Thursday, July 14, 2005

fjords anyone?

Stockholm, Sweden

While it may look like I've been in Sweden since I last wrote I actually did go to Norway. For some reason, I guess because they are printed on flat paper I always think that a country is going to be flat until proven otherwise. Norway is definatly not flat. I stayed with a family friend in Oslo and got to see cool things like the Nobel Peace Prize museam and the Munch (he was a famous norwegian artist) museam. I had no idea that the nobel peace prize is awarded by a committe of Norwegians. The rest of the nobel prizes are decided on by Swedes, but Nobel decided since at the time of his death they were in some kind of alliance he shouldn't let Norway feel left out.

The train ride from Oslo to Bergen which is on the west coast was absolutely amazing. It goes through many mountains, litterally through with lots of tunnels as well as through in a not quite so litteral sense. The highest point was at this town called Finse, and there's a glacier up there. I took a detour and went on the Flåm railway which has the steepest grade of any railroad in the world. It manages to be even more spectacular than the normal rail route. And it goes by this huge waterfall. They even stop the train so everyone can pile out and get misted. They have fake ruins and a fake nymph up on the rocks though which is just kind of stupid. But there's more...a boat ride on pieces of two fjords and then a bus ride that went from the valley where the fjord was up the steepest mountain road I think a bus could possibly get up. And according to the package that this came as, that is norway in a nutshell.

Bergen is a super cute town. There's a fish market where if you look longingly at it they might give you free samples of salmon and smoked whale. Yes there is commercial whaling in Norway, but they tell me they only hunt two species and that it's very highly regulated. There's also a row of wooden houses from the middle ages that are very tilty and cool to walk around. The town or maybe city is surrounded by mountains and so I went hiking one day with this Aussie girl named Teresa. We kind of hiked longer than we meant to and we were at it for about seven and a half hours. So when we got around this big long ridge we had been hiking along we took the cable car down. Fortunatly the fog came up right then so I didn't have to see down the 642 meters.

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