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