Well, when we left off last time I had just given you a fairly uninspired account of the first leg of the trip. I'll try to make it a bit more interesting now as we progress down to Oslo on the famous Bergen-Oslo railroad.

As promised earlier I will now bring you an hilarious story about two Norwegian sailors:
While in retrospect it was most likely a had-to-be-there moment, these two were just so funny, especially the one on the left there. They got on the train in Bergen with two massive bags of food, drinks and snus and proceded to alternate eating and napping, eating and napping, for the next 8 hours. Like kittens. Snooze, and then out would come a litre of chocolate milk and some pasta salad, then snooze again. I guess protecting their nation, in their little matchy shirts (too cute for the armed forces, surely?!), really takes its toll.
And I can tell you now, getting a photo was not as easy as you might assume: the one on the right kept waking up just as I would take the lens cap off, and I'd have to pretend I was taking photos of scenery...

Which brings me then to the next part of the story, which is the Bergen-Oslo railway itself. I remember reading in some guidebook a comment that went along the lines, "this trip will ruin all other train journeys for you". And really, it was pretty amazing. As we went from west to east, at times it almost felt like the Arctic Circle again- snow, ice, mountain peaks. And then suddenly lush greenery and massive lakes, all in one day of travel. If only I'd been able to work out how to get the blind back up on the window after pulling it down very far, not far out of Bergen (my ongoing attempts to get it back up caused some amount of amusement for navy boy on the right, but he was too polite to actually laugh out loud).



On to Oslo then, where the weather turned from not so nice, to incredibly rotten. Good thing Mum had held on to her emergency raincoat from Stockholm. Yes, the bright blue garbage-bag-type one with "SVERIGE" printed in bright yellow. Moving on.

I've been holding out all year for a trip to the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy, mainly because I'm a nerdy nerdy geek geek, but it was worth it.

I really can't get over how well these ships are preserved, or the work that must have gone into their restoration, because they were pretty amazing. Even the Tune, which is really just a skeleton now, still has some intact ribs giving you some idea of just how strong these karv, clinker built oak ships must have been. In terms of detail the Oseberg was really beautiful, but for the sheer size and technical skill involved the Gokstad was mind blowing.




Also at Bygdøy is the Fram Museum, we just peered through the windows, but it probably would have been quite interesting. The Fram ("forward" in Norwegian) was used by Roald Amundsen and others for both the Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. It makes the claim of being the strongest ship in the world, which I thought was a fairly broad statement, because surely, if it's really strong, they should still be using it?... But actually, make that the strongest wooden ship in the world and you have me pretty impressed. The idea was that it would freeze into the ice sheet and then be carried with the ocean current, and because of the shape of the hull it would resist the pressure of the ice by sort of sitting on top of it. Clearly I'm no naval engineer, but you get my drift *baboom ching*.

We caught the ferry back across the harbour to Aker Brygge and spent the afternoon wandering around looking for the polar bear statue I posed on many months back (we didn't find him, and looking back at those photos, I think it's because we were looking in the wrong place...) while the rain held off.

Whoosh, this is getting to be a long post so I'll do the rest of Oslo in point form:

-Vigeland Park: more photos on Flickr. Too lazy to add commentary here.

-National Gallery: Picasso, Monet, Manet, Rodin, JC Dahl, Munch (saw Scream and Madonna, got in while they weren't stolen, though they were bolted behind very thick glass)
-Coffee in the nice bread shop on Karl Johans Gate: never realised they had seats in the back and that you can see down into the basement bakery; the bread comes up to shop level in little baskets that move along the roof.
-Ferry to Denmark: very civilised, had cocktails with One Eyed Mickey in the lounge bar (a Prince of Norway..mmn), and at some point acquired more chins than I remember previously having (see photo and you'll see what I mean)

saw Norway and Sweden at the same time

pilfered supplies

marvelled that you can really fit 145 people in one of those life boats, got alarmed by the amount of boat-rockage going on late in the evening, read evacuation plan, freaked self out..went to bed.




Well, Demark and the rest of Sweden can wait. I had planned to write about them tonight but that's not going to happen now since I'm going to Oslo tomorrow and have to wake up before 6.30am, which is about 12 hours earlier than I've been waking up this week. Must pack and do all types of panicky last minute things because I'm going to Milan from Oslo and therefore must remember all kinds of important things- documents, clothes, argh! it's all too much!

It's probably easier if I just give you the sort of general overview of JM and my
Scandic adventures. But I may get carried away and lapse into story telling before the end of this post anyway. We'll see how it goes.

I've made another Flickr account because I maxed out the free capacity of the other one, and I'm cheap, therefore will not upgrade to pro anytime soon. All the trip photos are here, but I'll give you a taster right now.

So, come with me and I will take you on a whirlwind tour of Scandinavia.


We started in Stockholm by watching the changing of the guard with about a thousand million other people (yes, I have already seen it twice before, but JM was a newbie and anyway, you know how I like a boy in uniform...), and wandering through Gamla Stan. Due to the torrential downpour and the fact that JM left her raincoat at my house and I left mine in our luggage locker, we were forced to purchase two bright blue garbage bags emblazoned on the front with three yellow crowns, and on the back with SVERIGE. JM then proceded to wear hers for the rest of the trip. But I digress.
Like I say, I like a boy in uniform..I did try and ask to take a photo in Swedish, and was understood, but had to lapse back into English because they seemed a little bemused at the thought that I actually wanted to take a photo. Also, there was a much better looking one nearby, but I could hardly play swappy-changey based soley on looks with people carrying big fat guns. Sigh.


From Stockholm we caught a ferry to Helsinki, and enjoyed the only day of our trip untouched by rain by snoozing on a beach (fully clothed, although the same can't be said for a old saggy Finnish man. It's a cultural thing I guess). The ferry out of Stockholm was actually really beautiful because you sail out through the Stockholm Archipelago into the Baltic.
In Helsinki, we basically spent our time wandering around on foot seeing some sights, sunning on a beach, and drinking coffee, but I already covered this a little in my earlier post.


From Helsinki we had a 4.30am start to get to Bergen. In literal terms, the flight is under two hours, but because we weren't able to book an early connecting flight in Oslo, we spent six hours getting very well acquainted with Oslo Gardemoen airport. Very well acquainted indeed.

On to Bergen, where we were met at the airport by our CouchSurfing host, the wonderfully animated Per, who gave us a lift to his aparment, instructions for buses, directions for shopping, and other incredibly helpful stuff.
He took us on what was possibly the scariest, but most enjoyable, car ride of my life with his partner Elisabeth. We spun up to the top of a few mountains, took photos, reversed extremely fast down a winding one way street, and then went back to the flat for sushi.

Also in Bergen we did (on the advise of Robert a long time ago) a fjord boat tour through Hardangerfjord which was fairly spectacular. We also made a new Japanese friend on the tour (from Yokohama) after I started chatting to her in the train station, and spending the day with her was really pleasant. It's also worth mentioning here that whilst in Eidfjord, JM got bitten by a sheep, and I couldn't help taking photos of this man's fairly spectular eyebrow formations.



One in an ongoing series of "Ellie poses on/with animal statue" photos, taken in Eidfjord. Thw day wouldn't have been complete without it.



In the next installment: Bergen to Denmark via Oslo (ie. I'm tired now and want to go to bed).

Well, I haven't blogged in a while because JM and I have been on the road. We're about halfway through our trip and I've taken about 150 photos, some of them look really nice, but I can tell that once I have them on the computer there will need to be some serious editing done. Also, since rather stupidly I left my download cable at home, I won't be posting any photos for a while either.

We started by catching the ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki last week, getting in to the city early in the morning. We had two successful tram changes and a bit of a walk to get where we were staying, but found the place eventually. It was pretty good for being rated 1 star but it was a little confusing to have a room with kitchenette, sans any kind of cooking utensils... There were lots of death metal looking types around, which didn't really phase me too much, I just figured that it was some kind of cultural/Eurovision (ie. Lordi, 2006) throwback, but then I noticed lots of them were wearing shirts that said Tuska (underneath their floor-length leather overcoats that is), and I realised they were all there for the festival.

Helsinki felt more Russian than Stockholm which really surprised me because I thought that the Scandinavian influence would be more obvious. The people also looked more Slavic, like..a bit uglier, except for the really blonde Scandinavian looking ones, who looked extremely Scandinavian..ahem, anyway, I'm sure you get what I mean..
When we were wandering along the Esplanade we came across what I think was the Marimekko flagship store, which was tres exciting, and we bought some fabric from the sets of classic prints that date from about the mid-1950s. So nice!

A 4.30am start came the next morning as we caught the plane to Oslo, which was followed by a wait in the airport for the connecting flight. We'd been planning to go into Oslo, but it was going to cost 60 AUD for both of us and it was catting and dogging rain, so, we stayed in the airport. For 6 hours.
Originally I was thinking that we could meet up with Robert at the airport, since he works at the FedEx office at Gardermoen, but he's actually in Denmark this week at Roskilde getting rained on and drunk, so it wasn't to be.

Bergen was amazing, and the person whose apartment we stayed at was really great. We went on a big day trip of Hardangerfjord and spent the day with a nice Japanese woman we met in the train station who's also doing a bit of travelling around Europe.

But, I'm getting bored of writing about the trip for now, and I'm sure that you're bored of reading about it, so I'll continue next time I'm online. We're leaving for Denmark tomorrow night, catching the ferry from Oslo to Fredrikshavn and then the train to Copenhagen. I think going out of Oslo on the ferry through Oslofjorden will be nice, but quite different to the fjords of Western Norway.

So until then, let me tide you over by assuring you that I have a hilarious story about two Norwegian sailors we sat across from on the train, as well as photos of a very shaggy set of eyebrows. All will come in the near future.