Summer Time

Hey all. Though it doesn’t seem like it to me, my summer travels are almost half over. Here’s a quick summary of the trip thus far, and a look forward to my plans for the next month.

On Tuesday June 9th my parents and my sister, Solvejg, flew over for a visit to Trondheim! Bjorn stayed home to work for the summer. They stayed for three days, seeing what I had been up to over the semester, and doing some hiking in Bymarka, which I didn’t do enough of on my own. We then traveled south by rental car, visiting relatives in Soknedal and exploring the mountains and glaciers of the Luster Fjord in southern Norway (see the map). From Oslo we flew to Copenhagen, Denmark, rented another car, and drove south to Nakskov, Lolland, where our family spent a semester in 2001. There we visited many relatives and friends, and did some biking and sea kayaking. After that we flew from Copenhagen to Paris and worked our way down through France by car. Our destinations were Provence, the Riviera, and Chamonix, in the French Alps.

It was great to travel with family, as everything had already been planned out and I was able to just tag along. We did some great hiking, in the fjords of Norway and the alps of France, as well as some swimming in the Riviera. Last Tuesday, the 30th, my family drove back north to Paris and a flight home, dropping me in Geneva, Switzerland on the way. Thus begin my solo travels. From Geneva I took a combination of train, bus, and cable car to Gimmelwald, a tiny village up in the Swiss Alps. Which brings us to today.

The future is less certain than the past, but I do have a broad plan for the next five weeks. I’ll be in Switzerland for about a week, relaxing and hiking in the mountains, and then I’ll head south west to Spain. The European Juggling Convention takes place in Vitoria, Spain from the 4th to the 12th, and I’ll be there from the 9th on, seeing some amazing jugglers, and hopefully learning a lot. From there I’ll make an arc back up to Norway, stopping in Barcelona and Austria to visit friends, and Italy and Germany for sightseeing. On the 29th of July there is a festival in Stiklestad, just north of Trondheim, celebrating St. Olaf’s death there in battle. My relatives who live in the area have tickets, and so I’ll make it back up to Norway by then to see them and go to the festival. My flight leaves from Trondheim on the 5th of August, so for the remaining week I hope to keep going north, to Tromsø and the Lofoten islands, before returning for the plane ride home.

I’m not sure I will be writing any more on my trip, so have a wonderful summer wherever you are. I look forward to exchanging stories and photos when I get back. Until then, ha det godt!

hilsen Trygve

 

Great Britain Photos

I just added a handful of photos from my recent trip. Enjoy!

Photos

 

One Month

I was kind of afraid to look at the date of my last post when I went to write this. I guess my ideal of a post a week never really happened. Sorry. Now here we are at the end. It is, as always, a beginning as well as an end, but right now I’m feeling the later more sharply. A lot has happened in a month, as usual more than can be told in a short blog post. But we must try!

Last time I was starting the final week of classes. Classes here finished on the fifth of May, with the following week and a half devoted to reading. It’s a strange concept coming from St. Olaf where we get a day to read, and I often spend that playing frisbee! They take their reading days very seriously here, though, and ought to, since the exams last 4 hours and count for 100% of one’s grade. This arrangement does encourage many to do little during the semester and then fill their short-term memory in time for the test. I can’t say I didn’t take advantage of this,  allowing myself to experience more and study less during the semester than I am used to. I had exams on the 18th and 19th of May, and the 2nd and 3rd of June. The 15th and 16th were both math, and I spent most of the time beforehand studying.

There was, however, a small break for festivities on the 17th. For those who aren’t aware, the seventeenth of May is Norway’s national holiday (Did you know it is also Ireland’s Famine Memorial day?). For details I leave you to Wikipedia. It does a much better job than I would, non scholarly though it may be. What I can tell you is that the seventeenth is huge in Norway, rivaling (if not beating flat out) our July celebrations. The main event is a huge parade (bigger still if you get to Oslo, but Trondheim’s was pretty impressive). Mostly this consists of any and every organization in town which feels like walking around. There are also several marching bands, but no firetrucks or floats. Everyone with a bunad (Norway’s national dress. Again, check Wikipedia for details (CAUTION: this article does not cite sources! Don’t use it in your English paper.) wears one, otherwise men all wear black suits and ties, and women, well, it seems all the women have bunads. Together with much flag waving this makes for a very colorful and beautiful event. Virtually the whole city turns out in their finest, if not to walk in the parade, then to line the streets watching and cheering. Before the parade I also went to church in the cathedral, where we sang the national anthem. After the parade we wandered around town a bit, admiring everyone in their finery, though I did sneak home in the afternoon for some studying, as I had an exam at 9 o’clock sharp the next morning.

You might have noticed that there was a 14 day gap in between my finals. I noticed too! Fourteen days seemed like an awfully long time to study, so I planned a 10 day trip to Great Britain in between. There’s no time for details, but the basic route was London, Edinburgh, Pitlochry (highlands), Stirling, Manchester, Peak District (national park – hills and dales), London. Check out the map for the locations of all these places. Highlights included couch surfing in Edinburgh, catching an annual Scottish highland games festival, hiking – quite literally – over hill, over dale, and hearing the St. Olaf choir sing Moses Hogan in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. Oh, and seeing A comedy of Errors in the Globe Theater for 5 quid. It was a great trip, and fun to see so many familiar faces in the choir that I hadn’t seen in so long.

It was very hard, though, to come back to the grindstone for three days. I got back on a Sunday morning, and promptly commenced studying for physics (Classical Mechanics) whose exam was the following Tuesday. Then on Wednesday I had an oral exam for literature history, in Norwegian. It went quite well, probably the best of all my subjects this semester. Then I breathed. Actually I did a good bit of sleeping in, because, funny thing, it’s hard to go to bed at night when it’s still light at one in the morning, and you don’t have anything to do the next day. Right now it’s 10:20 and the sky has just barely started to color in preparation for a sunset. OK, now it’s 12:06, and the sky is still blushed from the sun. Though the birds have no intention of sleeping, I do. I hope to post some pictures of Great Britain tomorrow. Trust all is well.

 

Ελλάδα

That’s Greek for Greece! I’m not sure when I’ll finish this, but I’m tired of slogging through special relativity, and writing seemed like a pretty good alternative. This, then, is the tale of my spring break travels.

In short, I and a friend spent the week before Easter in Greece, split between Athens and the island Naxos. My travel companion was Chenoa Albertson, who many of you know. For those who don’t, she’s a friend and fellow art major from St. Olaf. She has also been taking Norwegian classes, and is spending the semester in Bø, just west of Oslo (See the map). The motivation was a desire for warm weather, a free week, and cheap flight tickets!

Vigeland Park Monolith

I left Trondheim the evening of the 19th of March, a Thursday, and arrived by bus in Oslo on Friday morning. It was actually a little more exciting than that. I was confused about the bus’s departure time (11 pm), and thought I had an extra half hour and a bus ride down to the station. Around 10:20 I realized my mistake, at which point I began hurriedly packing. I set a PR for packing time of 20 minutes, and then flew through the rain and dark on my bike down to the station. I arrived at the station at 10 til, found the bus at 5 til, and we left at 11. Perfect, right? This episode began an exciting string of close calls with transportation which continued throughout the trip.

Chenoa took the train over, and we met at Vigeland sculpture park. We explored the park for a bit and then took the train an hour south to the Rygge Airport. We were planning to take a buss which would have gotten us there in plenty of time, but we missed it by three minutes, and so time was a little tight. Lucky for us the airport was neither big nor crowded, and security was a breeze.

Three hours later we were in Greece! The sun set somewhere around the time we landed, so our first views of the city were by night. We took a half hour bus from the airport into the center of bustling Athens – prettier at night than during the day, and then walked about an hour north up to our hostel. Our hostel was on a quiet side street, a bit removed from the noise, but still solidly within the center of Athens. We spent the following two days, three nights in Athens in three main pursuits: seeing a bunch of old buildings,

Acropolis and Us

wandering around parks,

Oranges

and eating.

Dinner on a balcony in the Plaka

All three were wonderful. Especially the food. Greek food is full of spices, intriguing seafood, and potent cheeses. A combination of somewhat bland Norwegian fare, three months of cooking for myself, and affordable prices didn’t hurt either.

After a couple days in the city we were ready for peace and quiet. We chose the island of Naxos for its hiking, and for being somewhat less accessible than Paros, and less touristy than Santorini. All three are destinations on my ideal three week tour of Greece (I planned it concurrently, as I read about all the places we just didn’t have time to see). The ferry left at 7:25 am, so we and 10 others from the hostel ordered taxis for 6:15 am. The first came soon enough, but the other two took their time, and so we wasted no time sitting around waiting for the ferry to leave. The ride took five hours, during which we caught up on sleep, and then tried some fast food squid.

Pension Irene II

Our time on Naxos was centered around the main town called, simply enough, Naxos. We stayed four nights in a beautiful pension close to the center of town where we had a kitchenette, bathroom, and balcony, for less than the hostel in Athens! Irene, the landlady, was an archetypal Greek grandma with a very limited English vocabulary. She could understand us just fine, but used single words, smiles, and gestures to get her point across. We had wonderful weather in Athens, but that ended the day of our ferry trip with a three day stretch of clouds and periodic showers. The weather gave us an excuse to sleep in a bit, though we didn’t let it prevent us from exploring. Our first full day we climbed up to a peak above the town to get a view.

The town as seen from the hills

Finally, on our last day on the island, we got some sun. In the morning we rented bikes and set off to explore the interior (see our route on the map). We biked through a couple cute little villages, and a lot of beautiful olive groves. Part of the way was on roads of varying development, but we also did some mountain biking, following hiking trails, which was more exciting. My favorite stop was an ancient abandoned monastery we came across. There was no sign, no fence, no tourist establishment, just some old stone walls to explore. The overgrown olive orchard nearby was equally beautiful.

Our ferry back – another close call – gave us a few hours in Athens before our flight. We spent the time shopping and eating. Of particular interest was a stop at the poet sandal maker for handmade Greek leather sandals. The tiny shop used to be run by Melissinos, who would give away copies of his poems along with his sandals. It is now run by his son, an artist and playwright, who went to school in the states and speaks the best English we heard. It was a bit of a surprise stepping from a street with merchants who have learned just the limited vocabulary necessary for attracting tourists into a shop who’s clearly Greek owner sounds like an American.

The rest of the trip was just a bunch of travel – bus to airport, flight to Rygge, bus to Oslo, train to Bø. I spent a couple days over Easter at Chenoa’s place in Bø. This entailed several more adventures – adventures for another story. Greece was adventure filled enough, and a great start to my travels in Europe. It left me excited for the summer, during which I will be exploring western Europe by rail and backpack. Plans are starting to come together, though there is still much to do. Right now I’m planning a ten day trip to Great Britain, in between finals. Yeah, I have actually been doing some work here. Three more days of classes though, then finals, and then we’re done! Only five more weeks in Norway. Crazy.

 

Spring Break Photos

Guess where I was over spring break? Greece! Chenoa (A friend from St. Olaf, studying in a different town in Norway) and I met up in Oslo and flew down to Athens for a week of warmth, old buildings, and the ocean. I hope to provide a full story soon, but until then, here’s some pictures from the trip – Photos. Sorry, I know the gallery on this site isn’t ideal. If I had the time, I’d write my own, but then I don’t even have time to post pictures. Also, here’s a map of some of the places we went to on our trip – Greece. I’ll explain later, but I should really go to class. It’s Coding Theory, and my last class in that subject! My, how time flies.

 

Iglbu

Hello again!

This whole blog thing is harder than I thought. I guess it has not been very high on my priority list, and I can always find something else to do which seems more demanding. I will try to bump it up a few notches on the list. The following was started just over a month ago (eek!), and is way overdue. Here it is, with a second half and some comments.

Sorry, you’re not getting the second half of Wednesday the 25th.  That day seems like so long ago. But there are other events, from even further back, that demand attention, namely Iglbu (There are also much more recent items of note, but I’m trying for a minimum of anachronisms, to avoid confusion). As you might have deduced from the photos or the map, Iglbu is a cabin, and was the destination of my second cabin trip. It was just over a month ago (edit: two months ago!), from the 13th to the 15th of February, but looking back it has been the single most exciting and enjoyable thing I’ve done here (second to Greece, now), so I guess I ought to tell you about it.

Even on the other side of the pond, I have found that many things are just the same as back home. One of these is juggling club. Being an avid juggler, I was very excited to see that there was an official juggling club here. I have been attending the weekly meetings, and have confirmed my suspicions that juggling, like math, transcends languages and cultures. Within a half hour at the first meeting I was passing seven clubs with a Norwegian juggler, and finding out that we were familiar with the exact same techniques, patterns, and tricks. Of course not everything is the same, and there has been a lot of exchanging of ideas as well. Perhaps because of juggling’s international nature, the juggling club attracts a lot of international students. Attendance usually consists of about half Norwegians, half internationals, and so it has been a great place to meet both the locals and the world.

Cabin trips are certainly the thing to do with a large group of people in Trondheim in the winter, and the juggling club is no exception. The juggling club, I think, was more of an excuse than a motivation. We didn’t juggle at all on the trip, but then that wasn’t really the purpose. This time there were several differences from my first trip with my international friends. The biggest was that we had experience. Or at least, some of us did. One girl in particular is a member of the group which maintains the cabins, and has gone on upwards of 70 cabin trips! She and some of the others had their favorites, and so we ended up with one a bit smaller and more remote than last time. Given that it had also snowed quite a bit since my last trip, this meant that skis were a necessity. Thankfully I was able to borrow a pair from Anders, one of the Norwegians in the club.

The group

There were ten on the trip. Four were Norwegian, three German, two French, and an American. We met on Friday afternoon, right after my math class, and took the bus an hour and a half south to Soknedal (Coincidentaly, relatives of mine also live in Soknedal. I didn’t see them on this trip, though I hope to meet up with them at some point). From there we set out on skis. The first bit was mostly on country roads, but after about a half hour we turned off the road into the woods. There was a clear path through the trees for most of the way, but no one had been through recently, and so we made our own trail. This was still February, and we didn’t get on the bus until 4:30, so it was quite dark by the time we started skiing. It wasn’t too hard to follow the person in front, though, and the blue-gray snow, black trees, and shadowy mountains in the background made the whole trip somewhat mystical. The darkness did cause some exciting parts when the trail took a turn downhill. In the middle of the night, the snow’s shadows and highlights were replaced with a monotone blue-gray blanket that gave us no hint of small (or big) bumps in the hill (You just have to let go and hang on, if that makes sense. Kind of like a rollercoaster). Fortunately there were only a few of these, as the trail was mostly uphill. The trip took nearly 4 hours, with occasional short stops for refreshments. By the end we would have welcomed an “unfortunate” downhill as it was close to ten, and we were exhausted. The exhaustion helped with the cold, though, which was fortunate because the cabin was of course not warm when we got there. Since it was small, it didn’t take long to heat up after we got a fire started in the woodburning stove. We then started dinner – chicken and rice – and ate a midnight supper.

The mountain we climbed

Saturday we did what one always does on cabin trips – find the nearest (or highest) mountain, and get on top of it! In our case the nearest wasn’t the highest, so we went for the highest. It was a beautiful day, and we didn’t have packs anymore, so the climb wasn’t too bad (I’ve also had two months to forget about the hard parts). It did provide a demonstration and quite effective advertisement for modern technology. Several in our group had ski skins – a strip of fabric with a tooth in it that attaches to the bottom of one’s ski. They only cause a little friction going downhill, and uphill they prevent nearly all backward motion. This alows fortunate users to walk straight up the mountain. The less fortunate must resort to zigzagging and herringboning, as Anders is demonstrating so beautifully to the right. He makes it look easy.

Herringbone

At the top we got stunning views of mountains, trees, and snow – no sign of civilization except for a few other cabins. We didn’t linger at the top, though, because the wind whips across the peaks making it feel like the tundra (Not that I would know. I’ll add it to my travel wish-list). On the way down we learned that cross-country skis are made for going across country, downhill skis are made for going downhill. It’s very hard to stop and turn when descending on cross-country skis. Like the previous night, you sometimes just have to let go and hang on, though these slopes were significantly larger. There was a lot of falling, and a lot of zigzagging.

View from the mountain

When we got back we carried water from a mountain stream for drinking and washing. We had dinner at a more normal time that night, and then sat around the table playing games, singing songs, and chatting. There was also chocolate fondue for dessert, courtesy of our French cook. There are song books at all of the cabins, which contain a delightful mixture of traditional Norwegian campfire and pop songs, as well as a lot of well known American hits.

On Sunday we went part way up the mountain again before skiing back to the bus stop. The way back was nearly all downhill, and took approximately a third of the time. On the bus we all sat in the back, and our laughter, remnants from the previous night’s singing, and perhaps some of the perfume of a two day cabin trip gave us plenty of room to relax.