The Vikings

On Tuesday, Damion and I traveled into downtown Oslo and then took the ferry to Bygdoy, where we visited the Vikingskipshuset, or Viking Ship Museum. The Museum houses two of the world's best preserved Viking ships from the 9th century, which were found in burial mounds.

This is the Oseberg ship, which contained the remains of a Viking queen and her servant, as well as jewelry, weapons, cooking implements, animal carcasses and other needful items for the afterworld.
The ship was so well-preserved in its clay burial mound that you can still see the carvings:
The Oseberg ship was a luxury liner, for short trips, and sat very low on the water. The Gokstad ship, which was a burial chamber for a Viking chieftain, was less decorative, and intended for long voyages and pillaging:
This museum was fascinating. The artifacts recovered from the ships were incredible to look at, but I was blown away by the description of the Viking shipbuilders. They made incredibly sleek, fast ships which they could bring ashore to aid in all the raping and pillaging. Without plans. They made all of their ships without diagrams or measurements, but simply measured by eye.
Damion and I spent a long time in this museum, reading everything and looking at every artifact, because it was just so interesting. Then we left and walked to the Frammuseet, or Fram museum, to meet with Roberta and Claire. Claire had told us all about the Fram, which was used in explorations of both the North and South Poles.
We left the museum and drove home so Claire could get her music books, and then Roberta drove all four of us to Claire's school for her piano lesson, which Claire allowed us all to sit in on. Roberta dropped me and Damion off at the grocery store on the way home, and after dinner we sat at the dinner table and made up sandwiches in Norwegian lompe bread (sort of a tortilla, but made from potato) and packed a bag of snacks for our huge trip on Wednesday.

We played soccer with Kyle after dinner, but his final exams were looming, and he couldn't play with us as much as we all would have liked.

The best is to come...

Scream!

I had some sleeping issues in Norway, but they proved to be very helpful. I woke up at 3:30 Monday morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I went to the computer to do research about day trips to see the fjords, which are about 300 miles away from Oslo.

I had been getting a little anxious about the whole thing, because I hadn't been able to find anything online before we left the states except for hugely expensive five day cruises. At about 4:30 in the morning, I stumbled across something hiding in plain site in my guidebook: the "Norway in a Nutshell" tour, but when I tried to book online, the next available date was June 11. Three days after we returned to New York. In his review of the Nutshell tour, Rick Steves said that anyone who traveled to Norway and failed to see the fjords should have their passport revoked. I took that very seriously. It was too early in the morning for this disappointment. I went back to bed.

Later in the morning Roberta called the local Norwegian number, and we learned that we could book for the next day over the phone--and, if we took the tour on Wednesday, we would be able to reserve a sleeping car on the train home. Damion was enthused, so I booked the tickets and then did a happy dance, followed by several encores throughout the day.

In booking the all day tour for Wednesday, by Monday morning the rest of our time in Norway became fairly structured: we would have Monday and Tuesday to go to museums and wander around the city. Wednesday we would be gone all day and night, and we would return home very early Thursday morning. Claire's last soccer practice was Thursday evening, and Damion and I had promised to prepare dinner for the Macleod's. Friday we would leave for New York.

By late Monday morning Damion and I set out for the main Olso train station to pick up our tour tickets so that we would be prepared for Wednesday. That errand came off without a hitch, and we were feeling pretty confident about that, and about navigating ourselves all over the city on Saturday afternoon. We decided our next destination would be the Munchmuseet, or Edvard Munch museum, which was a bit outside the city center. Damion was all for walking, but it seemed too far to me. I wanted to take a bus. We saw one at the corner, and hopped on. And that, dear friends and family, is where things began to go downhill.

We knew from the guidebook that the 20 or the 60 buses would take us to the museum, but we didn't know what stop we were supposed to get off at, nor did we know what the museum looked like. Damion felt we should get off two stops sooner than we did; I felt the bus was going to loop around. No matter, we had maps! We began studying them as we passed a pretty young blonde woman pushing a stroller. (Norway is full of pretty young blonde women.)

"Excuse me," she called out to us. "Can I help you?" (I would like the New Yorkers reading this to take a moment to consider the likelihood of any of us calling out to tourists with maps who have already passed us, in order to offer our assistance. Yeah, me neither.)

We told the pretty blonde woman where we were headed, and she told us that the museum wasn't far, but if we had time, we could walk through two beautiful parks. Well, we had time, of course we had time. We headed for the parks. And though we are both excellent map readers, Damion and I could not find the way through park one to park two and the museum. We were both getting hungry, and crabby, and we kept going the wrong way, trying to sort it out, retracing our steps, getting hungrier, and not finding the damn musuem. There was tense silence. There was low-blood sugar induced irritability. As we wandered, I actually feared that we would encounter pretty blonde woman, and I would feel ashamed that we were lost and confused again, and after she was so much nicer than any New Yorker, even one like me, from Virginia.

After coming to the same T shaped intersection 2 times, the third time was the charm! as we had no other choice. We were so close! To food! To Munch! To The Scream which hadn't been stolen!

The Museum was fantastic, really. There was a documentary video in the basment on his life and art, and then the exhibition. The Scream:
Munch made four Screams; this one was oil, tempera, and pastels on cardboard. We went through the entire exhibition twice, then to the gift shop, where I got a book bag, and Damion bought postcards to create a Munch collage.

We left the museum in search of the No. 60 busstop nearest the museum. I saw our bus round a corner, and led us down the road.

"Are you sure this is the right way?"
"Absolutely. The bus just came from this direction."
"But why are we walking behind a building? Why are we passing dumpsters? We should go back."
"No, because right under that sign? With a bus on it? And a 60? And a bench? Is our stop."
"You're good."

And because I agreed that I was good, I had Damion pose with the busstop sign:
We sat, waited, and boarded, off to the city center, where we would head home for dinner. After all of the frustration of getting to the museum, we had found our bus quickly and easily. What a relief. We drove through intersections we had wandered through repeatedly, confusedly.

"Oh," said Damion, "we should have come this way. So now the bus is going to turn left."
The bus turned right.
"Huh," I said. I looked at the bus map, ticking off the stops as we made them. It wasn't a detailed map, and we made a few stops that weren't on it. The next one was.
"Um. Damion, I think we're going the wrong way."
"No."
"Yes. We are definitely going the wrong way." I was clutching the map now, and tracing our route as if staring at it would turn us around. The bus turned onto the highway.
"We didn't get on the highway to come here, did we?"
"No. And now we can't get off, because we can't just get off and cross the street and wait for the bus on the other side to come!"
"Well, when we get home--"
"When?! If! If we get home!"
And I continued freaking out as we traveled through some very interesting neighborhoods and waited at the bus station for the new bus driver to take over the route back to the city. I felt an overwhelming and wholly inappropriate sense of shame and embarrassment (see picture above, taken in a moment of gloating triumph) because I had been so sure this was the right bus.

(Sidenote: I realize that getting lost on public transport, especially in a foreign city, is practically compulsory. When I first moved to New York I had to find north and say "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" in order to figure out which way to walk everytime I got off the subway. (Sidesidenote: Okay. Sometimes I still do that. Leave me alone.))

Shannon is sad she put us on the bus to the outer reaches:


Damion laughingly forgives her:
Polar bears argue over which way to go. They're hungry and crabby too (I'm the bossy one on the left):

Morning breath:

The promised lake

This picture was taken at about 10:30pm on Saturday night. If you look toward the center, you can just make out the setting sun. This was the one thing I was most excited to experience in Norway, and it really is an experience. Having sunlight so early in the morning (beginning at about 3:30am when we were there) and so late at night completely changes your perception of how much time you have to accomplish the things you want. It means that a hike to a lake at 9pm isn't out of the question. It means that when Damion and I slept until 1pm after a long day trip, we still had time to go for a mini-hike, watch Claire's last soccer game, go grocery shopping, prepare and eat dinner with the Macleods, go for an hour and a half hike, eat dessert, and sit outside and enjoy the fading light at 11pm before we headed off to bed. The next picture was taken at 12:30am when I had some trouble sleeping. Even here you can still see the smallest hint of pink in the sky.

Damion and I had spoken of going biking, and Roberta wanted us to be familiar with the trail, so she, Claire, Damion and I set out to hike it on Sunday afternoon. Our destination was a huge beautiful lake. The next picture isn't our goal lake. It's just another beautiful lake on the way: Here are Claire and Roberta hiking on the trail. This was before we started ascending. It was about three miles to our destination, but we were stopping to take pictures, throw water on Claire, and just in general enjoy the walk. I took so many pictures, particularly as we started going up hill, but I won't post all of them here, as it'll get redundant. Just think: beautiful blue sky and lush greenery, again and again. Okay, I'll add just one more: I like this one because for some reason (certainly not the skill of the photographer, because I don't have any) the trees are blurry, so it looks like a Monet:



So we walked and walked, and made it to the promised lake, which was beautiful and cold. These Norwegian children are made of tougher stuff:

I started the first post after our arrival, so I'll go back a day now. Damion and I left New York on Thursday, May 31 at around 2pm and flew to Oslo via Reykjavik, arriving at the Macleod home at 8:30am Friday morning. To us it felt like 2:30am. Or like we were having our eyeballs sandpapered. Traveling east on an overnight flight meant we saw the sun set on our way to Iceland, landed there at 12am local time, and then saw it begin to rise only about an hour or so later:

Aunt Roberta picked us up at the Flytogget station and drove us to her home, where I in my delirium tried to pack several days worth of conversations into a few minutes, and peppered her with streams of disjointed questions from everything about Norway, her life, the kids, the house, her car, the weather (it was pouring) and the buying power of kroner, not waiting for complete answers before firing off another. Time for bed. I think we slept until 2pm or so that first day? Can't remember.

Our big job, the one I was really looking forward to, was Claire's birthday party that evening, with sixteen 8-year olds at her Harry Potter themed party. I'm sorry I don't have any pictures. Roberta sent them outside to play once the rain stopped, and Damion and I hid chocolate coins in the back yard. Then we went back upstairs, and while the kids hunted, we threw more coins out the window. Children behave exactly like ducks, geese, or pigeons in that scenario. I am also reminded of the tremendous and constant awareness of what's fair at that age: "She already won a prize. It's not fair" was heard, in variation, many times.

Damion and I stayed up as late as we could manage, then went back to bed. This was probably one of the nights I woke up at 4am. That happened a lot.

Here are some pictures of the house my aunt and uncle are renting:
The owners have been living in Paris for the past two years, because they're just that wealthy. Even after a week in this house, I still got disoriented every time I entered the foyer, turning the wrong way for the kitchen or the library. Some of the floors are heated, and the artwork on the walls...well, let's just say they're not posters.

Next up: The Munchmusseet and Damion and I walk in circles.

Back from Norway!

And I'm sad. My father has said in the past, "Don't be sad it's over, just be glad it happened." Wise, my dad. Like this guy:



Damion and I had a spectacular time (or as Dash says in "The Incredibles": "That was so totally awesome!" and what I said multiple times, leading to the title of this blog.)

Now formally:

Hello friends and family! We would like to tell you all about our trip and show you pictures. However, we would also like you to still be glad that you are our friends and family when we are done. I promise, only the best, the creme de le creme, the pictures with stories, with meaning, with depth, with hope for the world:


Me, Damion, four feet and a penis.

These pictures were taken in Vigeland Sculpture Park in Olso. The sculpture is a man holding two children the way Damion is holding me, but the effect has been somewhat lost. We couldn't take another as my costar complained about picking me up again, his back, blah blah blah. What a diva.

We had better luck with other sculptures:

Claire, Damion and I imitate the running people.

I put Damion's back in jeopardy again:


It was Claire who informed me of the meaning of this sculpture. As all of the sculptures represent the human condition, and The Monolith (Monolitten) is located at the end of the park, we arrive at death (click to see how cool):

Here's Claire as we entered the park. It was June 2, her 8th birthday. But you can tell that just by looking at her:

Next is a close up of the view behind Claire.

Here are me and Damion before I broke his back:


Awww!

And Damion, Mark, and Claire looking cool:

This was one of my most favorite days in Norway, and it was only our first full day. We visited the Macleod's beautiful new apartment, then walked through their neighborhood, a street fair, and then on to Frogner park and the sculptures. The weather was perfect, and afterwards we sat in the shade and snacked. Then the training wheels came off, as we agreed to meet the Macleods in Grunnelacken for Claire's birthday pizza dinner, and Damion and I navigated our way around the city on foot, frequently consulting our street map. We walked all over, didn't get lost (wait til Monday!) and made it to the meeting place.

After dinner, I faded quickly, but Damion had energy, which is a complete reversal of our sleep cycles in New York (since I work overnights, I go to bed around 1am; he's tired at 10pm.) He and Claire woke me up from my mini-nap (which, though at 9 something, was still in beautiful daylight) but I didn't last long.

More to come...