Buda & Pest

TO ALL

Last August when I was at Cedarville with Deanna, I met two missionary families who were serving in Budapest. At some point in the conversation I asked “Is there any reason why I would want to go to Budapest as a tourist?” The answer was “Absolutely, Budapest is one of the five great cities of Europe – after London, Paris, Rome, and . . .and . . . and . . . . . ” Prague maybe? Or Vienna? (I can’t remember, now.) This claim was followed by a list of things I should be sure to see in Budapest. For whatever it is worth, I also learned that there are NO Starbucks in Budapest. The closest one is in Vienna. Don’t laugh, now. If you were a missionary and liked American coffee this would be important information. One of the missionary wives commented, “Most people go to Vienna to the opera. We go to Vienna to Starbucks. We’ve never been to the opera.” To each his own.

A month or so after that conversation, I began thinking about where we might go over Columbus Day weekend that we could FLY to cheaply. After driving to Rome and then to Norway, neither Mike nor I were ready to get into the car again for awhile. Ryanair had tickets to Bratislava, Slovakia for about $50 each round trip. Slovakia is the other half of what used to be Czechoslovakia. It turns out that Bratislava is about 2 hours from Budapest by train (another $15 round trip). So off we headed. And . . . after a 2-hour drive to the Frankfurt-Hahn airport, a 2-hour flight, a 2-hour layover in Bratislava and a 2-hour train ride, we found ourselves in one of the 2 cities (Buda and Pest) commonly referred to as Budapest (pronounced BOO-dah-peshhhhht) with 2 days to see the sights. Getting to our pension was another story. More about that later.

First a few basic facts about Budapest that you might not happen to be aware of –

(1) Budapest is in Hungary

(2) Hungary used to be behind the Iron Curtain.

(3) Hungarians are Magyars (pronounced MUD-jar)

(4) Magyars speak Hungarian which is NOT a Slavic language

(5) Hungarian is an agglutinative language which means that you start with a simple root word and then start tacking on suffixes to create meaning. Yes, Germans do this sometimes, too. But the Hungarians seem to have a corner on the market for long words. I doubt that supercalifragilisticexpialidocious would even create a stir in Hungary.

(6) Hungary is part of the European Union but they prefer to use their own currency which is the forint. The ratio of forints to dollars is 230 to 1. For the next 24 hours, try dividing every price you see by 230 and see what that does to your brain.

(7) Budapest is on the Donau River (a.k.a. the Danube River). Buda is on the west bank and Pest is on the east bank.

Pest from Buda

Buda from Pest

(8) The composer Ferenc Lizst (a.k.a. Franz Lizst) was Hungarian – sort of. His name is Hungarian and he loved his Magyar heritage. He was born in Germany and never spoke Hungarian but he spent the last 5 years of his life in Budapest. He seems to be Hungary’s only claim to fame, unless of course you count ---

(9) Attila the Hun who may or may not have been an ancestor of the Hungarians. Regardless, there is a Hungarian poet named Jozsef Attila so the name “Attila” shows up all over the place in Budapest.

We arrived in Pest at about 8:00PM having made a room reservation by email with Maria and Istvan. (Istvan is the Hungarian version of Steven and is pronounced EESHT-vahn) I thought I knew exactly how to get from the train station to Istvan’s place. Somehow nothing seemed to work quite right. But . . . . . . . . . . . Hungarians are friendly. No less than 4 different people, all of whom spoke at least some English, perceived, at various points along the way, that we were confused and offered to help. The last one delivered us right to Istvan and Maria’s doorstep. Our difficulties had primarily to do with a section of one of the metro lines being down for repairs and secondarily with some irregularities in the above ground transportation system due to a political demonstration having just ended about the time we arrived in town. All the demonstrators were trying to get home at the same time. As Alan says, we have now extended the reach of our travels to include areas of political unrest. Well, sort of. Actually the crowd of people we encountered on the steetcars could easily have been mistaken for a bunch of American college football fans on their way home from a game had we not known otherwise. However, our last “guardian angel” – a man with a very ruddy face that Mike was sure was an alcoholic who couldn’t be trusted – did inform us in no uncertain terms that “the Prime Minister of Hungary has big problems.” And unfortunately the demonstrating in Budapest has not always been as peaceful as it was while we were there.

Istvan and Maria turned out to be look-a-likes of Sam and Marie Lynn with personalities akin to Louie and Mary Trout. I’ll leave the four of you to speculate on that one. Suffice it to say they were very friendly and helpful. After flooding us with maps and other helpful info about Budapest and explaining about the FOUR different keys required to access our room, Istvan took charge of my suitcase and escorted us to our room which was about 6 blocks away in another building.

Our suitemate (shared bathroom and kitchen) was a young lady from Billings, Montana, named Monica Morey. Small world. Monica turned out to be a highlight of the trip. She is an R.N. Maybe . . . late 20’s? Went to some little college in Minnesota and worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester for several years. She is taking a year off to travel all over Europe. It was fun comparing notes with her about places we have been. She is also a great fan of Rick Steves, so we had lots of common experiences to talk about. However the really significant detail about Monica is that her middle name is Strohm. No kidding!!!!!! Her mother’s maiden name was Strohm. This little detail came to light as a result of Mike having for some reason decided to put a military namestrip on his bathroom bag. Imagine Monica stumbling into the bathroom after we left that first morning, half awake, and seeing her name, right in front of her nose, on someone else’s stuff! Needless to say, she came to see us that night when we got home with some serious questions! Like us, she has never before just “accidentally” met another Strohm. (well, almost never ---- see my Travelogue entitled “Summer Travels” for another “Strohm story”). Her mother’s relatives live in Kansas and Mike knows that he also has some relatives that live in Kansas, but neither of them knew enough details to determine just how closely they might be related.

After our first day in Budapest I informed Mike that I thought that Budapest was my favorite of the large European cities that we have visited so far. But then I had to admit that my opinion could have more to do with the weather being absolutely perfect and the crowds being minimal than anything else.

Still, Budapest is a very pretty city, with lots of interesting history. Ironically, none of the buildings themselves are all that old. The story is that in 1896 Hungary celebrated the 1000 year anniversary of their ancestors’ arrival in Europe. Most of the significant buildings in the city were either built or rebuilt as part of the “sprucing up” they did in preparation for that celebration.

Castle Hill (in Buda) with the Chain Bridge in the foreground

The Parliament building is modeled after the one in London, though I think it is more attractive than the one in London. The roof is kind of a plum color that is really neat looking.

The Parliament building is right on the Donau River. On the non-river side of the building is Budapest’s version of Lafayette Square (behind the White House in Washington DC). This is where all the demonstrations that you may have heard about in the news have taken place. When we were there, there were a lot of tents set up and signs and Hungarian flags, etc. But nothing felt even remotely threatening or unsafe.

We did a lot of walking in Budapest. (On this trip Herr Glessner, we were quite peripatetic!) For the most part we didn’t feel compelled or inclined to go into any buildings. It was just interesting walking around observing things. Budapest is clearly an old city. The outsides of most buildings are worn and grimy – badly in need of a facelift – but the streets are clean and free of trash.

Thanks to a tip from Rick Steve’s we noticed that the bottom couple of floors and the entryways of many buildings are rather dull and utilitarian on the outside (compliments of the communists) but then from about the 3^rd floor up the architecture is truly art. Apparently as things were renovated during the communist

era they were made plain and utilitarian.
And . . .
maybe ground floors tend to get redone and upper floors don’t? Regardless, in Budapest, it pays to look up as you walk.
(So now . . . . if you were an archeologist digging up Budapest 2000 years from now, wouldn’t you draw all the wrong conclusions about the chronology of the Communist era in relationship to the other eras of Hungarian history? Hummmmm)

One other note about Hungarian architecture:

Hungarians are really into colorful mosaic tile roofs. We’ve seen these occasionally throughout Europe, but there are an inordinate number of them in Budapest.

One of the buildings we did go into in Budapest was the House of Terror. The House of Terror is a museum dealing with the “double occupation” of Hungary – first by the Nazis and then by the Communists. The building itself was used by both the Nazi and the Communist secret police organizations and hundreds of people were actually executed in its basement during those eras. It reminded me a bit of the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. in that it wasn’t just a historical archive that was open to the public. The displays were all very well thought out and carefully calculated to create a certain atmosphere and to evoke a certain response. The building is about 4 stories high and is square. The atrium features a Soviet tank and a wall covered with hundreds of black and white portraits of the victims of the building. A small stream of translucent oil runs continually out of the bottom of the tank and down the sides of the platform the tank sits on. (I tried to take a picture of this but was quickly rebuked. This time I was repentant and put my camera away. Have some of you been praying about my attitude or what?) Visitors are supposed to start on the top floor and work their way down to the basement were the executions actually took place. The basement walls are covered with pictures of the victimizers – both Nazi and Communist. Some of them are alive today and have never been brought to justice. (How did that happen?) Although there were English handouts available in every room, the wall plaques and display labels were all in Hungarian. That was a bit frustrating because the English handouts were basically just historical accounts that made no attempt to actually identify the items in the rooms. Just the same it was all very interesting and sobering.

House Of Terror
Sunlight mirrors the word "terror"
from roof eve

A couple of personal thoughts / reactions before I move on:

(1) It certainly does seem that the Hungarians have been caught in a no win situation for most of the 20^th century – beginning with the break up of the Hungarian empire after WWI followed first by Nazi aggression and then communist aggression. Even taking into account that this museum was put together by Hungarians and is for Hungarians, so it could be somewhat biased, one cannot help but feel blatantly appalled at what has been done to the Hungarians. In fact, our visit to this museum on the heels of just having read a book about the break up of the Ottoman Empire after WWI (“A Peace To End All Peace” by David Fromkin) added to my sense that the “settlement” after WWI was really poorly handled and to the extent that the US and Britain and France were responsible for that debacle, we have to take some responsible for WWII and the rest of the 20^th century. (Okay, so don’t panic, that is as anti-US as Nancy gets!) But, having said all that, it DOES appear that the Hungarians actually allied themselves with Hitler initially -- supposedly not because they liked Hitler but in hopes of being able to retain some degree of autonomy in return. Understandable, I guess -- except that this sounds suspiciously like the strategy of several of the OT kings of Israel and/or Judah. Instead of looking to God for help, they rushed into alliances that looked politically wise on the surface but turned out to be disastrous. Dare I draw a parallel between the two situations? Also, I did some looking around on the internet after I got home and apparently some Jewish organizations are unhappy with the way things are presented at the House of Terror. They feel that the idea of Hungary being an enemy of Nazism has been overstated and that the persecution of the Jews in Hungary by the Hungarian government has been glossed over.

(2) The 1956 Uprising – I wish I understood this event a little better. Apparently the Communists actually appeared for awhile to be pulling out of Hungary. The Hungarians elected a leader and started thinking they were free when all of sudden the Communists turned their tanks around and attacked with a vengeance, killing 25,000 Hungarians in the process of regaining control. Did they change their mind about pulling out (Pharaoh style)? Or was the whole thing a trick from the start? Mike and I actually have a friend from our pre-Army days, Gus Miklos, whose dad fled Hungary during the 1956 Uprising and ended up in the US. It was interesting to see the name “Miklos” in various places in Budapest.

(3) I kind of wish that I had the courage to ask someone like Maria or Istvan (who are somewhat older than I) to talk about what it was like living under Communism. I guess I just never know if that is an appropriate thing to do – or if I can phrase my question in an appropriate way. Somehow it intrigues me to think that these people actually lived in an environment that I only know (and can only know) from “story books.” To actually rub shoulders with someone who lived right in the midst of it and not hear their story first-hand seems like a big mistake.

On a lighter note –

Having been so impressed by the street musicians in Vienna and knowing that Budapest was another “musical” city, we actually frequented the pedestrian malls somewhat intentionally to see what we might find. Nothing in Budapest topped the balalaika and accordion trio we heard in Vienna (see my travelogue called “Mostly Austria”), but there were some interesting acts:
a male violinist whose mother was sitting off to the side, clapping after each number and taking the coins that were put in his cup for safe-keeping;
a young lady violinist (same spot as the guy, different time of day) who was playing Broadway tunes (both of them had incredibly good sound);
and two old men, one on the clarinet and the other on the violin playing Dixieland music. These last two were somewhat of an enigma. The clarinet player could not honestly be said to have any embouchure at all – let alone a good one -- and the spit dripped out the end of his clarinet continuously. The violinist did actually use a bow but he held his instrument more like a guitar and used it sort of like it was a percussion instrument. Yet the end result of all that was actually kind of pleasing and they were having so much fun and were such hams that one couldn’t help but respond positively.

I have developed the habit of tipping street musicians if they are any good at all. Being sort of a musician myself, I appreciate that a lot of money and effort goes into their training and the financial return tends to be meager. So it just seems right to help them out a bit. Plus they truly do add to my enjoyment of the day; they aren’t just beggars – wanting something for nothing. However, I found it hard to tip in Budapest. The idea of taking a bill with the number 200 written on it out of my pocket and giving it to some unknown person was more than I could handle. I could never quite convince myself that even though the bill said 200 on it, it was really only worth about one US dollar!

I am embarrassed to say that we never really got around to eating any authentic Hungarian food while we were in Budapest. Alan recently expressed his view that “our family doesn’t place enough value on eating good food when we travel.” I acknowledged at the time that he was right, but I don’t seem to have succeeded in doing anything about it. We ate about 4 meals in Budapest and one of them was at Subway and another at Burger King. Horrors!!!!! The other two meals were in places with a little more ambience, but nothing truly Hungarian. The most interesting food I ate in Budapest was a cinnamon roll type thing, called a kalac, that I bought at a street fair near our pension. I actually watched these kalacs being made. My mother was the official cinnamon roll guru in our family and she would have been impressed. The dough was rolled out pretty much like my mother would have done it, but then it was cut into long strips and wound around a spindle about the size of a large can of pork and beans. The spindle was mounted into a special oven that was designed to make it rotate slowly as it cooked. When it was done it was rolled in one of four different toppings (I chose the traditional cinnamon and sugar mixture. I’m not even sure what the other 3 were. The names were Hungarian.) Then somehow the roll was pushed off the spindle and handed to the customer--still hot -- in a plastic bag. I ate it by unwinding the roll and breaking off bite sized pieces. Yummmmm

The last night we were in Budapest, we went for a walk along the Donau after dark. At some point we realized that we were walking past a lot of big fancy boats and then it hit us that people were actually living on those boats . . . . they were like . . . . .cruise ships! Somehow neither Mike or I have ever had any huge urge to go on a ocean cruise. Probably we will do it at least once someday and we may decide we like it, but right at the moment it’s not very high on our list of things we’d like to do. But now . . . . . a European river cruise . . . . that might be a different story. Start somewhere in Eastern Europe and end up in Germany a week or so later and see a different city every day. That sounds like fun. Unfortunately, I’ve since learned that river cruises are a LOT more expensive than say . . . . a Caribbean Cruise. Oh, well. It was a nice idea while it lasted. I’m actually quite content with my present mode of travel.

Buda at night

So now, I’m caught up on travelogues and ready for the next adventure which is Belgium. We have chaplain friends that are living near Brussels and we are headed there next weekend.

Nancy

Additional Photos:

Hero's Square

The "heroes" have changed a couple of times over the years

depending on who in in power

Have any of your shoes turned up missing lately?


















This is Europe --
The old and the new together

Nancy Goes To Norway

TO ALL

My family thinks that this travelogue should be entitled “How to ford a fjord in a Ford.” But our van is a Honda, not a Ford and fjords are clearly not fordable, so that doesn’t seem to fit. At some point, Alan took such nonsense to the extreme by posing the question – “Can President Ford afford to ford a fjord in a Ford?” Whereupon Mike added to the insanity by finding an opportunity to state that he wasn’t sure whether we needed to go back or fjord. One would think that certain people were bored on this trip – maybe they were. We did spend a lot of time in the car. Norway itself was far from boring, but it is a long way from here to there.

Again, we chose the car option rather than flying, because it is cheaper for 6 people, it allowed us to bring food with us and some things in Norway are simply not accessible by plane or train. Plus my dad specifically wanted to go over the bridge from Denmark to Sweden (Did you realize there was such a thing?) and I wanted to see what was between Heidelberg and Oslo – all 1500 kilometers of it. (By the way, supposedly the distance from Rome to Oslo is the same as the distance from Oslo to the northern boundary of Norway. Having now driven the first, I think I’ll pass on the second. Norway is a big country.)

We actually pulled off this expedition for slightly less than $500 / person for 9 days. Most of you know that my Dad is the ultimate miser when it comes to money. Even at 80 years of age, he is content with pretty basic accommodations – most anything is fine as long as he doesn’t have to walk too far at night to get to the bathroom and preferably not to another building. And we have to work to keep him from heading straight for McDonalds for his one meal out per day.

The manifest for this expedition was similar to the Rome trip– my dad and brother (Curt), Alan, Amy, Mike and I – no Marion unfortunately. We just didn’t have room for an extra person since Mike was with us in the car for this entire trip. We really enjoyed having Marion with us on the Rome trip and look forward to more opportunities to travel with her in the future. She was our expense accountant on the Rome trip. I had to take over her job on the Norway trip and it was a real pain. With most expenses being shared between several families, we decided not to try to divide up every bill accurately on the spot but rather to pay for common expenses randomly, keep good records and sort everything out at the end. It worked great. Or at least I came out well at the end!! Ooops, I didn’t say that!

Speaking of such practicalities, Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Norway) has a really neat option for economy lodging. In many of the campgrounds, they have little huts called hytte (pronounced WHOO-teh possibly – Anne can you clarify this?) Some are nicer than others (we learned to ask for ones with a toilet and shower). The beds are often bunk beds, you either have to bring your own linens or pay extra to rent them, and they aren’t terribly spacious. But they are cheap ($100 - $150 per night for six people), they have heat (although we didn’t need / use it), and they usually have a small kitchen with a refrigerator, stove, dishes, etc. Six of our nine nights in Scandinavia, we stayed in huts – the other three in hostels or pensions. We kind of knew about this hut option ahead of time so we had a few sleeping bags with us, but in retrospect we should have had 6 single sheets and 6 duvet covers, and 6 pillow cases with us instead of the sleeping bags.

Our basic route was --
*north through Germany to Denmark,
*then east to Copenhagen (spelled Kobenhavn by the Danes),
*across a 10 mile long bridge to Malmo, Sweden,
*then north along the coast of Sweden to Norway,
*on north through Oslo to Lillehammer (where we spent a few hours with a cousin of mine),
*on north to Lom,
*then west over some high passes and along some fjords to Bergen,
*then south through the Setesdal Valley to Kristiansand, Norway,
*then across the Skaggerak Sea by ferry to Denmark
*and home again through Germany (with a slight detour back to Copenhagen to put Alan on a plane).

This last little detour is a good illustration of the absurdity of today’s airline industry policies. When Alan bought his plane ticket to Zurich (to work out of the Google office there for a month), I didn’t yet have our travel plans for Norway finalized. At some point I realized that we could get an extra day in Norway if we put Alan on a plane in Copenhagen on our way back to Germany. As luck would have it, the ticket Alan already had routed him through Copenhagen on the way home to Seattle, but do you think the airline would let him abort the first leg of his trip and just get on in Copenhagen? Absolutely not. The answer was “If you don’t get on in Zurich the rest of your ticket will be canceled.” They also wouldn’t allow him to alter his ticket in any way – not even if he was willing to pay a penalty. The only alternative they could offer was to sell him a whole new ticket. So . . . . . he ended up buying a one way ticket from Copenhagen to Zurich. To get home he flew from Copenhagen to Zurich, spent the night in Zurich and then flew back to Copenhagen and on to Seattle!!!

Denmark and Sweden are members of the EU, but have not adopted the Euro as their currency. Each has their own kind of “kroner” and the conversion rate for each is different. Norway is not a member of the EU. They have had a couple of referendums proposing that they join the EU but both failed – the last one in ’96 by only about 2%. Apparently Norwegians feel (and probably rightly so) that joining the EU can only limit their freedom (in regard to such things as how farm products are marketed) and lower their standard of living. Norwegian currency is yet another “kroner” with yet another conversion rate. It was rather a challenge to come up with the right kind of currency in the right denomination at the right time and to know, even in general terms, what we were paying for any particular item. The conversion rates range from 5.5 to 1 to as high as 7 to l. Seeing prices like “98” on a dinner menu was a little disconcerting. Convincing oneself that “98” of any currency was a good deal was even harder.

The last day of our trip, Amy took on the challenge of trying to compare gas prices for Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the US and I’m not sure her brain has recovered yet. Such calculations involve converting from liters to gallons as well as kroners (or euros) to dollars. I THINK that she concluded that gas prices were highest in Sweden – topping out at about $6.00 per gallon. Germany is more like $5.00 per gallon, but of course we can buy government fuel coupons for whatever the US average is – about $2.50 per gallon right now. Unfortunately the coupons work ONLY in Germany. Once we cross the border we’re on the economy.

Our visit with my cousin, Anne Risheim, and her husband, Ivar, was one of the highlights of the trip. Neither Anne or I are exactly sure when we last saw each other, but it has to have been at least 30 years. Anne met Ivar (pronounced EE-var) while he was in chiropractic school in Chicago and she was working in a nearby hospital as a pharmacist. He ended up transferring to a school in Iowa but after he graduated, they married and moved to Lillehammer, Norway, not far from the little town in which he grew up. I always thought that Anne’s moving to Norway was kind of an out-of-the-blue thing, but now I know otherwise. Anne’s grandfather was Norwegian. His entire family immigrated to the US together, so Anne doesn’t really have any paternal relatives left in Norway but she does know exactly which farm her grandfather grew up on, etc, etc. So . . . now Anne and Ivar have 2 grown kids – a boy, Hans Eric, who is studying to be a chiropractor at the same school in Iowa from which Ivar graduated and a girl, Elizabeth, who is in pharmacy school in Oslo. Unfortunately we didn’t get to meet either of them. English is spoken fairly commonly in all the Scandinavian countries (even more so than in Germany), but to actually live in Norway you do pretty much have to speak Norwegian, which Anne does fluently. After 25+ years in Norway, she says she even thinks in Norwegian. Anne served us a delicious Norwegian meal – including reindeer meat in the entrée -- and it was lots of fun getting first hand information about what it is like to live in Norway including what is was like to host the Olympics in your hometown. (The Olympics were in Lillehammer in 1996 – remember?)

Also Ivar sat down with Mike and laid out a sightseeing plan for us for the next four days. (Take note, Debbie Haynes, we put away our Rick Steve’s book for the better part of four days!!!). This was a crucial thing for Mike in that sometime during that 1500 km journey from Heidelberg to Lillehammer he had begun to question the sanity of this trip – and my sanity in proposing it!!!! Also he had begun looking closely at a map of Norway, especially western Norway, and he had some serious doubts about whether there were actually any roads in the part of Norway I was proposing that we explore – all he could see was water, water, and more water. Ivar was able to assure him that there were roads, that there was a lot to see between Lillehammer and Kristiansand, and that it was doable in 4 days.

Here I must pause for a funny story. In my last travelogue, I alluded to my having a GPS that works in connection with my PDA. As we all know, you get what you pay for and I didn’t pay much for this GPS. There are a TON of annoying things about how it works or doesn’t work. But . . . we did actually used it a fair amount on this trip, although it could seriously be debated whether it solved any more problems than it created. It did get us to Anne’s house and one night it did help us find lodging when things were getting a little tense. But it also lead us astray a time or two and it created some divisiveness among our group in that some of us trusted it and wanted to follow it and others of us (we won’t name names but I wasn’t in this group) were offended by the very idea of letting a computer tell them what to do (ahem . . . . Mike and Amy). On occasion it also provided levity – like when we would get seriously off track and it would say “Make legal U-turn” or when we found ourselves on a road that the GPS didn’t know about and it would responded by saying “Go to nearest road” -- as the cursor on the screen wandered aimlessly through a patch of green.

One other bit of trivia about our time with Anne and Ivar before I move on – We learned that lefsa is in fact an authentic Norwegian food although the way they eat it in South Dakota is NOT authentic. My dad is one quarter Norwegian and he grew up among Norwegians in South Dakota. Lefsa was always a Christmas treat. Lefsa looks a lot like a flour tortilla – in fact it could easily be mistaken for a flour tortillas by the uninitiated – but it is made out of potatoes. In Norway, it is also marketed a lot like a flour tortilla – in bundles of 8 or 10 in a plastic bag displayed on an unrefrigerated shelf. In South Dakota the accepted way to eat lefsa is to spread a thin layer of oleo all over it, sprinkle white sugar on it, fold it into a wedge and eat it as a snack. They don’t eat it that way in Norway. Instead, it is used more like its cousin, the flour tortilla. You put meat in it and roll it up like a burrito. A hotdog wrapped in lefsa is called a lumpa and it is a popular “fast food” option – sold in 7-11’s all over Norway.

When we left Anne’s house, we had 4 days to explore “fjord country” before we had to head home. Since Mike took over the navigating during that time and I was totally engrossed in the scenery, trying to capture it on film . . . . er-r-r memory stick, I’m not sure I could, at this point, actually trace our route on a map. It was all just incredibly beautiful. We took a wrong turn out of Lom and got off Ivar’s route immediately. We were so taken with the scenery it took us a long time to catch on to our “mistake” – if anything in Norway could be called a “mistake” in terms of scenery! We debated about whether to go “back or fjord” and ended up going back. We decided that when a local Norwegian tells you where to go, it’s worth the effort to follow his advice.

In our meanderings from Lom to Kristiansand, we took three different car ferries across various fjords. The views from the ferries were incredible -- the views from the roads no less so. The roads would go right beside the fjords for awhile and then over a high mountain pass to another fjord. Alan has decided that the purpose of switchbacks is to give the passengers on both sides of the car a chance to see the views. My dad has decided that the purpose of tunnels is to give your eyes a rest from the views – so your brain doesn’t go on overload. Most of our four days in “fjord country” were overcast, but not so foggy as to obscure the views. A couple of days the skies cleared about 4:00 in the afternoon. It would have been nice if it had been a little sunnier and probably pictures would have turned out a little better, but it wasn’t a big deal. The scenery was still absolutely incredible.

Norway is without a doubt, my favorite European county so far. It is Switzerland with a third as many people. Plus something about Norway feels familiar -- more like America than other European countries. I’m not sure exactly what that is all about. Maybe it’s just that Norway is less crowded than Germany. You can actually be out of sight of any town for long periods of time – long enough to warrant having signs along the road that tell you how many kilometers to the next town. They do have these in Germany, but there aren’t nearly as many as I am used to, especially having grown up in the west where things are fairly spread out. My attitude toward Norway is probably also influence by the fact that my all time favorite classical piano composition is written by a Norwegian - Edvard Grieg – the only really well-known Norwegian composer. His “hit” is called the “Norwegian Piano Concerto in A minor.”

The mountains around the fjords were slightly more rocky and barren and not quite as vertical as I had expected. One of the surprises was the abundance of waterfalls. If we had stopped to take a picture of every waterfall we saw we’d still be in Norway today. The waterfalls typically start “falling” at the very tops of the mountains (almost like the pouroffs in Big Bend National Park in Texas). How does that work? Obviously the “top” isn’t really the top and it is more of a plateau than a peak.

The fjords were every bit as spectacular as I had expected. What I hadn’t expected was the high plateaus in between the fjords. In between every fjord was a tundra area with expansive views, glaciers, invigorating crisp air, tundra vegetation and more lakes. It was every bit as spectacular as Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mtn Nat’l Park or the Beartooth Parkway in northern Wyoming / southern Montana (Lisa S. and Ana take note!) although the ground cover was a little different. The foliage was just starting to turn and the ground cover was a pleasing blend of greens and yellows and reds and browns. . It was a gorgeous time of year. There was a lot of a particularly brilliant red plant with white fluffy seeds that Amy thinks is called fireweed. It was either beginning to go to seed or entirely gone (depending on the elevation) but it was pretty nevertheless.

Although there are a lot fewer people in Norway than in Switzerland “fjord country” is NOT a wilderness. There are farms scattered along the edges of the fjords and also above them – like around the lakes in Switzerland, just not as many. My dad spoke for all of us one day when he pointed to a seemingly inaccessible collection of farm buildings way in the distance, across the water, and asked “Whatever do you suppose would possess a guy to put his farm there?”

Norwegian barns and farm houses are typically kind of an earthy color of red (barn red . . . duh). The barns typically have two or three grain silos attached to one side and a sturdy permanent ramp for hauling in grain on the other side providing easy access to the second story.

Sod roofs are really common on all kinds of buildings – houses, roadside outhouses, bus stop shelters, etc, etc – and not just on older historic buildings, but brand new ones as well. Ivar assured us that sod roofs do NOT leak, but we didn’t think to ask him “What is the advantage of a sod roof?” It is cheap insulation? Low maintenance? Or just traditional?

There were also lots of slate roofs.
The pieces of slate were as big as two feet square and laid out in a diamond pattern.

The medieval Norwegian equivalent of a log cabin is a stave church. Stave churches are made out of planks instead of logs and the planks are vertical instead of horizontal, but otherwise the concept is similar. The planks are sealed with a thick coat of tar. Stave churches are typically ornamented with dragons (like the ones on Viking ships) which were supposed fight off evil spirits -- the Norwegian equivalent of a gargoyle? Among the few stave church that are still left is one in Lom which we stopped to see on our first day out from Lillehammer.

The roads in “fjord country” are theoretically two-way, but there is rarely any center stripe and the best way to deal with oncoming traffic is to pray that it doesn’t show up in the wrong place (of which there are many) and then be prepared to back up if it does. The roads are every bit as narrow and windy as the Amalfi Coast, just without the horrendous traffic. If you’ve driven the road to Hana on the island of Maui in Hawaii and didn’t like it, don’t drive in fjord country -- take a cruise! Again Amy volunteered to do most of the driving and no one argued with her. One of my dad’s most-repeated phrases when he is traveling with us in Europe is “I’m glad you folks are doing the driving.” I sat in the front passenger’s seat for most of the four days and took pictures out the windows as Amy drove. Amazingly, I can’t always tell for sure which pictures were taken with the car in motion and which during one of our many stops along the way.

Our basic routine for the four days we were in Norway involved

*hitting the road about 8:00AM
*driving until someone got the urge to stop and take pictures and soak in the scenery,
*eventually moving on but then stopping again when the next urge hit
*making sandwiches at lunchtime from the food we brought along
*looking for lodging when it seemed like the time to do that
*eating supper in a restaurant and then retiring to our cabin
*playing four handed pinochle until 10:00 or 11:00 PM

This last activity somehow turned out to be a highlight of the trip. One night at supper, Alan got us out of the restaurant by commenting that we were “cutting into our pinochle time.” Mike and Curt bowed out of this activity. Mike doesn’t particularly like to play cards. He was quite happy to hit the sack early.

Curt used to be a great card player but for some mysterious reason he has been turning down all opportunities to play for the past several years. Alan and Amy were new converts to the game, but became great strategists quite rapidly.

One day we broke the routine and went into Bergen for a few hours to do laundry and explore the harbor. Bergen was an interesting town. I wouldn’t have minded spending a little more time there. The open-air market at the harbor had basically two things for sale: (1) every imaginable variety of fish, either fresh or dried and (2) sweaters, hats, scarves, and mittens in every imaginable color and style.

One day we came across a rather large herd of goats along the road. As soon as we stopped the van and rolled down the windows to take pictures they came to visit us and we had a lot of fun observing and taking pictures.

We were in Scandinavia from Sept 8-16 and it was clearly off season. With the exception of our night in Lillehammer, we left Heidelberg without any lodging reservations. When we decided it was time to stop for the night, we just sort of found something. My only regret about this is that I wish we had had a cell phone with reasonable rates so that we could have done the “looking” a little more efficiently (My German cell phone works in other countries, but it is really expensive.) However, the problem was not that some places were full, it was that some places were closed for the season. I’m not sure what makes the tourist season so short in Norway – the weather in September was really nice and the length of the days was not significantly different than in Heidelberg – but I’m not complaining. It was nice to have the roads to ourselves. A few closed campgrounds is a small price to pay for that luxury.

Apparently they do get a lot of snow in Norway in the winter and fog is a big problem, but wind is not. Some cars have an extra of set of “headlights” that are specifically for fog. Also some stretches of highway are lined with streetlights – even stretches that are out away from the towns, in the middle of nowhere. My dad observed right away that these “fog lights” were mounted on really spindly polls – totally incapable of withstanding wind. Ivar was able to clarify that wind really isn’t an issue in Norway – which means also that roads don’t drift closed like they do in South Dakota and Wyoming.

One last little anecdote before I close. After we dropped Alan off at the airport in Copenhagen, we went into the touristy part of the city and found someplace to eat dinner. After dinner we went into a little ice cream shop. (European ice cream is in a whole other class from anything you can buy in the US and we seize every opportunity to partake of it.) In this little “Eis Cafe,” the shopkeeper’s son was taking care of customers while he was busy doing something in the back. This kid was incredible. He wasn’t Danish – Mike thinks Turkish maybe – and he couldn’t have been more than about 8 years old. To dip ice cream he had to stand tiptoe on a bench. Even then he had to use every inch of his reach to get to the containers that were farthest away. His dad came out to check on him at one point while he was waiting on us but there was no need to take over. When the kid was done serving all five of us, he rang up the bill on a cash register that was just below his eye level, took our money, returned our change and thanked us politely. Boy was I impressed! Does this sort of thing happen anywhere in the US anymore??? Or are we too busy sending your kids to school and teaching them to play the piano and do sports to give them the opportunity to be responsible and practice real life skills.

So that is our trip to Norway. I would like to go back again in the winter – to ski and to see the northern lights. Mike would like to go back and check out the Aurlandsdalen Valley -- Norway’s Grand Canyon according to one of our tour books. As we approach the end of our 3 years in Europe somehow it seems like our list of travel goals is getting longer not shorter. Now that we’ve seen the road between here and Norway, we will probably fly if we go again. Ryanair has some good rates to Oslo.

Stand by for my next travelogue on Budapest, followed by Belgium and then Northern Ireland. And feel free to post comments on this or any other travelogue. I changed the settings so that you no longer have to be a “registered user” to do that. Of course e-mails are always welcome, too.

Nancy

For more pictures of this trip go to

http://picasaweb.google.com/nancy.strohm?pli=1