will & Grace re-runs with Norwegian subtitles at the moment, and considering where to have dinner.

Bergen in the Sun!

2011-06-05T08:46:00.000-06:00

(Mark has reminded me that our cabin in Stavanger did not have a grass roof, but the others surrounding it did,so I am correcting it)

Took off towards Bergen today, starting with three ferry trips and some jaw-droppingly gorgeous scenery. The E39 winds up along the islands with bridges, some really long tunnels (8 km! under water!) and a few ferries. The ferry bits are short, which is good, but it still took most of the day to get to Bergen. We actually considered taking the long way round the hardangerfjord, but we decided we wanted some time in he city with the sun shining -- which is a remarkable rarity; Bergen gets 280 days of rain a year. And it was a lovely day, almost hot. We parked the car out near the bus station and walked into the town center to find our hotel.

We're staying at Den Hanseatiske Hotell,which is in an old wooden shipping building near the end of the wharf. The floors tilt rather crazily, and there aren't any right angles in our room. We're tucked up in the top floor (which is lucky, actually -- tehre was a mix up with the reservations and we arrived to find they had no idea who we were. We got a room, though, so all is god) under the steep eaves, and while the room is tiny (and leans precariously to one side) it's actually quite comfortable. We've been boggling at the number of fire-sprinkler heads in the room (5), but in light of the history of Bergen in general -- they lose about half the city center every hundred years or so to fire--it makes sense. They are very serious about protecting the remaining stretch of buildings from 1702 (after a massive fire and "modernization" destroyed over half of them) and fire is a big worry.

Out and about in Bergen, we got the standard tourist photos of Bryggen -- all those red and yellow and white warehouses lining the quay. They are all tourist shops now, and artisans workshops in the alleys behind, and they are quite a bit smaller than I imaged they were, to be honest. A few have been replaced with five-story brick buildings, but a long strip of the original plank and post buildings remain.

We walked along the main harbour and through the fish market, and found the one remaining city gate (which is not so much for protection as it was for the collection of tolls) and Mark got to gawk at the big ships moored at the piers for awhile. We even found the laundry (which isn't open until tomorrow) and walked around the tiny domkirke (cathedral). Most museums are closed, so we just walked around the kings park and the lake, and meandered around with the rest of the people enjoying the rare sunshine.

Our room is above a pizza place, and the smell was good enough to convince us to eat pizza yet again (yes, we're in Scandinavia, but usually eating pizza for dinner. We find good places for lunch whenever we can, and then we're tired enough at night to just want something quick and hot. Pizza fits the bill, and the aroma was pretty good advertising).

But we did make a quick trip to see Fantoft Stave church, which is only a few kilometers from Bergen. It's not really an authentic stave church any more -- it was originally moved from some remote village, piece by piece, but the businessman who bought it had it "enhanced" with dragonheads and more decorations to make it more like the bigger stave churches near Oslo. Then, in 1992, it burned down and was completely rebuilt from scratch to the same specifications. So, it's a completely new reproduction of a changed-and-updated version of an original church. It's small, too -- mark assures me that most of them are really tiny. Somehow, I imagined them as much larger. But then again, I have a lot of problems with scale when it comes to old buildings.

When we finally crashed, it was after 11 and still bright outside. That is SO hard to get used to.

Tomorrow? More Bergen -- this time in the rain. We're going to see the Hanseatic Museum, the Bryggen museum (of the archeological excavations beneath the wharf), and the Shotstuen house, and climb Rosenkrantz's tower and Hakon's Hall. And shop. We have no souvenirs yet, which is par for the course.

Stavanger

2011-06-04T12:31:00.002-06:00

We woke up in our grass-roofed cabin to fog, although I was sure I saw at least a glimmer of blue sky. The tops of the mountains (well, compared to the Rockies, a bit smaller, but mountainous nonetheless) were wreathed in clouds and by the time we finished breakfast, it had started drizzling. Not exactly drizzling, really, more like misting.

We drove up the coast to Stavanger and arrived in time to see the sun come out so we could walk along the harbor so Mark could stare at all the enormous ships and I could wander in the old town part of Stavanger. On the western side of the harbor is a narrow hilly stretch of whitewashed clapboard houses on steep, narrow, cobbled lanes. It's set back quite a bit from the harborside now, but at one time it was the original quay and the captains and traders build houses here. We went to the Canning Museum, which is dedicated to the history of smoking and canning sardines -- one of the primary industries in this fishing town. At one time, collecting the labels for the various companies was a huge fad here in Stavanger (to the point where newspaper articles decrying the moral failings of the town's youth for stealing them were common). There's a restored film from the turn-of-the-century cannery showing the aproned and capped women sorting and packing the cans and nattily dressed young men manning the can-making machines. It was quite interesting -- although the hundreds and hundreds of rubber fish used in the demonstrations were a bit funny.

It's Saturday, so the streets are absolutely packed, and the "downtown" area around the harbor is just street after street of shops and we managed to arrive in time for the rock music festival -- indy bands were on stages all over the town, with competing guitars and amps, in English and Norwegian (and possibly German). We did find a book store so i could find a better map of Western Norway (the one I have is not particularly helpful -- 1:800,000 is too large to really navigate around here), but then we headed to the museum guaranteed to keep Mark enthralled: The Norwegian Oil Museum.

It's fascinating; I'm not even particularly interested in oil rigs or boats and I found it really interesting. From the history of oil driling and the impact on Norway's economy, to the various technical achievements in each successive generation of oil rigs and drilling. There are scale models of the history of oil drilling rigs and actual drill bits showing the evolution of things, and outside are three of the "modules" that make up a modern drilling rig, with exhibits on deep sea diving and safety.

Of course, we're halfway through our vacation, so i'm (predictably) tryng to get sick -- headachy and feeling warm. We found our hotel and checked in pretty early, but then decided to make another try at finding the Swords in Stone sculpture right outside the city. It's a huge piece on the shore of the Hafrsfjord and we missed it entirely this morning, despite a few u-turns. This time, we found it on the third try and walked along the beach to take pictures.

There are dozens of jellyfish in the water -- I would have thought it would be too cold for them, but I'm glad I didn't decide to take off my shoes and wade into the fjord to get the right angle for a picture!

We indulged our "once per country" McDonalds -- it was quick and easy and got us back to the hotel so we could both go to bed. The pickles are odd and the ketchup is , but otherwise things are the same. We keep hoping that we'll find a truly weird McDonald's...perhaps in Russia?

Our room at the Myhregaaten Hotel is lovely -- a wee bit small, but very comfortable and we're lounging in the bed watching a norwegian-subtitled version of Overboard (and, obviously, blogging).

Tomorrow? We've got the day to get up to Bergen -- I think there are a half-dozen ferries involved, it ought to be fun!

Squiggly Roads

2011-06-04T00:18:00.005-06:00

Woke up to sun and immediately drove off along the coast -- The North Sea/Viking Road --that runs from Kristiansand all the way up to Bergen, where it becomes the Atlantic Road and wends its way up past Trondheim, at least. it's a gorgeous drive; not too many towns along the way that are larger than a few houses, but the tiny narrow roads wind around the lakes and fjords on the coast. We tried to pick roads with higher numbers -- the higher the number, the "less used" the road is, and often the more scenic, and took rv44 most of the way to Egesund before we started our way north to pick up the ferry in Lysebotn so we can motor down the Lysefjord

it's a car ferry, not a cruise, so it's a bit slower and while they have dubbed it a "tourist ferry" and there is a bit of narration done by the captain of the ferry, it's mostly just a slow, scenic trip down the fjord, which is extremely steep and lovely.

But we barely made it in time to catch the ferry, despite leaving whta we thought was a ton of buffer -- we intended to arrive at 2 for the 3pm ferry (when they only specify 20 minutes, really) but we had to drive up the Lysebotn road...a fantastic, looping, turning, narrow-hairpin-curve road that climbs up over the mountain and back down again to the ferry port. In about 10km. The road up is narrow and rather hair-raising, but it's the downward journey that really sets your teeth on edge --- the GPS looked like a clump of spaghetti, really, and you actually go through a tunnel at the end that backs up under the fiteen or so hairpin turns you have already done. It's wild. We had to wait a few times in the wide placesi nthe road for oncoming cars to pass, and had a few close calls with the narrow roads on the curves, but this is why mark drives and I do not!

We did make it, though, and boarded the ferry in plenty of time to enjoy the four hour cruise along the fjord. We sailed close enough to one of the waterfalls to feel the spray, and we even got to watch The Amazing Goat Rescue -- on one of the tiny coves, there are three goats. It's just a tiny triangle of land surrounded by steep cliffs, but three goats graze there near a small waterfall and they have been there for quite a while, i guess. Except today, they only saw two goats. A bit of searching revealed that one of the goats was way up in the rocks and had apparently become stuck in a narrow crevasse. The captain stopped the ferry, backed us up, and two of the crew went down in the rubber boat to land on the steep scree, clamber up to where the goat was stuck and pull her out. They don'tknow how long she'd been there -- probably at least since yesterday -- and the two men had to pretty much carry her back to the lower part of the little outcropping and get her into the grass. They said she didn't appear seriously injuried, and by the time they managed to get the boat back onto the ferry, the goat was at least eating the grass around her and appeared to be moving.

They had a bit of trouble with the dinghy -- Mark thinks they'lll be doing some emergency procedure drills in the future.

But, goat safely retrieved, we continued on. The ferry goes all the way to Stavanger, but it does make one last call in Lauvik, which is a bit closer to where we are spending the night, so we got off the ferry there and drove to our hotel for the night, Byrkjedelstunet. Our room i very comfortable, which a huge bed (with a single mattress, so I don't fall into the middle!) and we're in a set of buildings that have sod roofs, a pretty common sight around here. It's kind of weird to see grass growing on the roof, but it's used all over. It must work, or I assume they wouldn't do it any more, right?

After dinner, we drove back up the tiny twisty road to view the Gloppelsdura Glacier Scree -- a huge 100m thick clump of giant boulders that were knocked loose and pushed around by the glaciers about 10,000 years ago. They are impressively large, and Mark even climbed out intot he field so i could take a picture with some sort of idea of scale. otherwise, they could be tiny rocks by the side of the road, instead of giant boulders the size of busses. Or larger. We didn't know how deep the pile of boulders was, but apparently some of the holes we saw are really deep.

Tomorrow? Off to Stavanger and the search to do laundry, I think. Mark is really excited about the Oil Museum (and clean socks, I think).

Across the water to Norway

2011-06-02T14:10:00.002-06:00

We boarded the ferry today for the super-fast crossing from northern Jutland to southern Norway -- from Hirtshals to Kristiansand. It only takes about 2 1/2 hours with the catamaran, but oy, is that a big boat. At least a hundred cars and more than 50 motorcycles (probably more motorcycles -- there were droves of them!). Mark spent quite a bit of time out by the stern of the boat, watching the huge roostertail that the engines kicked up. I'm glad I don't get seasick -- it was a relatively smooth crossing, but the poor guy at a table across the way was sick from the moment he got on the boat, I think.

It's a public holiday in both Denmark and Norway today -- Ascension Day -- and most everything is closed. But we stopped by the Kristiansand Kannonmuseum, just in case, and they were open. It's a WWII german gun emplacement on the coast, controlling the narrow straight of the Skaggerak, so not quite my cup of tea, but Mark loved it. Poked around at the enormous gun (the largest land installation, it fires a 21cm shell) and the destroyed batteries for awhile. It was gloriously sunny, and the walk was nice.

There's a 2km long tunnel to a nearby island that we accidentally took (well, we drove through it twice, since we didn't intend to go to the tiny island). It goes under the fjord mouth. Yeah, my day is fabulous -- boats, which I hate, and then under the water in a tunnel. But we found our way and drove all the way south to the Lindesnes Fyr (Lighthouse) on the southernmost point of Norway. The weather was calm, so it wasn't as exciting as it apparently can get when the wind is up, but it's a lovely view.

I'm sure I'm going to say that about a thousand times per post -- it's a lovely view. Lovely! Gorgeous! Wish you were here! Beautiful-beautiful!

Seriously,though, this place is gorgeous. As we were driving on the very narrow and unmarked roads down to Lindesnes, we both commented on how it felt a lot like driving in Boulder -- rocks on either side of the road, curvy, twisty, hairpin turns, trees everywhere. Just here, there is water. Lots and lots of water. And views out over the ocean past the rocky coastline that nearly made us crash three or four times because we were gawking like idiots.

And in the first ten minutes we were in Norway, we reached a higher altitude than we've been in the last two weeks. Seriously, Denmark is f-l-a-t, with barely a rolling hill to block the view all the way to Germany; Sweden is more hilly, but the south is farmland and, predictably, flat. Norway? Up and down. We decided that the roads were obviously Scottish Roads.

Let me explain -- in Scotland, there seems to be a rule that the roads must be windy and curvy, or roll up and down, or both. It's consistent -- as if the crew got together before the job and the chief told them, "Ok, lads, we've got enough stuff here to build 200km of roads, but it's only 100km to Edinburgh. We've got to use ALL of the materials, or we won't get paid. Have at it!" For every kilometer the crow flies, there are 2km of road. It twists and doubles back, or loops out widely side to side, or it galumphs over the hills like a roller coaster ride. Or, in some really fun cases, it does both. The only stretches of road in Scotland that are straight are the ones that the Romans built.

Now, Ireland is nearly the exact opposite -- every single road connects two points directly. It's just that every single point is connected to every other single point directly -- it ends up looking like a deranged spider laid out the roads, since every single house is connected to all the neighbors by a path from door to door. No extraneous winding here, thankyouverymuch, no unnecessary detours. Just a web of roads that meet at odd angles and go everywhere. Ever been at an intersection with six or seven outlets? Irish Roads.

Norway has roads of the windey-up-and-down sort in spades. And these are the "good roads", our host this evening told us. We're in the south, in the valley town of Kvinesdal, and the south is where most of the people are, so the roads are wide, marked, and well maintained. I might argue with wide and marked, actually -- about half the roads we drove on today (on the way to perfectly normal tourist destinations, I might add) had no center line, and were barely wide enough for two cars to pass, and in some cases far narrower than that. Oh, there are two-lane divided highways, but they seem to change abruptly from a lovely wide boulevard to a roundabout and then to three little roads that hairpin their way into the woods.

It was a blast!

Our B&B for the night is a 1930s guesthouse that has been bought by the local church and run as a church meeting hall and still rents out rooms. It's a bit dated in terms of decorations, but the room is clean and large, and everyone is very friendly. We've got a really nice view out over the water (if you ignore the excavation for a garden right outside the window) through the two french doors.

We ended up at the only place open for food at 9pm-- a pizza place populated by every teenager in Kvinesdal, I think. Good pizza,though. Of course, it's now 11:08 and it's light enough outside that I could read a book. It doesn't get really dark until after midnight -- and the sunrise is officially at 4:30. We're getting used to sleeping in the half-light.

Tomorrow? Up and north to Lysbotn to take the ferry down the Lysefjord to Stavanger, and then backtracking a bit to admire the scenery. It's even supposed to be sunny!

We've got bees!

2011-06-02T14:07:00.002-06:00

Apparently we have bees that have set up shop in our front yard -- enough so that Sandra (the woman who keeps our yard looking fabulous) called a beekeeper to handle them! I'm hoping they aren't all up under the porch.

Or if they are...they had better be paying rent. A bit of honey now and then would be nice. Assuming they are the honey-sort of bees and not the horrible house-eating sort of bees. Probably the latter. Oh, well.

Our neighbor posted a picture of them here.

Jutland

2011-06-01T13:27:00.004-06:00

Woke up this morning to crystal clear blue skies and a nearly perfect day. We don't have a ton planned today (well, yes, there are a lot of things on the list, but we aren't wedded to any of them). First up -- visit Ribe in the daylight and take some pictures of the absolutely charming town. We're about a 10minute walk from the town center, and we detoured a bit to see the island bastions that are all that remains of the "castle" at Ribe. Nothing much there, really, but earthworks and much later cannon batteries, but the little island site is raised up about 20' from the surrounding land,which makes it a veritable mountain in these parts.

From there, we walked through the town market (a few flower sellers and vegetable sellers, but mostly a car-boot sort of sale. Some interesting stuff, but we passed through and walked around the main part of town taking pictures. When they describe a town as "picturesque", this is the town I'll think of, I think. Huge cathedral in the middle of the town, a stolid brick affair in yellow and red brick; city hall, also of imposing red brick, and winding streets lined with houses and shops. I'll say it again, Ribe is adorable.

The houses mostly date from the 17th and 18th century -- some are actually labelled, which is neat-- and I'm sure there are others built on the foundations of older houses, but a fire in 1580 destroyed much of the town, so very little exists from before that. The town hall, though, was built in 1496 and the church dates from much earlier. There are a lot of half-timbered houses, and bole houses (which are also post-built houses, but with wood plank walls) in the town -- walk around any corner, on any curving street,and there are houses hugging the street, curving along with it, leaning companionably against each other or bulging just a bit into the road. Most houses are very well cared-for--a rule in Ribe is that anyone buying one of the old houses must actually live in it; no purchasing it for just a holiday home or a summer visit. Buy in Ribe, live in Ribe. It seems to keep everyone focused on maintaining the buildings, at least.

We crossed the three branches of the river (each with a dam) over to Ribe Vikingar, which is the museum associated with the viking history in the town. They are responsible for many of the excavations (including one which is ongoing right next to the church, which has discovered the oldest christian burial ground in Denmark and the foundations of 9th century buildings, along with a very rare find: a rune stone carved with a dragon head. Apparently that doesn't show up very often. it's an interesting museum, and the number of thigns they find every time they dig down a foot or two in someone's garden is astounding. A lot of cities here have "viking museums" , but not all of them can claim that most of the items were found in their very own town.

We walked back for quick look into the Ribe Cathedral, which is an interesting architectural hodge-podge that has been added to and upgraded since about 980. Parts are in red brick, parts in yellow, there's some stone work. Right now, the tower is entirely surrounded by scaffolding and they are repointing the brick and repairing the stonework. It's noisy business, and it means that we can't climb the tower to look out over the town. Hmph.

Lunch at Weis' Stue, a restaurant-with-rooms that is in one of the older buildings in Ribe. It, like many of the other old houses, isn't even remotely straight and square -- the second floor looks precariously attached, and falling gently over the front door, but there are four rooms upstairs to rent. I can only imagine that the floors slope just a bit.

We sat outside in the sunshine and chatted with a group of Welsh choir members while sharing a few beers and just basked in the lovely sun for a while before we packed up and headed out of Ribe to go north.

Mostly, we just randomly picked roads that headed N or NE and aimed in the general direction of Aalborg, where our B&B is tonight. We passed through Viborg, with its large cathedral, and stopped near Hybro to see the Viking round fort at Fyrkat and visit their viking village reconstruction. That was actually kind of fun; we arrived very late of course (stupid GPS!) and they let us in to walk around without charging admission, since they werei nthe process of packing up. We got to poke inside all the reconstructed buildings and wander around the farmstead for awhile before we took off up the hill to visit the fort itself. We're still trying to figure out just what the ring of post-holes around the inside edge of the earthworks was for (off to Google after this, I think) but it was a beautiful, sunny afternoon and walking around the top of the huge turf-built ring was pretty cool. it's almost identical to the fort at Trelleborg, perhaps a bit smaller, but the details here are clearer and it's easier to see the organization of the longhouses in the center of the fort. Plus, the surrounding area is marshland and natural hills, as far as we can tell. I tried to figure out how they had the buildings aligned, while Mark walked on the walls, assessing the various attack options and pondering how easy/hard it would be to defend this fortified farm-stead. Typical. That's how all our visits to ancient forts and castles go.

Our B&B is near Aalborg, so we turned north once again and drove through the farmland, admiring the tidy farms and green fields as we barrelled along on roads that were weirdly reminiscent of roads in Ireland: just a bit wider than the car) and arrived at our B&B without incident (finally, the gps didn't lead us astray) by about 6:30. Back out the door again to find food, and we're back, ready to crash by nine. That's how most of the evenings go. We did go outside to admire the lovely view, but we've got to get up early and head to the ferry to Norway tomorrow. It's not until 11-ish, but mark is of the "better to be very early than a little late" crowd, so we need to head out of here to drive the last hour or so north and get checked in, etc. Checked the weather for southern Norway tomorrow,and it will likely be much like is has been here for two days (that is, warm and sunny!) but quite a abit windier. If the forecast holds, we might even get sunshine in Bergen while we are there! That would be nearly miraculous, this time of year. Nice, though.

Tomorrow? Ferry from Denmark to Norway, along the Viking Road on the southern coast to Kvinesdal and a few lighthouses along the way.

Ribe Night Watchmane

2011-05-31T23:55:00.002-06:00

We're staying in Ribe-- a tinymedieval town on the western coast of Jutland, Denmark. It's a ridiculously cute town, with curving cobbled streets, leaning buildlings, a long and illustrious history as a viking outpost and medieval trading port. The lanes criss-cross the town almost randomly and change names every couple of feet, it seems.

But they have a Night watchman who emerges at 10pm to do a history tour of the town, singing traditional songs, explaining a bit about the various buildings in town and their occupants, and how Ribe has evolved since it was foundedi n the 8th century. We went along with a huge gaggle of schoolkids. It was a blast!

Trekking Across Denmark

2011-05-31T12:27:00.003-06:00

"Across Denmark" sounds pretty daunting, doesn't it? It's a total of three hours from coast to coast, including traffic from Copenhagen. But off we went this morning, fortified with extra wienerbrod and sugar-buns and a deadline to arrive in Roskilde before 10am.

Stopped for fuel -- which is expensive here, of course. it's on par with the rest of Europe (about 8 bucks a gallon) and we imagined the horror and chaos if gas hit $8 int he US. It's four now, and from all the wailing and breathless media coverage, you'd think it was a sign of the apocalypse. We've got a little diesel Hyundai as a rental car, which is great, actually. Good gas mileage, diesel is a wee bit cheaper, and a small car is much easier to maneuver in the times we've had to drive it into the city. Mark fits in it easily, which is the primary consideration. Renting a car is always a bit of a crap shoot when we go on vacation -- they have brands and makes of cars here we dont' see in the US, and some of them are tiny indeed. There is a little Fiat compact that we see dozens of that is, perhaps, a little smaller than a SmartCar, and a few Ka's (a car so small they dropped the r, we joke) and some truly microscopic little Mazdas. An awful lot of people drive very nice Audis and Mercedes, but most cars are small, serviceable, and easy to park. We actually saw a pickup truck today, and it warranted a second look -- we hadn't seen any before. We've got the car for the whole trip, which sounds a little insane when you consider that we're staying put in one city for three or four days at a time. Only at the end of the trip are we driving anywhere substantial, and between the major cities (Stockholm - Copenhagen, Copenhagen to the ferry to Norway, etc. I tried out the rental just picking up the car for the few days we needed to drive between places, and frankly it was much cheaper to get the car for the whole month, even if we had to pay for parking in every single city (which we didn't -- we had free parking at Stallmastaregarden and at the Kong Arthur, and at today's B&B. Score!

Roskilde, our first target for today, is best known for the Viking Ship Museum, which is on the "must-see" list for Denmark. it's more than just a few (5) salvaged ship skeletons -- it's a working shipyard where they test out buidling ships in the traditional way. In 2007, they built a replica of one of the found ships in the museum, The Sea Stallion, and sailed her to Dublin. There is a cool exhibit about it, and a film about the experience. The ship sits outside at the docks ehre, along with over 30 other ships of various sizes and origins, from huge viking longboats and trading boats, to smaller fishing vessels and tradtional danish and Faroese fishing boats. All made by hand, with traditional tools and traditional methods. It's really fascinating. There are workshops at the museum showin blacksmithing, woodworking, ropemaking -- it's a real,working ship yard. I love the old bones of the five ships that have been put together from the salvages pieces. The boats were scuttled on purpose to block the sound, and retrieved piece by piece and measured, preserved, and put together.

Just up the hill from the ship museum is the huge Domkirke -- the burial place of all the Danish kings and most of the Danish queens since the 14th century. The church itself is a mish-mash of styles -- it's obviously been added to nearly continuously for centuries. It's a brick church, too -- for some reason, having a huge church built of brick seems a bit odd to me -- I don't htink of brick as something you build tall towers with. But apparently it is. Inside, all the nooks and crannies are filled with monuments/mausoleums and coffins. Some of them are...big. And ostentations. That's what happens when you are royalty, i guess, and someone else gets to design your memorial. They're stunning and enormous and gaudy in most cases. Some of the side chapels have lovely paintings,and one is done in absolutely amazing trompe l'oeil that was real enough taht i jerked back to avoid whacking my elbow on what looked like a large carved head on the wall...but which was absolutely flat. The church has a lot of odd, dark, rather forbidding decorations, otherwise -- the King's Door is frightening, really, and there are weird gates of turned metal that look more like the doors to a dungeon than the doors to a tomb. Interesting, but in a rather strange way. Apparently Harald Bluetooth is buried here, but it is noted int he little guidebook that he is "walled up".

We made a quick stop in Ringsted to see the oldest brick church in Scandinavia...which was of course closed (unexpectedly, actually, it was suppoesd to be open and only a little handwritten Likkut sign on the locked door). But that was ok. We stopped at the ice cream shop in the main square, to make up for it.

The only other thing on the "must see" list for today is Trelleborg Viking fortress -- a huge round hillfort dating from 980 that is on the western coast of Zealand, just before the huge bridge to the rest of Denmark. Our GPS failed us miserably on this one, and refused to recognize that it even existed and so we had to rely on the too-small map to try to find the place and missed twice before hitting ont he right tiny little farm road. I should note that it was labelled, but only if you came from the other direction and were paying attention tot he tiny turnoff into the one-lane road. We did eventaully find it, but it took an extra half and hour and we arrived just as the museum part closed. Luckily, the site itself is open and we got to walk on the earthen mounds and see the burial grounds of this huge viking fort. it is a mighty familiar sort of place -- like the ring forts of Ireland and the remainso f round forts from the Roman era -- a high earthen wall surrounding a community of houses. The foundations here are odd: the shapes of the houses/buidlings is roughtly boat-shaped and they are arrangedi n groups of four to create interior courtyards. It's a rather impressive place, really, and I enjoyed being able to compare it to the other forts that I've seen from earlier (and later) eras. The technology might be a bit different, but the basic structure is the same. Interesting.

I timed things perfectly, of course. Just as walked back to the car, it started to rain. Hah! We got to do our drive-to-the-other-coast (a drive of maybe 90 minutes total) while it rained, and by the time we reached our B&B for thenight, it had stopped. Cooled off about 35 degrees, too.

One thing that is very noticeable is that Denmark is FLAT. Really, really flat. The hills roll gently, but from high ground I think you can see all the way to Germany.

We checked in (into the renovated stable block) at our B&B and then grabbed our coats to walk into the little town of Ribe.

It's ADORABLE. Seriously, the main part of town is an extremely well-preserved medieval trading town, with curving cobbled streets and precariously leaning half-timbered houses. The winding roads change names every block or so, but as long as you can see the spire of the church (by far the tallest things for miles) you can usually get your bearings. We walked through town, reading the plaques on buidlings that were built in the 17th century, some earlier, and ended up on their main pedestrian street to look at the shops and cafes. Closed, of course, since it's after 6, but we had a good look around, checked out which restaurant we are supposed to meet at later for the Night Watchman's tour -- a huge draw in thsi teensy little town -- and clomped back to the room to get warmer clothes.

I went from long sleeves to a t-shirt today and just about broiled at lunch, then by dinner was in silk long underwear, a long-sleeves t-shirt, a fleece, and my rain jacket. And gloves. if I had a had, I'd be wearing it. The wind can be fierce.

So - off tonight to the night watchman's tour at ten, and then tomorrow? Up through Jutland to Arhus and Aalborg.

Rush Hour in Copenhagen

2011-05-30T23:22:00.001-06:00

Copenhagen: Day 2

2011-05-30T12:00:00.004-06:00

Sunny and gorgeous...and HOT today. Perfect!

We're off today to see Amelianborg Palace, the Nationalmuseet, and the City Museum, and whatever else happens to fall into the path-- of course, I misread the notes and the Nat'l Museum is not open on Mondays. Lots of things are closed on mondays, actually -- check the schedules carefully.

At any rate, fortified with several lovely frosted pastries and a sugary, round bun sort of thing, we ventured off into the old town again, this time to check out a few of the church interiors that mark wouldn't let me go into yesterday (even if they weren't having services, we were never sure!) and visit a few museums. It was actually too warm for a fleece vest by about 10am, i spent the day with it looped through my daypack, keeping the side of my leg warm. Ugh.

Amalienborg Palace contains a small museum of memorabilia from the previous kings and queens of Denmark -- a series of rooms that are decorated and left just as the monarch had lived in them (compared, I think, to the photographs that were taken of the rooms when they were in power -- including photos from the 19th century, when the whole process of photography was pretty new. it's interesting to compare the rooms as they are now (even behind glass) and the early photograph. The whole place is -- as several guide-books noted -- a paean to the Danish monarchy, a bit more like an avid collectors hoard of Elvis memorabilia than museum-pieces, but it's a nice visit. There is a whole room devoted to the recent christening of the royal twins, who are now fourth and fifth in succession to the throne. All sorts of traditions were upheaved by the birth of twins -- the single christening gown that has been used for the last dozen or so ceremonies was not enough, the whole 'enter into the list' of succession thing was confused.

We watched the beefeater-hatted guards march around in the palace square, but we didn't stick around for the formal 'changing of the guard',which should include a full military band and all sorts of yelling and saluting, since the flags were out, signalling that the royal family was in residence. They moved here from Christiansborg Palace after the last major fire (in 18-something). From within the castle square (or pentagon, really) you can see Marmorkirken (Marble Church),which is currently half-concealed by scaffolding and surrounded by workers and cranes and trucks. It looks like they are re-doing the gilding on the copper dome, among other things. Inside, the main part of the church lies under the dome, so it's round. It's quite a spectacular dome, too -- painted and lit brightly in the center as if it had an oculus there, like the Pantheon. Very un-church-like, except all the latin inscriptions.

It was a bit early. but the day was so lovely that we decided to walk along the original harbor of Copenhagen, Nyhavn, and look at all the boats and then pick one of the two dozen cafes to have lunch at. We sat in the sun, drank wine and beer, and people-watched..ate lunch...more people-watching and sun-basking. And then we had ice cream. See? Such a tough day so far!

We walked to Christianshavn and admired the truly stupendous houses on the island, and discovered that my book lied and the Orlogsmuseet (Naval Museum) was closed. Considering that the book was the guide that came along with the Copenhagen card, published by the city...well, I was a little disappointed. But, since we were nearby, we took a brief walk into Christiania -- the squatters free-state in the middle of the city, which is a sort of hippy, artsy, alternative-lifestyle sort of place. It gets a lot of press as "free christiania", and there is a lot of discussion about it, but in general I just found it dirty, completely covered in graffiti, and simply a curiosity. I guess I just don't grok the whole bohemian/art-y lifestyle thing. The main drag, Pusherstreet, has been cleaned up by police raids, so you don't really see many drugs being sold, but there are some cafes and art exhibits that you can see. We made just a quick detour. I was contemplating climbing the 400 steps (the last of which are on the outside of the steeple) of the Vor Frelsers church next door, but there was a funeral in the church and so we passed.

I wanted to check and see if the National Museum really was closed, since the book said it was, but it also said that the Navy museum was open, so it has a lousy record of accuracy. it was indeed closed...I'm a little irked, actually, that I didn't check more carefully -- that was one of the museums that I really did want to see (their prehistory exhibits are suppoesd to be very good), and we're deciding if we want to stick around in town to see if tomorow (opens at 10) or if it's more important to get to Roskilde and see some of the sights outside of Copenhagen. We'll probably move on, but we'll play it by ear tomorrow.

We did, however, want to go to the city museum for Copenhagen, which is out in the boonies in Vesterbro -- it's a bit of a confusing museum, with exhibits on the history of Copenhagen from it's founding to the last decade with lots of displays of old stuff from the excavations of the city and collections of modern pieces that show the evolution of Copenhagen from a port city to a medieval power to the modern day. A bit hard to follow, since timelines and explanations of the history are mixed in with displays of typewriters and record jackets but it's a very neat museum. They also have a high-tech multimedia exhibit on "being a Copenhagener" which we were engrossed in for a long time. Interviews, movies, letters, personal histories and artifacts with immigrants to Denmark and what it means to be a Copenhagener -- focusing a lot on recent immigration from muslim countries, and the history of integration in the city. It was fascinating.

Since we'd already walked about 6 miles (Mark has a pedometer in his iphone), we figured "what's a few more?" and decided to go look at the Elephant Gate at the Carlsberg Brewery. We didn't really want to go on the tour (one brewery is much like the other, really, and it's too hot to drink beer and then walk back!) but the gate is quite famous. We walked along the main shopping street for this area of the city, around the Central station and out into the boonies. Frankly, I didn't really like the street much -- sure, lots of shopping, but it's a four-lane busy road with narrow sidewalka and other than the fact that all the signs were in Danish, it could have been any commercial zone in any city. Not my cup of tea, really. It was a really ugly street, to be honest. But, it got us out to the brewery with little fuss, and we discovered a handy bakery at the end, so we could have a tasty pastry and recover from the walk...before walking back to the hotel.

We picked a different route and went up a parallel street towards the main part of the city, and walked through the remaining bits of the Red Light district near the train station. About half of the shops on our side of the road were sex shops (with their wares prominently displayed in the windows -- it was hard not to stop and examine things, "what on earth IS that?", and as we neared the station,t he rest of the spaces were filled in with gambling establishments and topless bars. It was quite colorful. I'm not sure I'd want to walk around here after dark, but we got a bit of a laugh out of it.

Forty-five minutes later, we were back in the hotel to shower and laze about. We summoned enough energy to go out for pizza again for dinner, but that's about it. At the moment, we're stitting inthe little garden atrium of the hotel -- although a man with a pipe just sat down at a nearby table, so we're going to vacate pretty soon and get out of his smoke cloud. Ugh. For a country that is so focused on healthy living and such, a whole lot of people smoke. We were really excited about the outdoor seating at nearly every restaurant, until we realized that they can still smoke ata those tables -- they are outside, so fair game.

I was talking to mark about my comment yesterday on the number of bikes in the city, and we both commented on the fact that only a few people wear helmets -- kids do, nearly always, and especially when strapped in to the child seats on bicycles, but adults? Maybe 10%. Most people manage to hold umbrellas, or talk on cell phones, or carry briefcaes and bags and still maneuver their bikes without incident. In the morning, they have a rush-hour and traffic jams all of their own.

Tomorrow? Off across Denmark. Nah, don't be so impressed, you can do it in about 3 hours, coast to coast. But we're going to Roskilde to see the Viking Ship museum (and possibly row in a viking boat) and across Funen to visit Odense and then to the mainland and across to Ribe on the west coast. Probably with a stop in Legoland...you never know.

Oh! I forgot!

2011-05-29T23:53:00.005-06:00

I totally forgot to post the picture (not a very good one, the cows did not cooperate once they figured out that we did not bring food) -- but Carolina and her family have Highland Coos. I think I mentioned it,but I just got around to resizing the picture so I can post it.

Copenhagen: Day 1

2011-05-29T12:32:00.003-06:00

When we went to sleep last night, the forecast was for rain today. Nope! Dawned sunny, albeit cool, and stayed that way all day. Well, until the very end, when we were tired, as far from our hotel as we had been all day, and needed to walk back to the other end of town in the rain. We got damp enough it wasn't really even worth trying to catch the S-tog tramway.

Copenhagen is supposed to have this great bus, tram, train, metro system...and we hardly saw a bus all day and never did see any of the trains or trams. Compared to Gothenburg and Stockholm, where they are a constant presence, they just never seemed to be around when we walked. I can only assume it meant we were walking in the wrong parts of town, or something.

After stuffing ourselves full of Wienerbrod and croissants (and coffee for mark) at the nearby bakery, we just starting walking "towards town", to the main pedestrian zone in the city, admiring the buildings and the various churches we kept finding at every turn. Copenhagen has a huge network of pedestrian-only streets through the middle of the city, and scattered throughout the rest of the city are some random blocks and squares that have attached pedestrian zones -- eventually, it seems as if half the city will be only for people and bikes, with cars relegated to the outer fringes.

And bikes there are -- thousands of them. I don't think I've ever seen so many bikes in my life. Hundreds of them in racks near every bus stop and every big building, lining squares and filling the bike racks (which are as numerous as trees here, i swear) on every square. Every single street is lined with bikes just leaning against the walls -- all stolid, dependable, simple sorts of bikes (no fancy racing bikes here, or big heavy mountain bikes -- Copenhagen is the purview of the Cruiser in all it's styles). Nearly all of them sport a basket or two, many have one (or two!) child seats strapped to them, and a few even have a big square cart in front, making them more like a reverse-tricycle than a bike (think of something that looks like an old-fashioned ice-cream cart -- two wheels in front with a bin,and one behind.). Everyone rides bikes, and the bike lanes on most roads seem to be better planned and better maintained than the roads themselves. I thought Stockholm was bike-friendly, it looks positively tame compared to Copenhagen. Our hotel rents bikes, too -- we may try that tomorrow. Of course, I haven't been on a bike in about 20 years, so that could be a fun experiment. If I post tomorrow from a hospital room, you will know immediately that it's because of a bike!

Our timing worked out perfectly to join one of the canal tours (in a shallow open-topped boat that barely slips beneath some of the low bridges in the canals) and we enjoyed an hour floating around the main canals of Interhavnen and through the old neighborhoods of Holmen island, where everyone seems to have their own boat moored in the canal. It was interesting -- not so much because it told us any of the history of the city, as advertised, but because we got to see some of the areas and neighborhoods that we probably wouldn't make it to on foot, and we got to see the main harbor views from the water. The Black Diamond of the library, the Opera House, the Royal Theater, as well as some very nice views down the canals themselves, filled with sail boats and tons of people. And, the guide on the boat did the tour in three separate languages (Danish,English, and German) and swapped between the three without pause. It was quite impressive, really, and "low bridge! Watchyour head!" sounds remarkably similar in all three.

Mark decided to look for more food and coffee while I climbed the Rundetaarn (Round Tower) for the views out over the city. The tower was originally an observatory (the oldest in Denmark, from 1642). The inside of the tower doesn't have stairs -- to get to the top you walk up a huge spiral ramp, which is unique in Europe. It's a bit of a hike to the top, but the views out over Copenhagen are cool -- especially looking down on the rabbit-warren of streets and red-tile roofs just below the tower itself.

Very close to the tower is Rosenborg Castle and the huge castle garden (if you look on a map, they seem to cover about a quarter of the main island. Someone (several someones, I'm sure) has spent a lot of time, a tremendous amount of time, turning rows of beech trees into rectangular shapes. Seems rather weird, actually, since the trees are lovely in their natural shape, but the perfectly straight, perfectly block-shaped trees make for impressive avenues. There are a dozen different areas in the gardens, and we only saw the English knot garden and the large meadow of camelias (I think?) in six different colors before we went to the castle itself.

Only the state rooms are open, and some of the items displayed are really interesting (a number of brass clocks, and a room that is nearly completely mirrored are among the surprising finds), but the real draw is the Treasury beneath the castle, with cases full of extraordinary ivory carvings and cameos and steins and other tchotchkes that the rich and famous would give to the king. Some of the work is astoundingly ugly, but they are fascinating nonetheless because of their detail -- a 10" tall stein carved with intertwining branches and flowers, all perfectly formed is sort of mesmerizing, really -- how long would it take to actually carve that by hand? Without a dremel? One cup of coffee too many, one slip of the hand, and months of work have to be redone. I suppose the point was to show how rich you were, that you could afford to have this made and give it to the king, who probably just had it shipped off to a storeroom anyhow.

We listened to the advice of two gentleman sitting on a park bench to try an italian sandwich shop on the Stroget for lunch, which once again reinforced our "how to choose lunch" rules. Packed, bustling, and very, very tasty. Mark is so much more pleasant when he's had food. Oy. We were in a bit of a hurry, since i wanted to see the Royal Stables at Christianborg palace, andthey were only open from 2-4. They are completely restored -- in fact, completely rebuilt, due to changes in the rules as to how horses can be stabled. The old stable had stalls that were too small and the new law didn't allow the horses to be left in them for very long. So, they basically gutted the place and rebuilt it (using the same materials and as much of the old stsables as possible), including digging down the the floor over a meter and expanding all the lovely wood and stone horse stalls into even lovelier wood and stone "openboxes" that are three times the size. The troughs are still granite, the stall walls are still dark-stained wood, and the whole stable actually looks like the inner aisle of a huge stone church, big stone columns and all. It's really nice. I'm also a sucker for the bits and bobs that make up the old carriages, and the stables have almost twenty examples, some of them several hundred years old. The stable was theonly part of the castle to survive both fires (which destroyed the first two versions entirely).

Another thing that nearly always fascinates me are excavations and old foundations of things (crumbly bits!) and Christianborg has a huge underground walk through the excavated remains of the first castle built there inthe 12th century by city founger Bishop Absolom. They were restored about five years ago and you can walk through to see the remains of the old castle walls, towers, and wooden water mains built into the early stone castle here. The current castle is about the sixth iteration of a castle here (and it's more a manor house than castle, if you ask me) -- the previous two versions before this one burned to the ground because of faulty construction. A heating pipe lit a fire in the hollow spaces above a ceiling and the fire raced through the first building until it reached the attic...where they were storing wood to dry. The replacement palace was designed with firebreaks and better fire-fighting capabilities, but when it, too, was lit on fire by a faulty heating grate, the crew to fight the fire was denied entrance to the great hall (the fire had started inthe hollow passages underneath it) by the steward because he'd just polished the floors. It burned to the ground in a spectacular fashion and it was years before it was rebuilt. A lot of the art and furniture didn't survive the blaze (which was described by one person as a volcano, as if Vesuvius had erupted in the middle of the palace. It's quite a visual).

We also did our turn as Tourists today and ambled out to see the Little Mermaid statue, along with gaggles of other poeple. It's really quite tiny, and very close to shore. I was expecting something a bit further out, to be honest. But, now I've seen it, and can assure peple that yes, I've been to Copenhagen, I've seen The Little Mermaid, and survived. Frankly, I was more impressed by the Gefion fountain, which is a rather amazing thing with bulls and spouting water and rock-filled waterfalls. Amazing in a "um..why would anyone build that..." sort of way. Still, we sat and admired it in all its glory for a few minutes before heading on. We were going to walk around the fortifications on the island, but it decided at that moment to pour down rain and we simply stuck our hands in our pockets, ducked our heads, and walked as quickly as possible back to the hotel. It's still raining, but it's subsided to a faint drizzle, at least.

Tomorrow? Out into Copenhagan again-- Amalienborg Palace, the National Museum, the Navy Museum, and more pastries, I'm sure.

Denmark, here we come

2011-05-28T11:37:00.004-06:00

Up early this morning to have breakfast with our lovely hosts and drive to Helsingborg for the ferry to Denmark. We originally were going to take the new Oresund Bridge, but I'm glad that we took the ferry and spent the morning in Helsingor instead.

I don't like boats, really. And I really don't like boats that you drive trucks onto -- that just seems like a recipe for disaster, you know? The ferry is enormous, and does the trip every 20 minutes, and I don't remember any recent issues with ferries sinking, but still! We arrived about two minutes before the 8:20 ferry left, drove on and had just enough time to sit on the deck and swap out our Swedish Kroner for Danish Kroner and pack the envelopes back in my bag. it was a bit too cold and windy to stand on the top deck and see Kronborg (Elsinore/Hamlet's Castle) as we neared Denmark. It's practically a short-enough distance to swim (about 4.5km). We parked the car near the station and took off walking into town.

Helsingor is fabulous - the first thing we see coming across the street from the car park, is a slightly leaning, whitewashed half-timbered house in the medieval town center...followed by an entire street of them. The town was made very rich by the fees/tolls they charged for any ship passing between Sweden and Denmark, and it shows in the really grand houses that line the older part of town. We just poked around in the alleys and main streets before ending up at the Saturday morning street fair in the main square of the town. By lunchtime, nearly every shop had racks and tables of things out in the street and there were tents nad tables in the main square--we weren't really sure if this was a regular occurrence or not, since we had just gotten used to deciphering Swedish signs and Danish is enough different that we're a bit flummoxed by things. Luckly, we did figure out "one way street" before we messed up and drove the wrong way.

We walked along the harborfront to Kronborg Castle--which is a huge tourist draw for Hamlet fans, since the rumor is that Shakespeare based his play Hamlet not only on a Danish story about Amleth, but also sited it at this particular castle. Probably he heard about it from a traveling troupe of actors who performed here, but the story definitely stuck. It's an interesting castle, although no my favorite; there is a lot of art contained in the castle, but the rooms themselves are plain white and lack most decorations, probably because the castle was garrisoned by the Danish Army and then taken over by the Germans in WW2. The only room that is still in the same shape it would have been in the 16th century is the chapel -- which is pretty cool, I'll admit. We toured the casemates under the castle bastions and the state rooms, and Mark had to carefully inspect all the cannons lining the steep earthen defenses.

Of course, the first thing that he asked when we approached the castle to see the grass-covered banks was "how do they mow the grass on them?". The sides are probably 60 degrees. My immediate response? "Sheep. They lower them down on ropes..." I thought he was going to have to sit down, he was laughing so hard. The fact that we actually did see a rope and pulley system a bit later had us both wheezing with laughter.

Helsingor is only a few minutes from Fredensborg Slott, which is a royal residence and not open to tourists (at least, not today). We walked up to the gate and watched the very serious guard in his giant fuzzy hat walk back and forth a few times, and snapped a few pictures of the castle. It was still raining a bit, but we walked up the hill to the castle gardens hoping to see the sculptures, but everything is in the middle of restoration work and so we merely trekked around to the back of the castle, saw more fierce-looking young men in fuzzy beefeater hats marching smartly around in their tap shoes (seriously, they have metal bits on their shoes so they sound snappy when they march on pavement, like tap shoes). Oh! And we saw a dozen or so monuments in the back garden that look for all the world like giant erections. Yup. A field of penis sculpture. Closer examination shows them to be some sort of obelisk-like things with draped ivy on the bottom, but...well, I'll post a few pictures when I get through them and you'll think the same thing I did, I guarantee it!

Frederiksborg Slott, on the other hand, is stupendous. The rooms are carefully and completely restored, the art on display is great, and I spent the whole time walking around looking directly UP at the ceilings, which ranged from a rather sedate coffered ceiling with gold medallions to a ridiculous, over-the-top, frou-frou concoction of rococo decorations in a dozen different colors. I actually was laying on my back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling and trying to figure out how to take a good picture...the docent of the museum was a bit surprised. I think he was sure I'd fainted or something. The grand ballroom is a riot of colors and i can't imagine having a huge ball there with women in multi-colored dresses and men in their equally colorful finery (remember, this was the 18th century, they were dressing in the french style)...it might actually be nausea-inducing.

Many of the rooms have the best trompe l'oeil work that I've ever seen --the "marble" walls are simply paint, expertly done, and you've pretty much got to press your nose against it to realize that it's not real.

Mark also enjoyed identifying pictures of Christian IV (I think?) all over the castle, because the portraits,all of them, show a man with a very tiny head and a very large behind. Even if you grant some leeway to the artists for messing up the perspective, the guy in the paintings is pear-shaped. "Yup! Another one! Tiny head!" After looking at rooms of 16th and 17th century portraits, you realize that a lot of the faces look the same and the stylized clothing and expressions cover a multitude of artistic failings. Seriously - a lot of these portraits of women look like men in dresses, and we found at least one painting where every single person in the frame seemed to have exactly the same face. Maybe they found one guy who could paint faces really, really well...but he could only paint ONE of them. I don't know.

The GPS once again got us into Copenhagen and to the hotel without a single hitch. We're staying at the Hotel Kong Arthur, which is right on the canal (not the main canal, Inderhavn, but one of the smaller "so"s to the northeast) and we even scored a parking space in the small courtyard. We're on the fourth floor, which has a few angled beams in the room, but we can open the windows and lean out over the road and we've got a ton of space. Nice.

Scouted out a bakery for breakfast tomorrow (the hotel doesn't include breakfast, which is a change, and I refuse to pay $30 a head for a breakfast buffet that isn't so stellar that I'll write songs about it) and as we were discussing what to do for dinner, we both smelled it...pizza. Perfect, hot, garlicy pizza. We just followed our noses to a little downstairs hole-in-the-wall pizza joint run by an energetic Italian guy and absolutely packed with people. Always a good sign, when you can barely squeeze into the place. When we travel, we try to find the places that people are lined up outside of, or that are packed full of people -- usually they are the best places to eat. The fancy places with candles and white tablecloths can be great as well, but so far, we've had great luck with the local favorites.

I promptly took a bit of just-from-the-oven pizza...and burned the roof of my mouth. I hate that.

And tomorrow? Off to explore Copenhagen -- the three palaces in the city, dozens of churches,the pedestrian-only Stroget that covers most of downtown. And bakery. Don't forget the bakery -- the quintissential "Danish" pastry is pretty dang tasty!

Red-Carpet treatment

2011-05-27T13:06:00.000-06:00

We just spent two days visiting Mark's relatives in (and around) Hishult, Sweden -- it was an absolutely splendid trip and we had a great time with Carolina and Christer and their family. They fed us great food, took us to see all the places in the area related to Mark's family and made us feel so welcome in their home.

We stayed in the little red house that belonged to Christer's mother, which is only a little way from the main house, but is very quiet and private. We got to walk by the Scottish cows every morning on our way up to the house -- yes, they have Scottish Coos. Carolina bought them from someone online who wanted them to "have a good home" and so now they have five big fuzzy red cows in the field across from their house (a neighbors field, actually!). We joked that now they would never be able to sell them...the man they bought the cows from has actually visited them to make sure they are happy. If they ever sold the cows...he would know. They have a bull, two cows, and two calves right now. I imagine if we visit in a few years, they will have a dozen!

They drove us out to the family farm in Putsared - which Mark remembers from when he was last in Sweden, it belonged to his great-uncle and now the family pastures cows there and sometimes stays in the house in the summer time (even though it does not have running water). We stopped by to visit Evy (his mother's cousin, which makes her his..oh, I can't figure out the family tree past first cousins) and her husband Stig in their house in Hishult. They are moving soon to an apartment in Laholm where it is a little easier to take care of things, so they are busy packing and planning. Stig built the house himself (which I find rather amazing...I've only known of one person who build their own house, and now I know three of them!).

From there we drove to meet Lars (ok, let's see, a second cousin to Mark?) in Hoor. (sorry, can't do the o-with-umlaut thing, please imagine them there). I met Lars thirty years ago, when he visited Mark just when we started dating. He looks the same -- and we decided to ignore/deny the fact that thirty years had passed. Perhaps ten, we decided, that would be ok. Lars was terribly excited to show us his latest project: a spectacular new pipe organ for the church in Hoor. He is SO proud of it, and so obviously passionate about the music and the organ that it is contagious.

I have never actually been inside a pipe organ before, and not only did we get to hear Lars play a very complicated piece designed to really show off the different "voices" the organ has, he unlocked the little door in the side and let us climb inside (not while he was playing..that would be painful, I think!). I never realized just how much goes on inside of something like this -- and this organ is built with the technology and materials of the 17th century - oak and pine and lambskin and wooden bellows. No electronics, no motorized blower, no carbon fiber. Every key is attached to the pipes and air with wooden slats and small metal pegs -- it is like a complicated sculpture inside with pipes and bars and levers and tabs everywhere. I can't imagine what the plans look like to build it, but the end result is really fascinating.

We collected a few more family members on the way to get ice cream: Carolina's son Emil,and Lar's wife Birgita and their son Magnus. We even had a brief visit from Alice, their daughter, who whirled in with a bunch of her friends, waved hello, and then (with the embarassment that teenagers have about their parents in full show) bolted to be with her friends. She and her father had a conversation entirely in Swedish (which neither Mark nor I speak beyond takk and ja/nej) and yet we understood exactly what the conversion was about -- the tone and facial expressions said it all, and we laughed all the way to dinner. It was really good to see Lars again - hopefully we won't wait another 30 years!

Our hosts plied us with even more food and tasty treats when we got back to their farm, and we slept like stones.

They wanted to show us some of the more local stuff on Friday, and so we visited the church where Carolina works now -- a small stone 11-th century church in Ysby, and the new project Christer is working on (the building renovation for a new dairy/cheesemaking endeavor that someone in town is starting). Yes, they both have jobs in the daytime, and farm "only in the evenings" Christer says. Uh-huh. That's two jobs. At least. Then we drove up to Bastad (bow-stad) to see the beaches and the amazingly ugly (and expensive) new houses build along the water. The town is absolutely mad in July, she says, and they don't drive there at all until after the tourists leave. We stopped in the little town of Boarp at a deli to pick up some ham that Carolina wanted us to try, it is a speciality they have locally, but they were out.

But I still had a grand old time with the town....BORP! I can't quite pronounce the vowels properly and now the town will forever be BORP, at least to me. Just saying it makes me giggle. It actually made me chuckle out loud even as I typed this. Yes, I'm easy to amuse. BORP! BOORP! I can't help it. I think after this, they decided to try to teach me to pronounce things properly, but I just can't manage the a-with-the-little-o over it. It's pretty funny when I try, though.

We finally got to see their other house -- the one they built several years ago, intending to move from the farm house they are in. It's beautiful. I thought that had hired someone to build it for them -- Carolina designed it -- but it turns out that no, Christer and his sons built it themselves. We also got to see the new apartment in Laholm because we all drove to see Ebba (their daughter) play in a recital. The school was so unorganized though, that we did not attend -- I think Ebba was very glad, since we told her we would stand in the front row and do The Wave and take lots of flash pictures and tell everyone that we were there just to see her! She said later that it was good that no one came, it was an absolute disaster. At least she was laughing about it.

We had dinner and sat and talked for hours afterwards -- one thing I can say, Carolina made sure we had food, good food, and lots of it! Every time we stopped anywhere, food appeared ! And what can I say? Any culture that involves chocolate and marzipan for breakfast is ok in my book.

Southern Sweden is beautiful, and seems very, very familiar to me -- and i realized why: it looks like southern Minnesota. All those Swedes left Sweden and traveled until they found a place that looked just like home.

Tomorrow? Off to Copenhagen via the ferry to Helsingor (and Kronborg Slot -- Hamlet's Castle). Can I just register now that I don't really like boats? And especially boats onto which they drive trucks? Gah.

Gothenburg

2011-05-25T01:08:00.000-06:00

Oy, the wind! It's howling today -- the clouds cleared from all the rain overnight, but it was cold and very windy today as we walked through Gothenburg. It's the second largest town in Sweden, a huge shipping port, and has the buildngs to show for it; although only few of the 17th century buildings remain, most have been replaced by stone mansions along the canalfront and huge 1960s housing blocks south of the main part of the city. We went directly to the huge car-park near the bus station and left the car to walk around the older part of town, on a small island in the main canal -- the remains of the original walled city are very visible here.

We walked through the main pedestrian area of the city (lined with shops of every sort) and went to the cathedral (which is a very plain-looking building, actually). Inside, it's simple and nearly all-white. it does have some unusual details, though: along eah side of the church are glassed-in cases that look for all the world like tram cars (and the locals do call them "the trams", apparently) that were used for the private conversations of the bishops, and the cross hanging over the alter is an unusual sort: no christ on the cross, just his abandoned clothing. I probably wouodn' have even noticed this, to be honest, if every single guidebook hadn't mentioned it, but once you know that it's a rather weird version of things, it's hard to not notice.

The Fiskekirke ("Fish Church") is not really a church, and never has been, but it's the oldest indoor market in the city and while it's small compared to the others, the array of fresh fish here is amazing. People come from all over the city to buy fresh fish and prepared lunches. We were a bit early for lunch, but some of the shrimp salads looked amazing. Our primary goal, though, is Maritiman -- the "floating maritime museum" along the waterfront. Twenty boats of various types (from small local tug boats to a destroyer and a submarine) are tied up along the pier and are open for boat-nuts to poke into every nook and cranny. Not quite my cup of tea, but Mark loves it and clambered down into the submarine and into the engine rooms of the boats to look around.

We passed by the Stadmuseum (the city museum) and decided to have lunch in their cafe -which turned out to be one of the best lunches we've had so far -- the dagans ratt, or daily special: bread, salad, coffee, and a meat pie was excellent. We realized we needed to go back and plug the meter on the car parking, so we quickly went back to the car ad got another two hours of time, before walking through the botanical gardens to see the palm house -- a replica of the Crystal Palace -- and look at the not-quite-blooming-yet rose garden, which will be spectacular in the summer whne all three thousand plants are in bloom.

The central part of town around the main square and the central train/bus/tram station is filled with bicycles, and we stopped quickly in the the main station to look around. it's the oldest train station in Sweden,with lovely woodwork and decorative details. Our final stop before leaving the city was to see the Kronhuset - a 17th century brick building originally built as an artillery depot and now used as a concert space. The buildings wasn't open to look inside, but it is a good representation of what all the buildings in the main part of the old town would have looked like. For someone like me who likes old buildings, it's a gem. And, in the courtyard, there is a lovely bakery and chocolate shop. Can't beat that!

it's only about two hours down the coast to Hishult, so we have a pretty leisurely drive this afternoon, with a stop at the harborside fortress in Varberg -- which is very much like the star-forts we saw all along the coast in Ireland and Scotland -- obviously a very popular layout. The wind was so fierce that we were having a hard time walking up the steep cobbled lanes inside the fort...and of course mark went up on the battlements to peer over the very edge. I really shouldh ave demanded the car keys, just in case he pitched himself over the edge on a wind gust.

The GPS led us directly to Carolina and Christer's, and we settled in for the evening to catch up and drink coffee. We are staying in the little house that belonged to Christer's mother, which is just a short walk from their house. They are charming people, and we're really enjoying seeing them again (they visited us in Colorado about two years ago, as part of their trip to the US). They farm here ("as a second job, only in the evenings" Christer says) with sheep and five huge, fuzzy Highland cows. Carolina bought them, she said, and the seller was very concerned that they have "a good home", and even came to visit after they were here. We laughed and told her that she could never get rid of them now -- they would know.

Slept like rocks. Tomorrow -- off to visit more family!

Rain and a last look at Stockholm

2011-05-24T00:50:00.000-06:00

Our last day in Stockholm and we woke to gray skies, but we packed up and loaded the car after breakfast and then walked into town intending to take the Under the Bridges Tour (a two hour cruise through the canals around the city)...after we tracked down Marten Trotzig's Grand, the narrowest street in Gamla Stan.

It started to rain when we got off the T-bana and we figured it would be short-lived, so we just slogged on. We eventually stopped and took refuge under an awning and watched the crowds of people (mostly school kids, who we think were on a scavenger hunt, since they all came by in pairs with sheaves of paper and stopped at the same buildings) for a while. We had to resort to the mapping feature on Mark's phone to find the narrow little alley.

Deciding that cruising around in the rain wasn't going to be much fun, we opted instead for the Historiska Museet - the displays on vikings and medieval Stockholm were amazingly well done and interesting; the gold room, in particular, with the finds of dozens of Viking and later-era hoards was fascinating. This museum has the only three gold collars ever found. It also has the remains of what was reputed to be th elargest hoard ever found, which was dug up in the 18th century by a local nobleman. He brought the find to the King, who was unable to afford to buy all of it and so the museum has only a couple of small gold torcs and a few sword decorations...the noblemftok the rest of the find and melted it down to make ducats and pay off his huge debts! Mark liked this museum far more than the Nordiske Museum, and we wandered around for most of the morning.

We found Ostermalms Saluhall -- a huge indoor market -- and browsed around for lunch along with half the population of Stockholm, I think. We eventually settled on take-away from one of the vendors -- chicken (kyckling) croquettes, swedish moose meatballs with hunter sauce, gruyere potatoes, and bread from one of the bakeries. Great lunch, and now I can say I've eaten Swedish Moose Balls. Which were quite tasty.

Mark was inexorably drawn to the Armemuseum, so we made a quick detour to walk through the exhibition there before we headed back to the hotel to pick up the car. We have a reservation near Gothenburg (which I have been told is Yoh-te-burry) tonight, so we're heading across Sweden, past Lake Vannen, and down to Floda where we're staying at Naas Slott. The rain and wind picked up with a vengeance and by the time we arrived there it was gray and cold. Since we showed up very late, I had made arrangements with the caretaker to leave the keys and such and we spent a few minutes trying to find the "blue box" with the promised instructions before we could get in and dry off. It's a lovely place - the mansion was built by one of the burghers who was involved with the Swedish East India Company, and we stayed in the south wing of the house (which is actually a separate building, it just looks like it's connected from the front). Very comfortable and quite lovely - although i can't quite get used to the "two separate duvets" on the double bed. After a very quick foray to find dinner (local pizza place, which actually stayed open late to feed us -- we hadn't checked the time and didn't realize that they were actually closing when we showed up!) we were back and asleep in minutes.

Off to Gothenburg tomorrow and then on to visit family near Hishult.

BaconOst

2011-05-24T00:47:00.000-06:00

I've been corrected (and we probably should get a dictionary!) that the Squeezy Bacon in a tube is actually just bacon-flavored cheese.

I'm quite dissappointed. I was sure it was just bacon in a tube....but no. It's just flavored cheese-food. Hmph.

Now I'm a bit concerned that there is shrimp-flavored cheese, too. That's just too weird to contemplate.

Stockholm 3: less walking, bigger stuff

2011-05-23T11:47:00.003-06:00

We did a bit less walking today -- we still hoofed it to the Tunnelbana station but our destination today was Drottningholm Palace and we actually figured out the bus and train schedules (in Swedish, no less) to get out there. We decided against the boat, since we're going to take the Under the Bridges tour tomorrow (well, we were going to do it today, but the Vasa museum was far too interesting to leave, so..tomorrow it is!)

It apparently rained buckets this morning before we got up, and it was forecast for rain until mid-day, but everything looked like it was clearing up as we left the hotel, so I didn't bring a rain jacket. For once, I was right. It cleared by lunchtime and was sunny and gorgeous (albeit win-dy!). We definitely luck out with weather on our vacations.

Drottningholm is interesting -- in comparison to the Kungliga Slott (Royal palace) in Gamla Stan, which we toured around on Saturday, and which is designed/finished by the same architect, it's a much more typical baroque and rococo style building. The obvious comparison is to Versailles (which was built at the same time, so the rumors that thisis meant to be "a copy" are false, according to our very knowledgeable guide) with the long, perfectly symmetrical facade and wings, and the extensive French and English gardens is apt. Inside, it's french silk wallpaper, rococo and neo-classical mirrors and gilding, and not much of a trace of good old-fashioned Swedish aesthetics. Nothing is simple, everythign is a bit overwrought, most notably the main staircase which is a riot of faux painted marbles and sculptures and trompe l'oeil ceilings and alcoves. The effect is nearly perfect - I had to touch a few of the walls to confirm that they are, indeed, just paint. Some of the perspective-bending ceiling paintings are realistic enough to fool a first glance, and make the rooms look taller and larger than they are. Drottningholm is actually quite small, as apalaces go -- it is meant as a true summer home for the king, even though the current family lives here most of the year.

But it's the gardens and the remarkable Chinese Pavillion that are really fun. Over 700 lime trees in perfect, neat rows surround carefully laid out and pruned pleasure gardens, all leading to the fanciful pavillion at the far end -- a concoction of mock-oriental design and color -- "like a chinese lacquer box plopped down in the swedish countryside" our guide said. it even has a private dining house where the table and the cabinets rise up out of the floor so the cooking and serving happens below, and no servants are required to stand tableside to serve things. it's all just cooked and raised up on pulleys into the little gazebo. The king and his friends used to take a carriage from the palace to have parties here, among the tschotkes of chinese dolls and painted porcelain.

Back in town, we got stuck in a tunnelbana station a bit further away than we anticipated -- we manage to decipher something about "road work" and "20 minute delay" (we think!) from the very serious sounding announcement. But, the walk was nice and we were back on the tram to Djurgaden easily enough, once we navigated our way around the station and figured out which direction we were facing once we emerged at ground level. At least the streets are consistently labelled here (even if most street names have about thirty letters, I swear).

The Vasa museum was tops on our list to visit (and should be tops on anyone's list to visit -- it's absolutely amazing to see this huge, tall, narrow ship almost entirely intact, in the museum. Once you stand on the floor near the huge rudder and stare up at the insanely narrow, towering stern of the ship, you understand immediately why it sank promptly, in the harbor, on its first voyage out of the docks. Blub glub glub. Originally, they thought it was the weight of the guns shifting from side to side that did her in, but they were all found well-fastened when the ship was discovered and raised in the 1960s. The current theory is that she had far too little ballast to balance out the huge, top-heavy ship. The rest of the museum is fascinating, but it pales in comparison to just looking at the enormous, fully-restored ship sitting in the middle. Nearly everything is the original wood (preserved with some sort of chemical soup) and the restorers put the thing together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, matching up nail holes in individual pieces as they went. It's just a stunning work of art. I could have stayed for hours just staring at the bits and pieces all over the ship. It was for that reason taht we missed the boat tour -- I was hanging, agog, over the railinglooking down on he main deck.

We went a little further onto the island, and just walked around the park for awhile -- sat on the bluff overlooking the harbor at Prince Eugene's Waldensudde and walked up to the vast gardens at Rosendal palace (and never did see the actual palace, which is kind of funny, castle-hunter that I am). It was just a lovely, perfect evening to wander around and sit on the various benches.

Street food for dinner - Sergels Torg was filled with the 'International Food Festival" and we downed a couple of enormous sausages and picked up a half-dozen desserts (hey, you have to set priorities!) before finally trekking back to the hotel. On the way we ran into a gentleman we'd met at Drottningholm (he asked us to 'test' his photograph by holding up our hands to "hold" a building on our palms so he could help a friend of his get "the perfect tourist picture"). he actually lives only a few blocks from our hotel and we passed him walking up the street....a rather weird, deja-vu-ish sort of experience. We assured him that we were not stalking him, and had an enjoyable chat on the way from the metro station. How odd!

It's early still, and we're in the hotel room, stuffed full of bratwurst, baklava, and English fudge and probably ready to crash for the night. it took all of four seconds for us to kick off our shoes and socks and collapse.

Oh, and may I just register that I think it's against the geneva convention to charge for using the bathroom at a mall? We ducked in to the Gallerian mall (a ginormous mall near the central station) and luckily we had 10 kroner to put intot he turnstile or we'd have been out of luck. Phffft! Although, I will say, Swedish public toilets are among the nicest I've ever been in and very, very clean.

Tomorrow? The Under the Bridges tour, and if I can manage to convince Mark, the historic museum. We have to leave Stockholm by about 2:30 (We're going to be in Gothenburg tomorrow night) and we'll probably not have time to do much. But we'll try!

Stockholm 2: Footsore and sunburned

2011-05-22T12:55:00.004-06:00

Another absolutely fabulous day in Stockholm -- warm, sunny, a bit windy, and perfect for wandering around. Wandered around Riddaholmen this morning before things opened, taking pictures of the outside of the Riddarholmskyrkan before we joined the guided tour at the Radhuset (City hall). Which is unlike any city hall I'm used to -- we never hosted the Nobel Prize dinners in any sort of city hall I'm aware of. It's an interesting building -- dozens of different styles and colors that is at once harmonious and just slightly jarring. A room of gold-leaf mosaic tiles follows a plain, pale-painted drawing room. After walking around for an hour, we decided that our original plan to climb the 365 steps to the top of the tower was probably not the best thing to do, considering how exhausted we were yesterday (and how we're both feeling a bit sore and tired.

Yes, blame me. I over-commit. Or over-plan. Take your pick. I have far too much stuff on the list for us to do than we can possibly squeeze in. And we tend to go non-stop from 8am-8pm before crashing, packing in as much as we can. That's how we always go on vacations -- up early, out all day, crash like big crashy things at night, exhausted. We often end up at the end of our vacation with aches and pains and too little sleep. Go-Go-Go!

At any rate, we walked back across the bridge to Gamla Stan again to visit the Nobel Museum and eat lunch in their cafe, sitting outside and looking over the main square and basking in the sunshine. We are continually amazed that women in high-heels can walk across the cobblestone streets.

We were going to go to Skepsholmen to visit the Architecture museum, but we decided to get off the 'hop-0n/hop-off' boat early and went to the Nordiska Museum. Mark really felt cheated -- he thought atht a museum that was supposed to be representative of life in Scandinavia shoould have more in it than a wing of costumes, house interiors, and pictures of men in bathing suits (the temporary exhibition). I, personally, loved the home interiors from the 19th century, the 30s, the 50s and a modern room. And, walking through the displays of historic costume is guaranteed to interest me -- I even lost a half hour pulling out al the drawers in the textile display area to see examples of weaving, needlework, crochet, and knitting in the various styles throughout Sweden. I did expect a few more examples of the bunad in the collection, though. There was only one. The building, though, is quite interesting.

We walked along the waterfront and gawked at all the people heading to Gruna Lund,the amusement park, and finally wended our way to Skansen, where we spent the afternoon looking at houses and farmsteads and churches of every sort moved to Stockholm from the far reaches of Sweden for an open-air recreation of the different regions. it was sunny, warm, and strolling along the cobbled lanes to look at farms from the last few centuries (including a storehouse that dates to 1320) and people-watching was a lovely, relaxing afternoon. We had been worried that it would be Disney-esque sort of place, all commercial and in-your-face (like the much-mentioned Bunratty Castle in Ireland, which still can reduce us to giggles), but it wasn't Bunrattified at all -- very low key, very little commercial glitz. You can tell they can really gear it up in the summer months during high-season, but right now, it's just starting to fill up and not everythign is open yet.

Caught the train back to central Stockholm and hiked back to the hotel -- I swear, that walk is getting longer and longer every time we do it -- there's bus service that is closer, but it's actually quicker to just walk to the nearest Tunnelbana station...but at the end of the day, the slog back can feel like miles and miles.

We drove out into the world looking for food tonight. The area we're in is pretty thin on the ground with restuarants that are open for dinner (and even fewer of them are open on Sunday night) and we figured the pickings would be better further out in one of the "shopping areas"...which were also closed, along with anything even remotely attached to them. We ended up, of all places, in McDonalds. Which is ok - we do specifically try to stop in a McDs in every country we visit, to compare notes (the ketchup is not as sweet here, and the pickles are a bit odd, but otherwise, just the same), and we wandered through a grocery store (which is fun, since everything is a different brand and we don't actually read any Swedish).

Mark simply would not take a picture of the enormous sausage that I found (figuring quite rightly that I would be forced to make some sort of off-color joke about a bright red sausage the size of a whiffle bat), but he did deign to take a photo of the Wall of Food in a Tube...more specifically...BACON in a tube. Along with shrimp, crab, cheese, ham, and a variety of other combinations of Squeeze Food. I was giggling helplessly. I can't decide if Squeezze Bacon is the best

invention evah, or a sign of the apocalypse.

Probably the latter. We didn't buy any (no place to keep it at the moment), but we might have to, even if we just empty it out and take home the tube proclaiming BaconOst!

Stockholm

2011-05-21T14:11:00.003-06:00

Stockholm has to be the cleanest city that I've ever been in. We spent the day in Gamla Stan (old town) -- the original island of medieval Stockholm -- walking around the narrow cobbled lanes and around the royal castle and cathedral, and all the buildings are in good condition (or actively being fixed and under scaffolding and tarps), painted lovely ocher shades that make the curving streets seem as if they are bathed in sunlight, even when they are shadowed. It's a lovely place.

Easy to get lost in, despite the fact that it's about 1/2 mile from end to end. We spent the morning just wandering around, then went to the Kunglinga Slottet (royal castle), a huge square not-too-castle-looking castle to see the State Apartments and public rooms. They've got more room here than Buckingham palace, decorated most in the rococo style with tons of gold leaf, over-dramatic scenes on the ceilings, and chandeliers the size of a volkswagen. It's really sort of odd to move from one room that is very much like the florid style of Versailles (gold leaf, red velvet and the like) to a simply decorated room of pale greenish-gray walls, gray woodwork, and white ceilings. it's like going from "woah! Royalty!" to the sedate, calm interiors of IKEA. I kid, of course, but there is somethingquintissentially Swedish about those colors and simple style that are immediately recognizable.

There are actually five different museums in the complex -- and only one wing is really open to the public --so we wandered around the armory museum (which contains, among other things, a really cool collection of carriages), the crown jewels, and the museum tucked under the walls of the original north wing with the remains of the cellars and walls of the first fortress build here - Tre Kronor, Three Crowns. I'm a huge sucker for the bits and pieces that always show up under these old buildings, so we spent a while poking about in the museum there.

The cathedral, Storykyrkan (well, it's not technically a cathedral, but it's accepted as one) is lovely, and has the original of the much-copied St George and the Dragon statue along with some truly spectacularly over-the-top royal boxes/pews. I can't imagine acutally sitting in one, they'd give me nightmares of being swallowed up by frou-frou and gold leaf.

Popped in for lunch in one of the hundreds of little restaurants that line the alleys (it's going to take a while to get used to paying $5 for a glass of diet coke) and followed lunch with a long walk along the original streets of the island -- a couple hundred yards in from the current shoreline, and linked to it by dozens of narrow, twisty alleys. It took two tries to find the medieval Stockholm museum, but it was worth it -- more bits and bobs from the old town and even a stretch of the original city wall (now twenty feet down from ground level).

We made a valiant attempt to wander around the National Museum but we were done. Even ice cream, eaten while watching the boats dock nearby and enjoying the sun, wasn't enough to perk us up. We took the metro back up north and staggered to our hotel room to fall into a coma for three hours. The fact that it was still bright outside at 9pm when we ventured out to find dinner, is still a bit weird.

Tomorrow? Lots on the docket -- Skansen, the architecture museum, Stadhuset, Riddarholmskyrkran, City museum, possibly a quick trip out of the city to see the Anunshog burial mounds after dinner. Probably too much to actually get done, but...well, we're going try!It's supposed to rain on Monday, so we're going to try for some of the more "indoor" pursuits and make sure to visit Skansen and the island of Djurgarden while it's sunny and gorgeous.

Now? To sleep. Possibly to dream. most likely to sink into a coma that won't even be broken by the morning sun rising...at 3am.

Jet-lagged and overly bright!

2011-05-20T22:55:00.002-06:00

We went for a walk last night after finding our hotel (the absolutely charming Stallmastaregarden) at about 10:30--and it was light enough to read the paper outside..we should have known that we'd be woken up at 3:30 or so by bright sun.

Seriously -- not only does it feel like noon to us jet-lagged Denverites, but it LOOKS like noon. This is going to take some getting used to. it's nice -- I mean, who doesn't want to be able to be out and about until the wee hours? -- but even with the shades down, it's awfully darn bright in here.

It's absolutely gorgeous outside (supposed to be mid-60s today) and sunny today and tomorrow. Woot!

Our hotel is north of the city a bit -- a bus ride or about a 15minute walk to the nearest Tunnelbana (metro) stop and then another fifteen minute walk to Gamla Stan -- Old Town -- our target for today. We're going to walk around the remains of the medieval town, see the castle (one of several, actually), and probably spend the afternoon at the National Museum (or just wandering around eating ice cream, you never know). Things are only open roughtly 10-4 (or sometimes 5), so today is our day to figure out how this is going to work. We might make great progress, or we might dawdle about and do nothing but people watch.

I've got a good map (several, actually) and we're set. Metro station map, Stockholm Cards, Camera. Check!

Scandinavia Mocking

2011-05-19T18:32:00.003-06:00

Ok, yes, mock away. You're going to laugh. But here's the FIRST PAGE of the seven-page travel planning doc (which is supported by multiple other documents, including a day-by-day color-coded chart --and if you think I'm going to post THAT for public consumption you're insane) and lists of opening times, checklists of things to see, etc)

I left our housesitter a seven page documennt. The follow is only the FIRST PAGE of the multi-colored, color-coded daily plan. I think I should seek treatment.

So...mock away. I deserve it.

Scandianvia Day 1

2011-05-19T17:00:00.002-06:00

We're off! Left the dogs in the capable hands of our housesitter, Rainer (and our neighbor, Bacon Lady) and slogged through the deluge to the airport to start off our trip to Scandinavia.

I had the standard pre-trip anxiety attack -- what have I forgotten? What if we get there and Sweden is CLOSED? What happens if we miss our flight? -- and rushed about like a demented weirdo for the afternoon before we left. Made a last minute run to pick up a spare pair of glasses and i still forgot to return all the library books. Oh, well.

We packed last night, really (although we've been piling up things on the dining room table for a week or more) and I managed to come in under 35 lbs (for a month! A new record!). Plus camera gear, of course. And Kindle. The guy at the security checkpoint int he airport commented that our trip must be a good one, if the amount of camera stuff is any indication!

But, we're in the lovely BA lounge, enjoying free glasses of wine and dinner, and I'm starting to calm down. I might take another glass of wine, though.

So -- off to Stockholm (we arrive tomorrow) and four days there,then to visit family in southern Sweden, and then onwards to Denmark, Norway, and finally Russia! Yeeha! (Yes, I'll post the embarassing and entirely too detailed charts of the trip. I promise. Mock away.

As for now, I'm going to finish my wine, relax, and see what I can do about getting seats together on the plane. More later from Sunny Scandinavia!

Lap-Giraffe

2011-03-27T11:51:00.002-06:00

You too can have a Lap Giraffe.

I have to admit, I'm terribly annoyed by the Directv commercials, but I totally want a tiny giraffe.

Bees love Junk Food, too

2010-11-30T15:29:00.002-07:00

I know that I'd be a bit concerned with red honey, but with a name like Cerise, what did she expect?

Apparently her bees have been ignoring the local nectar in favor of the runoff from the Maraschino Cherry factory a few miles away....

Huh. So bees like junk food, too!

Yes, yes, I know!

2010-11-17T23:11:00.002-07:00

Yes, yes yes..I know, I've been gone for ages, but I had to pop over here to link to the funniest thing I've read in...well, possibly ever.

My cheeks hurt, I've been laughing to hard. I have actual tears in my eyes. I've summoned both dogs, who think that I'm cackling in a very disturbing manner.

I will note that you might not find this as funny if you don't have a "short bus" dog, but damn this is exactly how it is....

Dogs don't understand moving

An interesting character

2010-10-21T21:53:00.001-06:00

Perhaps the best first obituary line, ever:

PITRE Loulan Joseph Pitre, Sr., age 89, a lifelong citizen of Cut Off, LA on Sunday, October 17th, 2010, finally stopped debating every subject imaginable with anyone lucky enough to encounter him

It sounds like Mr. Pitre was a fascinating character.

100%

2010-09-28T22:31:00.002-06:00

According to a recent survey, the people most knowledgeable about religion are atheists and agnostics -- not surprising, really; part of understanding why we don't believe is understanding what is is that others do believe and the history of both the religion and the scripture of the major religions, and many religious sects strongly discourage that sort of knowledge, for fear it will detract from faith.

I got 100% on the sample quiz (15 of the 32 questions that were given to the phone survey participants). I'm curious what the rest of the questions were -- they seemed pretty basic (I'm surprised that over half of all protestants don't know that Luther inspired the Protestant Reformation, for example, that seems to be a core sort of understanding of church history).

I'm a little fuzzier on Jewish history, though. One of the questions (not in the sample) was about Maimonides..I had to go look that one up. Although I think I might have guessed he was Jewish, since it was a multiple choice question.

Ah, well. What does this mean? I'm not sure. It certainly doesn't mean non-believers are smarter and believers are stupid -- as some of the comments have suggested. But it might give us a hint into what and why people believe the way they do, and how they approach that knowledge. Most atheists and agnostics are non-believers because they have studied the lessons of the religion they left - often in-depth and often with the hopes of rekindling faith, if you read any of the stories they tell of their passage to atheism.

Interesting, at any rate. And sure to raise a lot of hackles.

I've got mine, screw you

2010-09-18T10:18:00.004-06:00

Huckabee was blathering yesterday about the republican plan to revoke the 'pre-existing condition' clause in the new health care bill. The one that no longer allows insurance companies to refuse to cover a person because they either have a condition or have been treated for it in the past. Say, you were treated for colitis years ago, and have had a recurrence. An insurance company can refuse to pay for your treatment now and can reject you for insurance. Cancer treatment makes you pretty much uninsurable for any other insurance coverage. People get dropped from insurance rolls, and cannot get reinsured, because of this loophole in the insurance regulations that favor insurance companies.

At any rate, he compared the requirement that insurance companies cover pre-existing conditions to homeowners insurance companues being required to cover your burned-down house. Oh, it would be a nice thing, but it's patently ridiculous, he sneered.

No, you slack-jawed moron. Your analogy is absolutely wrong, and patently dishonest.

The analogy should be: Having an insurance company refuse you coverage because of a pre-existing condition is like trying to get homeowners insurance when your house burned town ten years ago, and you have rebuilt it, and they refuse to cover your existing house for fire because you once had a house fire.

What Huckabee is describing is what happens when you have no insurance, and finally end up in the emergency room trying to get treatment and pay for a condition that you currently have. He has completely misunderstood (or misrepresented, more likely) the entire issue. But it makes a nice soundbite, though, so I'm sure it will be touted as "truth" in no time.

Once again, the modern conservative movements credo is shining through: I've got mine, screw you. Look, if you dislike the idea of requiring insurance companies to provide insurance, regardless of pre-existing conditions, then argue against it; that's you're right. But do it honestly, eh? If you've got facts and evidence, provide them. If not, fanning the flames of fear and anxiety is not an acceptable alternative.

A Pot Rack Incident

2010-09-17T10:35:00.000-06:00

We're having another scope creep issue here at Chez Phouka -- remember the pot rack in the old kitchen? The small hole in the wall to add a support for the pot rack ended up the impetus for totally redoing the bathroom?

At any rate, we finally got an offer from Comcast to swap over internet and tv and telephone that was too good to pass up, so we're moving all the services to Comcast from our current combination of Directv and Qwest. We're not unhappy with the service, but saving 70+ bucks a month for faster internet and HD cable was enough to do it.

But we only have one HD television, the projector in the theater downstairs. It's time to consider replacing the 15-year-old television in the living room with a new HD television, we decided.

...which will require getting a new piece of furniture, since the current entertainment armoire will fit the existing 32" CRT television and nothing else. We want a flat screen, and large enough to be worthwhile watching HD television, so it has to go, and we need some other component storage/media cabinet. This is surprisingly difficult for us - that armoire was the first piece of furniture we ever bought, and we both love it, it's just not workable.

...which requires that we either figure out where else it can go in the house, so as not to lose it, or we have to get rid of it entirely, which is emotionally difficult. Sigh. Moving it somewhere else would probably require moving other furniture pieces (I suggested moving it to the guest room, but it's a wee bit too big for that) somewhere else. It's like playing musical chairs with large pieces of furniture.

It's never just one thing, it is? I almost wish I could be that person who changes their house up every few years, new furniture, new paint, new stuff. I'm not. It took us almost a year to negotiate the painting of the living room a new color and the purchase of a new couch. It's not easy for us, apparently.

Wish us luck! We're out to look at televisions today (although we'll probably buy on line for price) and new pieces of furniture. Send any suggestions, we need them!

Frankensteinian Medicine

2010-09-15T11:06:00.003-06:00

If anyone suggests that you should have a Nerve Conductance Test, make sure you have enough time to drink heavily beforehand. Ow! I now know exactly where all the nerves are, in detail, in my leg and hip... I know this because the doctor stuck little electrodes on me and then used a tiny medical Tazer to ZAP! each of the nerves in turn. Sometimes 10 times in a row.

Ok, it's not really horribly painful. It hurts, but more because that is not something you ever to yourself. It's awfully weird-feeling, though. I kept having the mental image of the Frankenstein monster being 'jolted' to life. "It's aaaaaa-live! Alive!".

Follow it with a muscle response test (which involved NEEDLES stuck in my leg) and my leg now hurts more than when I went in. I think I should convalesce on the couch for the rest of the afternoon. Just in case.

But - the outcome is good. The meralgia paresthetica diagnosis from six years ago seems to be absolutely correct, and the new symptom of pain is not damaging anything, just an annoying side effect. It's not even a progression of symptoms -- it may do this for awhile, then subside and go back to just being the weird numb spot on my leg, or it may 'act up' for a long time. My concern was that the pain wasn't a sign that something else was being damaged or something, and that walking wasn't going to cause eventual muscle damage or other nerve damage that might be important. A sensory nerve isn't necessary (in fact, if it gets bad, they can just cut the nerve) but it certainly does make you notice it!

Jackpot!

2010-09-14T15:41:00.003-06:00

Wow! I knew that some universities in the US have made courses available online (via video or mp3, class notes, etc) but I didn't realize the sheer number of classes out there. Yale University, Berkeley, NYU, Oxford, tons of others -- all consolidated at a website called Academic Earth.

Jackpot! Tons of interesting classes by the top universities and colleges -- free.

Damn, I love the interwebs.

Dog Training

2010-09-02T14:27:00.002-06:00

Most of the time when I go downstairs to plod along on the treadmill, both dogs follow me. They tend to follow me everywhere (if I let them), of course. I can't figure out what they find so fascinating about me walking in place, but it's cool down there and they like to lounge about while I exercise.

But now, when I announce that "I'm going downstairs to walk..." they both RUN to the basement door and then thunder downstairs to stand expectantly by the storage room door, tails wagging. Why? Because I -- ONCE -- went into the storage room where the dog biscuits are stored to give them a cookie before I started on the treadmill.

Once is apparently enough to convince them this is what 'going to walk' means. It means: run downstairs and we'll get a biscuit! Yeah!.

So, unlike every other dog on the planet, the word 'walk' has nothing to do with outside or a leash or sniffing every shrub for four blocks...it means 'go in the basement'

That's somehow every embarrassing.

Happy Wine Day

2010-08-13T14:05:00.003-06:00

We are now in possession of two cases of new 2009 Mollydooker wines -- including seven bottles of the absolutely perfect Velvet Glove. I'm going to have to start inventing important celebratory holidays to warrant drinking them.

Let's see... the anniversary of our first toaster purchase. Yup! Dog's birthday. Sounds good! No rain on Tuesday, that'll do.

We tend to hoard this just a bit, since it's so good. Plan to be at our house for a major anniversary or birthday and we'll probably share.

Probably.

For Booklovers

2010-08-03T13:33:00.000-06:00

You know you're a bookish, geekish sort when....you can name all but one of the covers pictured in this little quiz.

Ok, I really did miss 2, I knew what the book was but it was picky about the exact wording. They are mostly american covers, and not always new ones, at that.

Extra points if you can name the author for each of them....

Virtual Climbing

2010-08-01T08:49:00.000-06:00

Well, real climbing, but a virtual hill, I guess!

According to my treadmill, I have walked 272 miles, and climbed over 38,000 feet. Woot!

Artistic Artichokes

2010-07-19T12:25:00.001-06:00

Someone had too much time on their hands (and hopefully is not in trouble for misuse of an MRI machine), but the images of vegetables and fruits in the MRI are very interesting!!

Food Porn

2010-07-18T23:02:00.003-06:00

We've been trying to eat better here at Chez Phouka, more fresh veggies, cooking at home more often, just trying to do a bit better.

I've also been watching a lot of Food Channel and Cooking Channel shows as I huddle in the living room cross stitching, so I've been trolling the internet for recipes and new ideas. There are only so many ways to cook zucchini, you know?

And I discovered a blog that is a collection of the "foodie" sites -- TasteSpotting. It's just food porn, really -- beautiful pictures of fabulous food, descriptions of meals, and some really interesting recipes. It's just fun to browse.

The Grass is Greener

2010-07-16T00:27:00.001-06:00

I was thinking about this today, after a conversation with a friend over kids vs dogs.

One of the few times I wish that my dogs were actually human children is when they wake me up urgently at 3am.

With a human child (at least a verbal one) they could tell me if the urgency is "hurry up I'm bored and you should play with me" or "I forgot to pee before I went to bed can I go now?" or "Imminent butt-splosion from all the bacon I ate! Defcon four! 911! HELP!"

That would be helpful. With the dogs, it's all the same facial expression, and "I just want to go outside to bark" has the same urgency as "I think I'm gonna barf now".

Most often, it's the former--they sleep all day and want to go out. One benefit, though, I can just close the door, leave them outside, and go back to bed. Probably not a good idea with children, right?

I wonder if she'll do it

2010-06-29T15:49:00.004-06:00

Back in February, a facebook page went up:
MY SISTER SAID IF I GET ONE MILLION FANS SHE WILL NAME HER BABY MEGATRON

It took 13 days. Do not mess with the power of the interwebs!

Galapagos Pictures

2010-06-25T10:37:00.003-06:00

I've posted a quick set of pictures from the Galapagos Islands on Flickr. Just a quick run through - there are tons more! I'm working on it!

I'm not dead! Really!

2010-06-25T10:34:00.003-06:00

Busy, busy, busy, though. I missed an entire month of posting. Oy. You must all think I've crawled under a rock or fled the country or something.

Well, I did sort of flee the country -- spent two weeks in Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands with our family (wow! just wow!), celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary, my birthday (for an undisclosed number of years), and have been helping my sister plan her wedding. Apparently posting to the interwebs fell by the wayside.

No worries, we're alive! I promise.

Am I nuts?

2010-05-28T00:45:00.005-06:00

Probably. I love doing counted cross stitch -- something about the precision, detail, and twiddly stitching really appeals to me; I find it calming, really (despite the fact that it makes the Adorable Husband twitch to watch me stitch).

I realized that I haven't stitched anything in almost two years. Not sure why - too much going on, not enough leisure time, always something else to do instead of plopping down for a bit of zen-like focus on a blank piece of fabric, a printed chart, and a photo of what it will eventually look like.

So I spent some time web-surfing and looking for what sorts of patterns are out there now. I've always like the huge charts from Mirabilia and the extremely detailed architectural charts that I've found. I tend to not like the "crafty" sort of charts that abound -- kittens and teddy bears and amish-style samplers aren't my style.

And then I discovered that, in the last few years the 'fine art' style of cross stitch has simply exploded. Scarlet Quince and Heaven and Earth Designs have page after page of absolutely stunning charts -- huge, detailed, multi-year projects. I'm in heaven. My wish list at both sites is embarassingly huge.

So, I've resolved to start a project - -and picked a piece designed by John Godward called 'Pompeiian Lady', which just leapt out at me on the site when I saw it. I ordered it immediately and expect it to arrive this weekend.

The chart that is. I still need to figure out what I'm going to stitch it on and collect the whole 'kit', which is at least part of the fun.

At my normal 'resolution', this thing is 22" x 47". I'm going to have to work smaller than I'm used to, or I won't be able to actually hang it anywhere, it will be too huge. 334,400 stitches.

I'm insane, aren't I?

And now I'm going to have to get the other charts for this artist from HaED, or risk them disappearing/being retired before I can finish. (hm, possibly a birthday gift? Must tell the Adorable Husband...)

Definitely insane. Possibly certifiable.

Balloooooooons!

2010-05-16T09:53:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was the Erie Town Fair, and there is usually a huge air balloon launch in the morning to kick off the festivities -- but Saturday dawned gray and cloudy, so no balloons.

Today, though, is gorgeous, and I was woken up by the hiss and pop of balloons heading over the house -- sometimes very, very close!.

Yes, it's done!

2010-05-16T09:50:00.001-06:00

The Adorable Husband reminded me this morning that I had not posted evidentiary pictures of the "finished' garage door trim job. Yes, it's done -- primed, waiting for the painters to come and do the rest of the trim, but it really did only take one day to get all the new trim planed and put up.

Ta-da!

Surprise!

2010-05-02T18:29:00.002-06:00

I woke up this morning, a lovely Sunday morning, to THIS....The Husband is dismantling the garage!

We're having the trim painted again this summer (dark colors + mile-high-city-sunshine = peeling paint) and as we looked around at the house, we realized that the trim on the garage -- just one corner, on the header over my garage door -- was a bit water damaged. Should be easy enough to replace, right?

So, the Adorable Husband got up early this morning to pull down the damaged piece and replace it.

Apparently it was a bit more troublesome than we imagined. Now there is a pile of red-painted ex-trim in the driveway, holes in the garage, and two carloads of new lumber.

I spent the afternoon helping him plane 2 x 8s into 1" x 6" headers and 2 x 6s into 1" x 4" frames. Seriously - nothing is nominal size lumber. It's all weird "exact" sizes that apparently don't exist at a regular Home Depot! Luckily the garage includes tools, including a planer. It is a most inefficient way to create eighteen bazillion cubic feet of sawdust, I promise!

The Adorable Husband is outside finishing up the caulking now, and I'm trying to snort out the sixty pounds of sawdust I inhaled. Not quite how I envisioned my Sunday!

Oooh, Retro!

2010-04-23T23:44:00.002-06:00

I totally forgot to post this, and I really should have!

The Adorable Husband wears Gargoyle sunglasses -- remember Terminator? -- and has for twenty years or so. He likes them, and hasn't found anything else that blocks enough light and that don't make him look like a deranged bug.

So he was up skiing with my nephew last month, and one of the lift operators thought they were pretty cool -- "Really neat, man -- totally retro!"

I don't think you can be considered fashionably "retro" if you have been wearing the style the whole time. I'm not sure what that is, exactly, but retro it ain't! The Adorable Husband disagrees, of course, and he's feeling quite fashionable and stylish.

Only 2166 Chickens

2010-04-23T12:54:00.004-06:00

Senate hopeful Sue Lowden’s plan for Healthcare reform is to barter for medical procedures. It's eminently mockable, not because the barter system is a bad idea (it's honestly not), but because she simply doesn't seem to grasp that the same people who don't have money for health care, have little to barter, and continues to repeat it. People bartered chickens for medical care becuase they couldn't afford to pay. That is not a solution to healthcare - bartering won't "Bring down prices in a hurry", unless, perhaps, you're a car dealer, it is a desperate, last-ditch attempt to get care and it turns medical care into a 'maybe you'll get it, maybe you won't" proposition. That's not acceptable.

Sue Lowden (R), the leading Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, recently articulated her vision of how the American health-care system should work. At a local candidate forum, Lowden, a former state senator and chair of the Nevada Republican Party, encouraged Nevadans to "go ahead and barter with your doctor." It would, she insisted, "get get prices down in a hurry."
"I'm telling you that this works," the Republican candidate explained. "You know, before we all started having health care, in the olden days, our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor. They would say, 'I'll paint your house.' I mean, that's the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I'm not backing down from that system."

I would point out that "Before we all started having health care", people died of simple things that we can now prevent, and people with easily treatable diseases got no treatment at all because they couldn't pay for it. It just wasn't an option. The reason why people paid with chickens was because they were broke. Not because it was some idyllic time when things were simpler. It was because it was a horrid time when there were more poor people and there was no social safety net.

But, I really posted this because the following website made me laugh. A lot.

Some enterprising person has put up the Sue Lowden Chicken for Checkups web page, which just make me laugh uproariously.

Double Standards

2010-04-23T10:02:00.005-06:00

Apparently bra- and panty-clad women prancing around in Victoria Secret ads are ok becuase the women are thin and have a-cup breasts. But try airing an ad for plus-sized lingerie, and the networks balk. Lane Bryant has a new Cacique lingerie ad that the networks didn't like, and apparently didn't want to air. The only reason I can see? Because the women aren't thin.

It appears that ABC and Fox have made the decision to define beauty for you by denying our new, groundbreaking Cacique commercial from airing freely on their networks.

ABC refused to show the commercial during “Dancing with the Stars” without restricting our airtime to the final moments of the show. Fox demanded excessive re-edits and rebuffed it three times before relenting to air it during the final 10 minutes of “American Idol,” but only after we threatened to pull the ad buy.

These are the same networks that run Victoria Secret ads. What was their complaint? "Too much cleavage". Well, yeah, when you look at real women and not coat-hangers and they tend to have breasts. Real women look like this -- far more than look like the airbrushed version of beauty that the fashion mags would have us believe. Talk about a double standard.

Cool Science Badges

2010-04-17T15:25:00.002-06:00

Just popping in to link to Cool Science Merit Badges.

"I work with way too much radioactivity, and yet still no discernable superpowers yet” is my favorite!

I can't believe you said that....

2010-04-05T22:46:00.003-06:00

I can't believe that they actually used the name. I can't. It's just too damn funny. I'm laughing so hard I nearly ruptured something. Yup. I'm twelve.

Duluth Trading Company Ballroom Jeans. Yup. Ball Room.

Unfamiliar Rules

2010-03-31T11:36:00.003-06:00

I've been trying to help my sister with her wedding planning--getting the guest list put together, figuring out when things have to happen, that sort of thing. She's got most of it in hand, and when she was out visiting, we picked invitations and the associated bits and pieces that are included (rsvp, maps, ceremony/reception cards, etc). They are shipping now and she's getting ready to start the long evenings of addressing the things.

We, as a culture, just don't have big formal parties very often - weddings are about it for most people. There are all sorts of weird rules for things that we simply don't know (and if you don't pay attention you can miss them entirely). I didn't have placecards at my wedding, because I had absolutely no idea that I was supposed to, for example. Placecards? When was the last time you saw those? It all worked out, and in terms of faux pas it was a pretty minor one, but as I went through the books with Nin about what to do and when to do it and how to address things and the rest, it struck me that we really have to learn a whole new set of rules.

Take the RSVP card that's included in nearly every wedding invitation you've ever seen. It's actually a no-no in really formal circles, but everyone finally surrendered to the reality that no one writes personalized letters of regrets or acceptance anymore and has them delivered on little silver platters. We don't do it - and the etiquette for weddings finally realized that if the average person wanted to know how many people were coming to the wedding, providing them with an easy way to tell you is important. Now people are arguing whether the postcard version of the response card (instead of the little card and envelope) are acceptable, and whether providing a website or email address to response to is 'tacky'. This is all new to most people.

Which was hammered home when I started trolling a few of the wedding websites and forums looking for some general tips. Every single one has a dozen brides asking how to explicitly ask for cash as wedding gifts, or how to invite one person and not another, or how to make it clear that no children are invited to the wedding.

The "no children" thing is a serious hot-button issue with a lot of people. Some view a wedding as a huge family event at which everyone should be there and all kids should be included. To them, not inviting their children is insulting and rude. Others view a wedding as a formal adult celebration and do not want to have a dozen children running around. Sometimes it's a financial issue, sometimes it's a preference - want kids, or don't want them at the reception, either option is ok. You're not rude for not inviting them, if that's what you want. If you want kids, great. I'm not judging one way or the other.

Nin is definitely inviting kids to the wedding. She and her fiance are in their thirties, all their friends have kids - it is what they want. So for her, the issue is moot.

But there are a ton of couples out there who are struggling with the problem of not wanting to invite kids to their wedding - they aren't set up for it, they can't afford it, they simply want an adults-only affair. But this is apparently very hard to communicate to today's wedding guests. Every single forum is filled with questions on how to explain to guests who return a response card + 3, or communicate through family members how excited their kids are to come to the wedding, and when told that they aren't going to be able to bring them, announce that they aren't going to attend, either.

The thing is, there really is a rule about this -- it's just that we're so unfamiliar with the etiquette of formal invitations that no one knows what it is anymore. It's simple: only the people NAMED on the invitation are invitied. Makes perfect logical sense, but there are a lot of people out there that think an invitation to Mr. and Mrs. John Smith automatically includes their three children and the dog. I think we all intuitively know this, but given the conversations I've been reading online, a lot of people don't want to accept it. It should be enough that the invitation is written out to the two adults, to inform them that they should plan for a babysitter, but that's not always the case. Every bride was bemoaning the fact that they had to call people on their list to clarify that no, Junior is not invited and we simply cannot accomodate him. Sorry.

I wonder if you asked people randomly whether they would assume their "and family" was invited to a party, if the invitation was addressed to "Mr and Mrs...". We simply aren't aware of what the subtle wording is supposed to mean anymore. Our society isn't geared to that uber-formal sort of lifestyle, so the whole wedding etiquette thing is a monstrously huge list of do's and don'ts that are confusing. No wonder the bridal industry makes a mint on etiquette books and wedding planners. Oy!

As I said, it's not an issue for Nin's wedding - they want, and are inviting, kids. Ok, so how does that work? Technically, you're not supposed to write "and family" on the invitation, if you're being formal (and let's be honest, this is faux-formal nowadays, since we simply don't do it very often) you write all the names on the inner envelope - that's how you know that little Susie and Jimmy are invited. There are entire books out there with examples of how to address wedding invitations. What about "and guest"? Nin's fiance pointed out that he always got invitations addressed to him "and guest" and taht was perfectly fine. We pointed out to him that if the person is in a long-term relationship (as most of their friends are) then you are obligated to find out what the 'and guest's' name is and write that on the invitation (and in fact, they should receive their own). He was confused about this (well, so were we sometimes..everyone is.)

But we get to dress up, drink champagne, and pretend we know exactly how this high-society thing works. And I'm sure we'll mess up something, somewhere. It will still be fun!

Semantics, again

2010-03-29T14:12:00.003-06:00

The christian militia group (calling themselves "Hutaree") was recently in the news -- its members were arrested for plotting to kill law enforcement personnel. I haven't really followed much of the story, except to wonder - why is this not being called what it is: terrorism. Is it because the group is white? Christian? American? What they were planning is the very definition of terorrism, and yet that word has yet to be applied to them by the media. I guess American's don't like the idea that there are native terrorists. Weapons of mass destruction? WTF?

According to the indictment, “The general concept of operations provided that the Hutaree would commit some violent act to draw the attention of law enforcement or government officials and which would prompt a response by law enforcement. Possible such acts which were discussed included killing a member of law enforcement after a traffic stop, killing a member of law enforcement and his or her family at home, ambushing a member of law enforcement in rural communities, luring a member of law enforcement with a false 911 emergency call and then killing him or her, and killing a member of law enforcement and then attacking the funeral procession with weapons of mass destruction.

After the attack, Hutaree members would retreat to one of several “rally points” to wage war against the government and be prepared to defend with “trip-wired and command detonated anti-personnel improvised explosive devices, ambushes, and prepared fighting positions,” the indictment says. That action, Hutaree believed, would serve as a catalyst for a more widespread uprising against the government, the indictment says.

Terrorists. C'mon, let's see it being reporting properly: these people are a dangerous cult, planning a terrorist attack.

Small but still there

2010-03-26T22:00:00.002-06:00

Even though I ate cheese and drank wine and avoided the treadmill for ten days (including having my sister and entourage at the house, wining and dining), when I finally ordered my bridesmaid dress for her wedding, it was a size smaller than I was wearing before.

And I feel better. That's the whole point, of course, but there is a slim chance (a slim one, but one there, nonetheless) that I might be able to wear a sleeveless dress in August and not be all freaked out about it.

And I've graduated to walking uphill on the treadmill, since walking without any incline doesn't get my heart rate up high enough anymore. Hah!

Eek. Long Absence

2010-03-24T09:10:00.002-06:00

Back after a long hiatus -- travel for work, spring break vacation with my sister, her son, and fiance, and now...tons of snow.

Seriously - a foot and a half, at least, since 5pm yesterday. Everything pretty much shut down - including I25 from Denver to Colorado Springs, and most of I70 west of the city. Schools closed, and all the foofaraw that accompany a "spring storm"

Tomorrow (thursday) is supposed to be in the fifties again. Gotta love spring!

Weather woes

2010-03-09T16:25:00.001-07:00

I arrived in Vegas this morning (spending the week on-site at my client) and it was *SNOWING*.

SNOW.

In Vegas. I supposed it is March, and weather is still wintery...but I was totally not expecting snow. And, I've been told it will be in the seventies later this week.

It's not all bad

2010-03-04T22:02:00.002-07:00

I just wanted to report that the Ongoing Treadmill Adventure seems to be working.

My butt is smaller. Not by much, but definitely measureably smaller. Hah!

We have BAD dogs

2010-03-04T20:30:00.002-07:00

Came home this evening, having been gone about two hours, and discover my driver's license, and all my credit cards, CHEWED UP on the floor.

They were on the kitchen counter. Berit (and we know it's her, we've caught her a few times) is counter surfing and apparently these looked good.

It's easy enough to get replacement cards, of course...but now I will have to stand in line at the DMV for how long? Last time I had to do anything there, it took three hours.

Bad, bad, BAD dogs.

How? Huh?

2010-02-26T15:06:00.004-07:00

My MIL sent me a link to this picture from the NYT. How, exactly, were the track marks in the snow made? Every time I think I figure it out, the fact that there aren't two wheeled cars trips me up. A trailer? Unicyclists? Just an axle? Photoshop?

HOW?

What's real?

2010-02-26T09:36:00.003-07:00

Half the time when I'm watching a movie, I can no longer reliably tell what is real and what is computer generated -- but I never realized how ubiquitous the green/blue screen is on television. (although why I should be surprised by this is beyond me, with lower budgets it makes perfect sense that they build backgrounds and such via computer.

But this is still pretty cool.

At it again

2010-02-24T16:21:00.003-07:00

The religious whackoloons are at it again in Utah. They have proposed legislation that would make miscarriage a criminal offense.

Utah is posed to become the first state in the U.S. to criminalize miscarriage and punish women for having or seeking an illegal abortion. Utah's "Criminal Miscarriage" law:

* expands the definition of illegal abortion to include miscarriages
* removes immunity protections for women who have or seek illegal abortions
* assumes women are "guilty of criminal homicide of an unborn child" if a pregnancy ends after "intentional, knowing, or reckless" behavior.

But even among states that punish illegal abortions, this "Criminal Miscarriage" law is unique. It doesn't punish individuals who perform illegal procedures; it punishes women.

It has a very minimal chance of passing, since it's vague enough that it would be impossible to actually enforce. Is riding a bike ocnsidered reckless? How about hiking? How about swimming? How about a job that exposes them to second hand smoke? Drinking coffee? Having sex? What other "controls" do they plan to put on women to ensure they fulfill their role as walking uterus?

They didn't think this one through, from a applicability perspective, but they sure as hell thought it through from a position of punishing women and forced pregnancy. These people hate women, there is no other possible way to interpret this. It is too grotesque for words.

And they are obivously ignorant of the fact that miscarriage is very, very common -- up to 40% of all conceptions miscarry (many of those fertlized eggs that never implant), and of the roughly 4 1/2 million pregnancies every year, half a million end in miscarriage, and another thirty thousand or so in stillbirth or infant death. These statistics include all women, not just those the Utah legislature seem to want to target -- the women who are "reckless" and intentionally do things that can cause a miscarriage. Not just the ones who "deserve" to go to jail because they got pregnant. Becuase, as we all know, a woman is just a container for a fetus, once she gets pregnant. Idiots.

Women may have to PROVE that the miscarriage they had was not 'criminal'. Think about that. Think about the woman you know who had a miscarriage (we all know a few)...dealing with the loss of a pregnancy which they most likely wanted and hoped for...and to be criminally investigated and forced to prove they didn't do anything "wrong". I'm so angry I'm having a hard time typing that.

The legislators in Utah really want their own particular version of morality to be enforced. Their version of morality is hateful and wrong and evil. Regardless of what side of the abortion issue you are on, this is beyond the pale.

Even better, they are now going to classify anything that causes a miscarriage as "illegal abortion", and, if you read the text of the bill, it eliminates any option for elective abortion. It is not only a ban on legal abortion except in very narrow circumstances, it criminalizes everything else. O

This law: - defines legal abortion as a procedure "carried out by a physician or through a substance used under the direction of a physician." Anything else that terminates a pregnancy is now defined as illegal abortion - including miscarriages.

This is the 21st century? Could have fooled me.

More at DailyKos

The full text of the bill is here.

TILT

2010-02-19T17:52:00.002-07:00

Strange thing I learned today (I so love the interwebs! I really do!)

The word "sibling" is not a naturally evolved English word but instead a modern revival of a lost Old English word generally meaning kins-person or relative rather than specifically referring to brothers and sisters.

This popped up from another blogger, who picked it out of a footnote from a book published in 1942:

Sibling is a coined word use by scientists for both brothers and sisters. The English language lacks such a word.

I find this astonishing.

Geeky Cooking

2010-02-16T14:29:00.002-07:00

I was browsing around for recipes and came across 'Cooking for Engineers', -- simple recipes, fully explained, and definitely written with the engineer in mind.

I am totally enamored of the big charts at the bottom of each recipe, though. They appeal to my geeky sense of process.

Berit, Again

2010-02-15T21:47:00.003-07:00

Well, we did follow-up bloodwork on the pink beastie, and her platelet count is so low that our vet advised us to not let her outside without supervision. This happened before Christmas (and for all we know, it has been a constant problem that we only managed to fix for the time she was on steroids. At any rate, she's back on steroids because her platelet count is 5,000. It's supposed to be somewhere between 140-170,000. Not good.

She seems to be fine, which is weird. At a count this low, she is at risk for spontaneous bleeding, which could be very dangerous. So, no romping outside with the blue beastie, and we're trying to keep her quiet and give the meds a chance to work. She rebounded really quickly last time, but we obviously didn't find the cause of the problem. It's an immuno-suppressive issue, at any rate, but all the tests came back as negative, so we don't know what is causing this. It's possible that a year of allergy shots messed up her immune system. Fun, en?

Not quite getting it

2010-02-15T20:27:00.005-07:00

This just made me laugh (and then cringe a bit). Methinks they don't really understand medicare or socialism at all. Tea-party FAIL.

Let's test them first

2010-02-15T09:10:00.002-07:00

Tom Tancredo (yes, I'm embarrassed to be from his state) wants to bring back literacy tests for voting. You know, the "literacy tests" that were used to bar certain people from voting. Rachel Maddow had the only possible response:

"But I want you to know first, that this is what it was like. You would head down to the courthouse to register to vote, if you dared. In order to register, you‘d face an exam. It was sometimes called a literacy test, but it wasn‘t testing to determine necessarily if you could read or write. If you were black, the test was designed purely to afford a legalistic veneer of justification for denying you your constitutional right to vote.

The questions weren‘t about ABCs. They were—they were questions like this one, from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted? Do you consider yourself qualified to vote in this country? Can you answer that question?

You want to hear it again? If a person is charged with treason—if a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?

Or how about this one from the same test: In what year did the Congress gain the right to prohibit the migration of persons to the states? Do you know the answer to that one?

Again, these are from Alabama‘s literacy test in 1965. It was applied selectively, of course, to black voters, to keep them from registering.

If you lived in Georgia in 1958, you would have faced questions like this one: Who is the solicitor general of the state judicial circuit in which you live and who is the judge of such circuit? If such circuit has more than one judge, name them all.

How did you do on that one? Or how about this one: What does the Constitution of Georgia provide regarding the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus?

If you wanted to vote in Georgia in 1958, those are the questions you would have to answer. But, of course, not everyone would face those questions. The board of registrars had the sole authority to determine who got asked which literacy test questions and whose answers to those questions rendered them ineligible to vote.

The idea was that black voters weren‘t being denied the right to vote based on race. That would be illegal. No, those voters just couldn‘t pass this literacy test.

This isn‘t the plot of some Kagzo (ph) Klansman gothic short story. This isn‘t a theoretical for first-year law students. This isn‘t some State Department report on some tin pot dictatorship halfway around the world that we can‘t pronounce.

This is American history. This is really, really recent American history—as in this lifetime for a lot of people American history.

And the opening night speech at the national tea party convention this weekend proposed bringing the literacy test for voting back. And that proposal got a warm round of applause

I suggest that the FIRST people to have to pass a "literacy test" should be the ones calling for it. Since they seem to be misinformed bigoted cranks absolutely unaware of history (or uncaring of it), it should be easy for them, right? Right?

I couldn't answer those questions. Could you?

Love Languages

2010-02-12T22:38:00.002-07:00

I've often read about love-languages on my SIL's blog, about the way that people express love and feel loved. I've never read the book, but a recent conversation with my sister about communication and expectations of marriage prompted me to google it and I found an online quick quiz to figure out what "type" you are -- do you value quality time or gifts or supportive words or acts of service as an expression of love? Would you rather get a gift, or have your spouse do laundry and pick up groceries on the way home? Would you rather be told how much you are appreciated, or hugged and snuggled?

I realized that I value quality time and acts of service as being meaningful to me -- filling my car with gas or stopping on the way home to pick up a loaf of bread make me feel loved and secure and appreciated. Bringing me flowers is nice, but I'd rather have the Adorable Husband come home an hour early. It would be difficult if we didn't realize what the other expected or wanted -- and it's definitely got to be difficult trying to figure out what those things are.

I may have to actually pick up the book. Hmph.

Antique Cars

2010-02-12T10:50:00.002-07:00

Watch the flickr slideshow carefully...absolutely fabulous!

Not only a great photographer, but.. oh, just watch!

I need a cape!

2010-02-09T19:53:00.002-07:00

I have discovered that I have a Superpower. Oh, nothing as exciting as leaping tall buildings or running faster than speeding bullets or invisibility or anything, oh, no.

Nope. My superpower is discovering (or causing, the jury's out on that one) weird and unpredictable problems in computer code, that no one else has seen before.

Every day for the last week, I've found something strange and inexplicable in the application that I'm building. Weird characters show up, things work and then they don't, data disappears at random...you name it, I've been dredging it up in my code.

Hmph. I'd rather be able to burst into flame or hurl lightning bolts.

Gradeschool moves

2010-02-07T15:38:00.002-07:00

Perhaps the ridiculous teleprompter sneering will stop, now. Whaddya, think?

It took this long?

2010-02-03T20:51:00.004-07:00

Everyone has heard the rather bizarre claim that 'vaccines cause autism', which has fostered an almost rabid anti-vaccine movement. It was based on a single study, which has been debunked thoroughly over the last few years as being invalid. Despite the claims of the anti-vac crowd, there is absolutely no, none, zero, zip, nada connection between autism and vaccines.

Well, the Lancet has finally completed disavowed the study and come out a report that the author of the study, Andrew Wakefield, falsified the data and manipulated medical records to make his study give specific results. The study is completely, utterly, wrong. The methodology and data aren't even valid. Wakefield is accused of unethical behavior, on top of it all.

Of course, the damage has already been done. People continue to believe the thoroughly disproven results. The study was flawed from the beginning, but it apparently said something that made True Believers out of a lot of people -- someone to blame, something to point at as a cause for autism. I can only imagine that for parents with children who are autistic, it was something to cling to. But for the thousands of people who refuse to vaccinate their kids? Hey, idiots -- herd immunity only works when 95% of the population is vaccinated...and this ridiculous campaign has dropped that to less than 80% in some areas. Measles is back the US because of this. It's likely the resurgence of Whooping Cough is probably related.

I'm just surprised that it took this long to come out formally against the paper, and sad that for most people, it probably won't make any difference.

Life Lesson Learned

2010-02-02T20:49:00.000-07:00

Do not, whilst walking merrily along on the treadmill listening to your ipod, lean down to fix your shoe.