For Some Weird Reason...

...we tend to have a knack for attracting adorable little two year old blonde Norwegian boys. Unfortunately, this doesn't translate to also having a knack for attracting not two year old Norwegian boys. Dang. Probably cuz 16 year olds don't run around in restaurants and randomly start talking to strangers, as has been the case for the Norwegian two year olds we've met. Yesterday we went to dinner and had two little perfect Aryan boys somewhere between the ages of one and five at the table behind us who kept turning around and giving us stares of awe and waving. Not too uncommon from any little kid at any table next to you in any country anywhere. But my personal favorite was when we went to an amazing seafood restaurant in Bergen and one of the families near us had twins that were a boy and girl that were also perfectly blonde and adorable (imagine that) and the little boy, it turned out, really really really enjoyed running around the restaurant, where he established our table as his favorite and kept coming back for more attention from us while we waited for our food. One of his favorite things to do was show us how his Buzz Lightyear shoes lit up when he stomped them. Oh, and he liked to pay attention to my dad except when my dad tried to get his attention to show him some awesome (and by awesome I mean not awesome) magic tricks. So basically, this little random kid was our evening entertainment. It was awesome. And he was adorable. End of story. I hope this dude gets famous so that I can be all like "Oh yeah I just entertained him when he was two at some random restaurant in Bergen no big deal I'm better than you."

Of course, if you were to respond to that with, "Well at least I don't completely repel Norwegian boys that aren't two, SUCK IT", then that would be an effective rebuttal. Seriously, Merty Terty and I have luck that is basically equivalent to the French and Belgians in WWI and II combined. One of our only chances was at dinner two days ago with friends of our Norway Master, Ed. It was with a family that he knew that had grandparents and the son in his forties (Jan) and his family including his son and daughter that were a little bit younger than us. During dinner, Maaike and Heidi and David (just some other peeps on our tour, if you hadn't figured that out) were busy being entertained by the dog, Cecil, which we later found out that it was actually named Cesar, when Ed asked Jan, "So, how old is your oldest now?", to which Jan replied, "Oh he's 17 now." And when Ed asked where he was, Jan's response was "He decided to stay at home and watch the dog, getting too old to be with his parents." [insert chuckle by Jan and Ed here] WTF MATE? Not cool. In fact, that's borderline totally lame as butt.
The dinner was crazy good, on a separate note, more on that later in a different post.

Here's some more random pictures from our exploits (or lack thereof):

Bubble busker in Oslo

 Pretty self-explanatory

Bryggen in Bergen, kinda (totally) reminds us of Diagon Alley

The Motherland Has Much to Teach Us

My all the things we've learned in Norway so far. One, is that all Thon Hotels (the hotels we've mainly been sleeping in this past week) are NOT made the same. First one is Oslo, great. Great room, nice location, excellent breakfast. In Al, rooms were comfortable but the food (im basically talking about the dinner)........... not so much. The soup, or would "butter water" be more appropriate?, was pretty terrible, and the rest of the meal isn't really worth describing. I do love Norwegian breakfasts though, always a wonderful combination of fresh breads, meats, jam, and cheese.
Second, gabe and I have learned that old German/French tourists are SCARY. I had decided to get a little of this white flan-type dessert after my less than satisfying dinner where in line getting dessert were about 5 loud, very large German ladies. (AKA "landwhales" as one so accurately put it). The dinner area being a buffet was naturally two sided, so people could come on either side to serve themselves.......or so I thought. As I came up along the opposite side of the German ladies to help myself, they all just stopped and stared at me. I'm naturally minding my own business and hardly looked up until I realize 5 women are boring their eyes into me. I look up startled from my flan only to see one of the largest landwhales angrily gesturing and yelling at me in German. I manage to infer from the muddled grunts and shouts that I am gasp.....cutting. They seem NOT to realize that the buffet goes two ways and that each flan dish (there were 4) is NOT a different flavor( Each lady was taking a large spoonful from EVERY flan dish there was for reasons I couldnt figure out). So startled as I was, I dropped the spoon and proceeded to wait at the back of the line as every one of them got their 4 scoops of "different" flavored flan. Darn tourists.

One last interesting tidbit from our adventures thus far is that most Norwegians own two separate homes much like most Americans own two cars. One home is their normal everyday house and the other is usually a cabin up in the mountains where they stay in the winter to ski. This is very common and we saw many cabins scattered along the hillside as we drove through the mountains to Bergen today                         Maaike T

I got suckered

(BTW:  Does anyone else think the pants I got at Anthropologie especially for our trip -- modeled in the photo of us in front of the Norwegian Royal Palace -- look like Mom Jeans??   I thought they were so cool when I bought them only to discover I look like Tina Fey in her infamous Saturday Night Live skit.)

CL 6/26/11

The scooter police and a husband gone loco

We realized we'd left the safety and sanity of Homeland U.S.A. when we noted that the Security Police in the Iceland Airport sailed about the sleek modernist corridors on....scooters! (Just about the most fun job in the world!) (One of our fellow travelers noted that before their country fell into financial trouble a few years ago they probably had Segways). 

In any event, the whole Norway-via-Iceland was indeed a blessing in disguise, as one of our bloggers noted earlier.

The funniest (to me, at least) part of the first 48 hours was when Stan "I Sleep Anywhere, Anytime, Anyplace" Lucas got a lesson in Jet Lag.  He fell asleep in our awesome Iceland hotel and woke up a couple of hours later, threw open the curtains, convinced we'd missed our plane to Norway because it was so light out.  Then he decided he HAD to know what time it was so proceeded to turn on ALL the room lights so he could track down and read the one watch I had with the correct time. Then he proceeded to THROW open the curtains again, an hour later, because again he was dead certain the world had come to an end and an atomic bomb had blown outside. No, dear, just the 65 degree North sunshine. Still up, at 3 AM.  He tossed and turned the rest of the night, untossing every hour to double check the time and the position of the sun in the sky and, and, and....he was just plain out of his mind.

However, I can't really brag about my own lack of cultural coolness: Our room faced south west so naturally was frying hot when we arrived.  Gasping for air, we tried to open the window but it seemed stuck, so I, taking matters into my own hands, called the reception desk.

"How do we turn on the air conditioner?  We can't find it."

"Uh...this is ICEland.  We don't have air conditioning."  (Dumb tourist, was his thought bubble. Or worse.)

Bottom line: Iceland is GREAT, and Stan has been selling it up to anyone who will listen.  Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT, ask him about how great Iceland is unless you have 60 minutes to spare.

Carol Lucas -- June 26, Al, Norway

A Blessing in Disguise/ It Really Kinda Sucked

Excitement, expectations, and anticipation was high Tuesday afternoon for us 4 Norway-bound travelers arriving at sea-tac airport. We were going to be in Norway by this time tomorrow we all kept telling each other! Conversation started out lively and giddy when we first got to the terminal..... and then crawled to an almost non existent stand still during our 6 1/2 hour wait at Sea-Tac airport for our airplane to be considered "suitable" for flying............ hmmmm sketch.
Should Gabe and I count the number of things we invented to do for ourselves? Nevertheless, a lot of interesting people were also in our sticky situation, there was hottie Icelandic boy with the dreds in the far right corner (unfortunately never looked up from his ipad), nice Swedish family who helped me find my socks to the immediate left, and 2 groups of Germany-bound high school students from Portland. Some of the peeps from one school entertained us with a few songs sung in harmony during some point of the delay. That got annoying pretty fast. (This is Gabey: but it did sound nice)
So, continued by Gaberz:
Hokai, so: basically, the Iceland air chick would say, "so so far we don't know when we'll be able to take off, but I will go check with the crew and then I'll update you in about 20 minutes." and by that she meant "so I'll tell you that we're still screwed in an hour." and then finally, at 10:00 (no joke, and our plane was supposed to leave at 4:30) we got the update that we WEREN'T SCREWED FOREVER LIFE IS AWESOME ALL STARVATION IS SOLVED THE DYING ATMOSPHERE IS BACK TOGETHER AND THERE IS A PERMANENT CEASE-FIRE IN SYRIA, EGYPT, AND LIBYA!!!YAY! Except not the last three. It was still pretty awesome.
So then we boarded the plane took off sat there for seven hours and ima not talk about that cuz it's boring as crap, with the exception of Greenland looking pretty snazzy when we flew over it cuz it had crazy rocks n' snow n' stuff.

And so due to the crazy time zone mind-blowedness of us leaving at 10:50 pm in Seattle and arriving at noon the next day in Iceland, I had gotten an hour of crappy and broken up sleep and then it was all like, "Go check out Reykjavik yo and touch the Atlantic Ocean cuz it's not super freaking early in the morning even though according to your internal clock it should be." So basically we realized that Iceland is AWESOME and a bit weird and that the Atlantic Ocean is a bit chilly up at 66 degrees north latitude. Aaaaaaaand soooo basically that's what happened. Oh, and Keflavik Int'l Airport is, no joke, like a shopping mall that just happens to have planes going in and out of it.