a bit over the top: 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: