I realize I've neglected this blog for the better part of two weeks now, but there's a very good reason for that...I've not had the time! The last 16 days have seen me in Stavanger, driving and hiking through the fjords, back in Stavanger again, then to Oslo, Stockholm, Gothenburg (or more correctly the "suburb" of Alingsas), and finally Copenhagen. If there's one thing all of this madcap touristing has made abundantly clear to me, it's that there is a very definite difference between a "traveler" and a "tourist", and while I am an excellent traveler, I am a terrible tourist! I much prefer wandering aimlessly through the streets of a new city only stopping to take the occasional photo of a building or a park that moves me, or to settle into an interesting watering hole and mingle with the locals than I do dashing from tourist trap to tourist trap, taking endless amounts of photos and checking things off a "to-do" list. I just don't have that kind of energy! But when time is short and the list of things to see is long, sometimes, it's gotta be done. It would take me ages to properly describe everything that I got up to in the last couple weeks, and as we've established, I'm a bit lazy...So instead, I give you the highlight reel:
Stavanger: I walked into a bar to get a beer. Started chatting with the bar owner. Next thing I know, he's introducing me to all the regulars around the bar, and offering up his flat in Gamle Stavanger for me to stay in the following week when I return to town, while he and his roommate are away in Croatia. Between that unbelievable display of hospitality, my very gracious couch surfing hosts, another couch surfer who showed me around the food festival, and another of the bartenders at Bar Bache who made a delicious lasagna dinner for us on my last night in town, I really felt like I made myself at home here. The people in this town go a long way toward battling the "unfriendly Norwegian" stereotype, and I've definitely found my "Cheers" in Bar Bache (I've even got a bet with one of the regulars about the upcoming presidential elections...When a democrat takes the White House, I will be returning to collect!)
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| Gamle Stavanger. My favorite neighborhood. |
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| The color street. |
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The Fjords: In a continuing lesson on how certain English words don't have the same meaning to Norwegians as they do to the rest of the world, I give you "hiking". In America, going for a hike generally means walking along a fairly well-groomed and not-too-terribly-steep path located somewhere in a natural setting. In Norway, hiking means scrambling your way up this:
Or this:
Or this:
Depending on where you want to hike, it also means wading through snow...even in the middle of July. I very quickly realized that I am far too much of a chicken to tackle most of these "hikes" by myself. I did find some slightly-less-terrifying alternatives, though, and a whole lot of awesome waterfalls. To Kjerag and Trolltunga: I shall return...with reinforcements!
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| So... |
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| Many... | |
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| Waterfalls! |
Oslo: There's not a lot of love among Norwegians for their capital city...at least not among most of the Norwegians I met along the way. When asked about Oslo, mostly I was met with a shrug of the shoulders and an unenthusiastic "Meh". This left me a bit sad to be leaving my favorite city of Stavanger to head east, but it would have been silly to have spent a month and a half in Norway without seeing the capital city. I found Oslo to be a perfectly lovely place, with everything you'd want in a major European city...except with an outrageously high price tag. I had long since adjusted to the fact that everything in Norway was more expensive to me than what I was used to at home, but Oslo takes this to a whole other level. How anyone manages to make ends meet here is beyond me! I was glad I only had a day and a half before it was off to Stockholm.
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| The Opera House |
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| Downtown |
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| Vigelandspark |
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Stockholm: Holy s%*& is this place huge and beautiful! Everywhere you look there's another massive and stunning building and none of my photos do it any justice at all (mostly because my crap cell phone decided to turn the whole screen black whenever I went to take a photo, so I was mostly shooting blind...thanks, Motorola!) I had two days to see as much of it as possible and so I invested in the Stockholm card, which led to two days spent dashing from museum to museum and from buses to trolleys to trains to boats. Exactly the kind of touristing that I am not generally a big fan of. I did manage to find a chain of Boston sports bars, though, and even had time to pop into a local pub and make friends with a bunch of the regulars (ahhh, that's more like it!) Definitely a city I could see coming back to explore more properly in the future.
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| Some pretty buildings |
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| More cool buildings |
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| Yup, this is a thing |
Gothenburg/Alingsas: One of my favorite parts of the whole trip, mainly because it was a chance to meet a branch of my family I hadn't ever met before! Turns out I've had a 2nd cousin living in Sweden for the last 22 years, and turns out she's freakin' awesome! After a week spent running around like a crazed tourist, it was lovely to spend a couple relaxing days boating with her family, talking about relatives, and making a new best friend in their dog, Diva! I even got a whirlwind tour of Gothenburg on the way to the train.
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| Diva the boat dog |
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| Shellfish |
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| Boat Life |
And so this brings us to
Copenhagen, where I find myself currently. A good friend of mine from NYC (who I met 10 years ago in Paris!) flew in to meet me here and we've spent the past few days wandering the city, doing more shopping than I personally have probably done all year, and being mesmerized by the strange electronic billboard outside the window of the Air B'n'B flat we're staying in, that spews forth a never-ending array of fascinating nonsense like this:
It's a great city, with a great energy, and an absolutely inexplicable dedication to (nay, obsession with) tapas style restaurants. Seriously, if you want to have a non-fancy, unpretentious dinner that consists of one decent-sized main entree per person, you're kind of out of luck in this city. If you're a foodie, on the other hand, this is your paradise...just be prepared for the hefty price tag that accompanies it!
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| A Copenhagen canal |
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| Girls night out |
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| Arrrrr..... |
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| Yup... |
Whew! Typing all of that was almost as exhausting as living it, in the best possible way. Off now to enjoy one last girls night on the town in Copenhagen before my current travel companion takes off for home and I head up to "Elsinore" castle to get my Shakespeare on.
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