Norway: Part 1

Cynthia: So..finally the Norway photos are up! Serves me right for being so trigger happy and having to sort through 550 photos and edit the good ones to perfection, and then spend hours struggling to upload them through this incredibly annoying blogger which is not very photo upload friendly at all, I have to say. Anyways, here goes.. I've started the post

Sarah: ... and I finished it. Enjoy!

Daniela, Claudia, Martina and I boarded the Scandinavian Princess from Copenhagen at 5pm one afternoon to sail North towards Oslo. A 17 hour journey on a party cruise..woohoo..

Here we are partying in our tiny tiny cabin

Arriving in Oslo on a Saturday morning, we trudged from the port to our hostel through the bare and silent streets of the city and met Scanrail Sarah.

An interpretation of "The Scream"

Some more Munch to scream about, with less clothing

The smoked salmon is better in Norway!

Clearly they've let the place go to the dogs in Oslo...

Ski Jump, built for the 1952 Oslo Olympic Games

Immaturity Rocks...teeheehee...

Norway: Home of the Troll!

Live street art is so in these days..Daniela and Martina taking a break in Oslo

Soup is where it's at in Norway, and it's mostly fish soup (pictured here, in Oslo). Though we had reindeer soup with berries in Bergen!

You can go crazy and make your own cappuccino in Norwegian 7-Eleven stores!! Less caramel syrup is not more! We walked with our coffees down the main strip to the harbour on Saturday night and checked out Grande Cafe through its beautiful big windows - where Ibsen and Munch used to hang out, but maybe not together?

We turned in early after sampling some of the bad techno in the clubs from the street and remembering what Lonely Planet said about dress codes in Oslo.

Our hostel was an army facility, so there were men in camouflage at the next table at breakfast and our room was new and clean!

We took a beautiful red Norwegian train from Oslo to Bergen on Sunday morning. It was clean and quiet, until we realised we were in the compartment which allows dogs and five got on all at once, which was not so nice actually! But the scenery was great!

We arrived in Bergen and, of course, it was raining, but our YMCA was in the corner of a small square looking out to the fish markets and the harbour. The square itself was enclosed by all the major Scandinavian banks, with a copper statute of a man with longish hair - maybe Grieg or Bull - I didn't check because of the rain and forgot later.

We went crazy at the fish market and even made prawn risotto. Claudia and I debated whether to take off the shells, and she asked this scruffy looking guy also in the kitchen what he thought, to settle the dispute. He settled it, but, of course, I unsuccessfully argued that he was not an appropriate consultant as he was Israeli and had never seen a prawn with a head on it before. Bah!

In the evening, when we discovered that we couldn't drink our Malibu in the hostel, we took some tropical fruit juice, coke, yellow paper cups and cookies to the harbour and stood under a clear plastic tent constructed for the fish market. We drank and, oddly enough when I think of it now, sang songs, including "American Pie", the Italian, Swiss and Australian national anthems, "Losing my Religion" and "Like a Virgin", which went well together I thought. A Norwegian guy appeared, claiming that he was not Norwegian, but from Bergen, "the most beautiful city in the world. He told us "when God made Bergen, he said: 'I will make it the most beautiful city in the world. And so, I will wash it every day."

And so it rains 274 days in the year, on average...

For those who don't know, Bergen is Norway's main university town, and used to be the capital in the 12th and 13th centuries. It has lots of great cafes and bars. This one was called Legal - we had to check it out! The photo doesn't do the place justice (haha) - it had this most amazing red decor and lighting that was very 1960s English rock, complete with a nice-looking pseudo-intellectual crowd... It had a few too many bare-breasted she-devils painted on the walls, and the coffee was bitter, but I liked it.

We took the Flam railway - through the fog, unfortunately, but I think it added more than it took away

Can you make out a blue nymph with long blonde hair? Random, isn't it? That's what we thought.

The Flam stopped at a waterfall for 5 minutes and almost everybody got out. Some sort of gypsy violin music and singing began, and then out of the rock came this woman with a long blonde wig, who was twirling to the music, round and round. Another appeared with the same blonde wig and blue dress, but it looked more like a man to me, and they danced, to the amusement of those of us who aren't used to this sort of thing, until the music stopped. The "nymphs" doubled over and disappeared under the waterfall, ending their performance as mysteriously as they had begun it...

Claudia and I spent a relaxed afternoon in Bergen traipsing from closed church to closed church (they are open 11-12.30pm) remarking how they never close in Italy, and nearly tried a self-serve tanning salon but freaked out instead. We even found the impressive law faculty of Bergen University, perched on a hill overlooking a shipping port. A Palestinian candle-maker gave Claudia a 50% discount because she reminded him of an old Italian girlfriend - the poor guy had to look away with tears in his eyes, he was so moved by her beauty! "I am italian, too!" I said. He wasn't so moved, but he gave me a terracotta model of a troll... (!)

I thought Oslo rather small and nondescript on first glance, but I really enjoyed exploring the streets further and finding my Nick Cave poster from 1982 from this very cool Hi-Fidelity style record/second-hand book store. The sculpture garden, also, was beautiful. Unfortunately my photos of that are on a disposable.

The wealth of the people was far more conspicuous then it is in Denmark - maybe because of the taxes on luxuries and cars here. In Oslo I noticed lots more blondes in Prada sunglasses and BMWs, and the sloping, treelined streets with larger houses made it look far more uppity than flat, utilitarian Copenhagen with its grid pattern streets.

A very cool trip - more photos from Norway coming soon!