Viegland Park

This place was really great. It was created by Gustav Vigeland the sculptor and there are literally TONS of sculptures (ahhahaha) across an 80 acre park. It's really quite amazing. He built the thing in the 20's...in my opinion a lot of the sculptures are quite provocative even by today's standards (American though my standards may be). I'm a little kid really because I was like giggling at a lot of this stuff, and then my 32-year-old self finally did appreciate it for the beautiful art that it is. But the giggling comes first.

This next one is called the Monolith. Here are some pearls from Wikipedia about it:

"Construction of the massive monument began in 1924 when Gustav Vigeland himself modeled it out of clay in his studio in Frogner. The design process took him ten months, and it is speculated that Vigeland had the help of a few sketches drafted in 1919. The model was then cast in plaster. In the autumn of 1927 a block of granite weighing several hundred tons was delivered to the park from a stone quarry in Halden. It was erected a year later and a wooden shed was built around it to keep out the elements. Vigeland’s plaster design was set up next to it to give reference to its sculptors. Transferring of the figures began in 1929 and took 3 stone carvers 14 years to accomplish. On the Christmas of 1944 the public was allowed to admire The Monolith and 180,000 people crowded the wooden shed to get a close look at the creation. The shed was demolished shortly thereafter. The Monolith towers 14.12 meters (46.32 ft) high and is composed of 121 human figures rising towards the sky. This is meant to represent man’s desire to become closer with the spiritual and divine. It portrays a feeling of togetherness as the human figures embrace one another as they are carried toward salvation."

(Looks like a buncha naked people crawlin all over eachother to me.) But isn't it gorgeous!??

This is the "Angry Baby" sculpture, it's famous.

Thank you, Inge Bjart Torkildson!

While we were in Oslo, we stayed a total of three nights on this man's couch:

That turned out to be one of my favorite photos of the trip. He looks so mysterious and Norwegian! I don't think he knew I snapped this shot, so he was totally not even posing. Anyway, Inge Bjart met one of my coworkers in Spain years ago and based solely on her email request, he agreed to let us stay on his couch, and show us around Oslo since he would have some free time.

Also, he fed us breakfast every morning with coffee and let us do laundry at his place. Twice. He spent about 2 1/2 days walking us around Oslo. We saw Viegland Park, the Ski Jump (which is currently under construction), the Scream by Edvard Munck, several museums, the waterfront, the fortress, and many more Oslo attractions.

When I forgot my memory card in Bergen, he suggested that I ask the man at the Internet Cafe to mail it to him, and then he would mail it to me here in Minnesota. I received it today!

He told us all about Norwegian culture and politics and it was great to be treated to Oslo by him. Gotta love the local's perspective. He's the one that told us that $28 for a meal was pretty 'reasonable'. Anyway, he's a cyclist and once was sponsored to cycle around Iran. We learned that in Norway, your education is free your entire life, even college and graduate school. Your health care is always covered, your pay checks get taxed pretty heavily, but you'll receive a pension of about $50k when you turn 67, and your family will receive an inheritance if you die. When a couple has a baby, the mom and dad get a total of one year off at 80% of their pay, and either the mom can take it all or they can split it 6 months each, or whatever (this one is weird and cool and I'm not totally sure if I got the facts straight so don't quote me).

**I met a woman while we were on the bus to Preikestolen and she is living in Oslo with her husband and child. He is working at the University of Oslo as an Evolutionary Geneticist and was paid double if he brought his family with him. (He's on a 5 month job.) She enroled her little boy in school and told me that he has 2 hours of recess per day, and once per week the teacher takes the students on a nature walk in the forest and teaches them about plants and trees and animals and stuff. It's hard to get a job in Norway if you're from the States though: you have to prove that you'd be better at the job than a Norwegian. She explained that in his field at the University only about 30% of the other Scientists are from Norway.**

Anyway, if you're a student, you can stay in Norway and in some cases study free as a foreigner, but you have to move away when you're done studying. hmmmmm...., I'd love to study for free, if only I could afford to live there!

Anyway again, Thanks Inge Bjart!!

Preikestolen photos

Here's a little photo special of hiking up Preikestolen. In this first photo you can see that we climbed about 300m up and about 2 hours across. (ha. I dont know how far it was, plus who cares about meters). When you get to the top, it's a 600 meter drop. What?

We were told to "follow the T's":
Rocky and steep:
A little swimming hole on the way up. In the summer, everybody stops and takes a swim.



Drops straight down on the left hand side. SCARY! (Can you see the T?)

I took this photo over the edge.

This was a tiny little ledge that we had to crawl around.

Can you see it beneath Ross' right foot?
Here's a crack that goes all the way down 600m. I was very scared in this picture.

This is Ross. As you can see when we finally got to the top (2 hour hike) it was fully enveloped in a cloud and very foggy. It was a blessing and a curse because we couldn't see anything, but yet we couldn't see anything, which probably gave us the confidence to stand there.

I inched up to the edge and this is what I saw:
You could totally fall man.



All the way to the top and my shoes were still white! (EXPERT)

Look how steep!

Such a beautiful view...pretty foggy though

This picture kind of shows how steep it was, and how rocky the path was:

Preikestolen -- (Backing up a little in the trip)

This was the view from our hostel in Preikestolen. This was a part of our trip that I didn't write about because I wasn't able to upload all of the photos properly from the internet cafe. Anyway, after that harrowing crappy ferry/getting confused/lost day, we finally got that fantastic $30 lamb kabob pizza and then made it down to the bus stop in Tau. The bus ride was very beautiful. It was probably like 20 miles or so but it took a while to drive up to a tiny town called Jorpeland, and we stopped one thousand times to let people get on and off the bus and then finally we rode up up up the mountain to our hostel at Preikestolen. (The lady at the hostel pronounced it PREEK-stole.) Anyway, we got off the bus, and this was what we saw. A mountain, perfectly reflected in the still, glass lake. Gorgeous. I posted a photo of it earlier also. (And wouldja lookit that broad standing in front of it.) We went to check in, which for some reason took about an hour. It was pretty exciting to think about hiking up the mountain the following morning. This was the place where I found the HUGE hunk of hair in the hostel shower. Also, I saw a bunch of shoes and boots in the hallway that were absolutely caked in mud. This scared the bajeezus out of me because I only brought my one pair of cutie tennis shoes that were totally white. Not only did I not want to get them dirty, I didn't have any shoes to wear the next day(s) if I did get them dirty. So that caused me some great anxiety, plus the claustrophobic room, and the hair ball shower...
It was nice to get out of there. I decided that I was just going to have to get over the white-shoe thing. When we walked up to breakfast (free!) I was SO glad it wasn't raining! But the sky was cloudy so I wasn't sure what to expect. I did feel like a prima donna worrying about my shoes, but it was mostly for practical reasons...



That's a picture of their amazing whiteness before we began the hike.

The Evolution of Embarrassing Ross

These first photos were in Iceland, and I thought he should act like one of the statues, but he wouldn't do it, and frankly I think he was embarrassed that I did do it. The ladies who took the picture were waiting for him to do something and he never did.



In this one it looks like he is participating, but he's not, he's trying to get out of the shot:




"Here Ross, let's stand by this statue and do something crazy. Yes, do something crazy.":



And, here's that exact scenario, in Oslo, with the exact same result:



"Here Ross, do hang loose, like Inge Bjart!" Nope.



"Work it!, Work it! Strut your stuff, yes that's good!"
"Shut up, Kady."





(On the fjord) "Ross, go be 'King of the World'."
"I don't even know what that is."
"You haven't seen Titanic? Jeez!"

Home tomorrow

I haven't really blogged very much, and there is so much more to tell! So, even though we arrive in Minneapolis tomorrow afternoon, I'll probably be posting stories and photos from the trip for a few weeks.

I took 1,000 pictures or more. I guess that's the blessing and the curse of having a digital camera. I probably can delete about 600 for duplicates and blurries.

Wow, like seven Segues just rolled in front of the internet cafe. That was funny.

Last night we took the boat from Helsinki to Stockholm and...when I said 'the sea, she was angry' in Bergen, I guess I really had no idea. It was awful and horrible. We were really moving around a lot in the cabin. In fact, we kind of played a game where we had to keep our feet together and try to stand still. And then the boat would knock us into the wall. It was great. Then I made us close our eyes. When it was time to go to sleep, I was just terrified that the ship would completely tip over. I'm embarrassed to admit that knowing that Amy Lindahl might read this. And of course a huge ocean liner wouldn't tip over. But at first I thought the boat was rocking back to front, and then I realized because I was turned around it was actually rocking side to side and so I was convinced that we would just tip. And then in the middle of the night, I was like, "Ross, you awake?...will the boat tip over?" And he was like...*and here I have to break to explain something...*

I guess when he was a little kid he accidentally saw a commercial for the Chuckie movie and it scared him, so he asked his parents if he could come and sleep with them. His dad said, "just picture Chuckie coming into your room, and then I shoot him."

So Ross told me, "just picture the boat tipping over. AND THEN I SHOOT IT."


Anyway, we better get going. We come home tomorrow!!! See ya!

Scandinavia by the numbers

5 - Number of countries visited
50 - Number of episodes of The Office watched
3 - Number of nights slept on boats
1 - Number of nights slept on trains
5 - Number of nights slept on nice people's couches
42 - Number of dollars for most expensive meal
2 - Number of pants Ross brought with
3 - Number of times I wish I had just gotten out of bed and taken the Xanex already (paralyzed by fear while not sleeping)
8 - Number of the most people sleeping in one room
5 - Number of hats Ross bought
37 - Number of times Ross counted the days before we go home
115 - Number of times Kady embarrassed Ross
8 - Number of times Ross had to drink because he didn't make his bid in the card game
11 - Number of times Kady didn't make her bid
6 - Number of days of rain in West Norway
5 - Number of Minutes of sun in Bergen
17.5 - Number of hours on the boat from Helsinki to Stockholm
8 - Number of hours on the train from Bergen to Oslo
1,209 - Number of times Kady gasped and Ross thought something was wrong, but she just saw something pretty
57 - Number of minutes spent marinating in human stew in Iceland
14 - Number of times somebody said, "it's just 10 minutes walk"
0 - Number of times it was actually just 10 minutes walking
2 - Number of times we got lost
2 - Number of times we ran for the bus with backpacks on
1 - Number of times we made it onto the bus after running for it
3 - Number of bananas we usually buy
1 - Number of mountains climbed
1.5 million - Number of people in Stockholm
400 - Number of murders in Trinidad this year so far
42 - Number of zits pinched on Kady's face the night we finally got good lighting in the bathroom
1 - Number of beards grown
3 - Number of free refills stolen before knowing refills aren't free here
9 - Number of free bus rides stolen before Ross realized his bus pass was only good for one hour
5 - Number of languages I can say, "she pooped in her hand"
1 - Number of people who think that is cool
15 - Number of new friends met
28 - Number of times I have thought, "I could live here"
3 - Number of times Ross Shooshed me
37 - Number of times Ross wanted to Shoosh me
1 - Number of chances for us to get bedbugs before coming home

Facebook photos from Estonia

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Ross is the MAN

The best view from any toilet I've ever been in.

From the top of a tower in Helsinki.

We're in Helsinki, Stinky

I'm skipping way ahead in the story of the trip and will have to go back to the parts about Preikestolen and Oslo later, but today we are in Helsinki andhaving a nice time. We took the Viking Line (party boat) from STockholm to Helsinki, and it boards about 4:30pm and arrives the next morning at 10am. For us, it was not a party boat at all. We stayed in the cabin and watched the office and got ready for bed. Ross took a nap and I explored the ship a little bit. I thought it was weird and ironic and maybe a little insensitive that they played the theme from Titanic by Celine Dion as we left port. We had to go to the VERY bottom floor to find our room, but it was a bigger than any room we've had so far and had four beds. There was even a WARM WORKING SHOWER. I took some photos and shopped the duty free shop, and then finally around 10:45 Ross said, we should go to sleep and then I realized that there is a time change between the two cities and so we were going to lose an hour! We ended up not getting the huge amounts of sleep we were hoping for. AND in the morning, I realized our alarm clock (my iPod) didn't immediately recognize the time change and so we gained the hour of sleep back but lost an hour in the AM of getting ready. Plus, we had some trouble at the arrivals area of the Cruise ship place trying to use the phone/internet, but a New Zealander lent us some money to make a phone call to Veera, Minea's friend and we got directions to their apartment. We had to take two trams. Tram 4, straight from the harbor had a NICE driver who helped us and gave us advice and told us when we got to our stop. Tram 3T was driven by a huge jerk, who first off told us that he doesnt go to Arkadia street where the girls live and we should get on the 7 tram. We did get off the bus, but we got back on because Veera told me to take 3T and I believed her. I talked to a man on the tram and he confirmed that we just had to get off two stops past the stop where he got off. And so we did, we got up and started walking to the door, which the MEAN driver opened for two seconds and then SHUT really fast, so we couldnt get off. We had to get off at the next stop and walk back. No big deal really. But Pinja was waiting for us. Veera had to leave for work. Pinja gave us a phone, keys to the apartment, offered us the shower and said we could stay here in the apartment. YAY!!!! So we're all taken care of and we spent the day in Helsinki walking around, meeting new friends...and tomorrow we're going with Arto to Estonia on the ferry and that should be fun also.

Minea and Veera:



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