A little perspective

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...

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...

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

How predictable

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup, still makes me giggle.

Добро пожаловать в Санкт-Петербурге

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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!