On the train platform in Bergen, a man walked by with a sword half sticking out of his suitcase. Carrying swords on Norwegian trains is, I guess, perfectly fine. Maybe swords in Norway are something like firearms in the United States: The real problem is that not enough people carry them. That's why there's so much sword-related violence. And if someone comes at you with, say, a halberd, how else are you going to defend your family?
I sat behind a happy Norwegian family with little girls who played a Norwegian variant of pat-a-cake. Norwegian pat-a-cake is like other versions, except it never ends.
The Bergen-Oslo rail trip is spectacular. Towns of white wood houses spilling down green mountainsides. Reflecting-pool lakes and torrential rivers. Red boat sheds on blue glacial lakes. Little homes on tiny shelves of land between a mountain and a fjord. It's a landscape that, like Greece, sort of pushes you into the water. There is nowhere to expand to; you just slide off into the sea. Natural enough that Norwegians came to be seafarers and explorers.
The train climbs for a while, and stupendous landscapes flicker past between long tunnels. We spend some time at altitude: Mountain tarns, snowcaps, blue, lichen-covered rocks. Barren rubble fields with occasional neat wood houses, like another planet settled by the Amish. Rockfall netting above the tracks. A couple of tunnel-boring machines parked on the rails. Huge aprons of scree. A town called Ål. (There are also some villages just called Å.) This is one of the frustrations with train travel: I would have loved to get off and wander around any of the little mountain towns.
Around Oslo, there's green land that's not at a 45' angle, and it's clear why this seemed a more natural spot for a capital once dried fish and pillaging monasteries had ceased to be the economic mainstays. Oslo itself is new as European cities go, partly because of the Norwegian tradition of building things out of wood and the related Norwegian tradition of town-leveling fires.
In Oslo (and Bergen, and Stockholm), I've been staying in OK business-type hotels with breakfast buffets, which are great to have, but sort of dispiriting. The wet slap of cold scrambled eggs hitting plates, the polite jostling around the espresso machine, breakfast buffet veterans stopping in the middle of things to size up this particular buffet and plot their path through it, people bumping into each other with soft bumfs like low-speed blimp collisions. A hundred querulous complaints about the organization of their tour blending together into a kind of awful music.
In the early morning, the low-angle sun burns through the drapes like a death ray, so I hit the buffet and look around the city. Oslo has a grand European central square. Clipboard people who wear badges around their necks like magical amulets that give them the power to compel passersby to fill out surveys. Patriotic red white and blue public toilets standing in a row. Thomas-the-Tank-Engine trains for people worried that the usual red double decker sightseeing bus is too dignified. Statues of important national figures with seagulls resting on their heads. The national theatre, with a statue of Ibsen out front and another of what's probably another famous Norwegian playwright for symmetry. A piano in a wooden shed out in front of the university with someone inside playing. Someone else teaching himself the saxophone by playing 'Over the Rainbow'. Putting the final seal on the area's noteworthiness, a Hard Rock Cafe.
Oslo's fortress is called Akerhus, and it's so freshly-painted and its grounds so bench-lined that it's hard to visualize it in action. You imagine it being stormed by Disney characters, and no one gets hurt because something happens that teaches everyone a valuable lesson about friendship. High parapets with no guardrails, but with signs observing that letting your children run around on them might not be smart. Tourists lined up on crenellated battlements as though waiting to repel an attack of something equally silly.
Inside, the family ahead of me have worked out that they can all share one audio guide if they use it as a boombox. Slightly sparse rooms that make you wonder whether the roots of the austere Scandinavian aesthetic could lie partly in a certain historical lack of stuff.
From Oslo, I took a train to Stockholm.
I sat behind a happy Norwegian family with little girls who played a Norwegian variant of pat-a-cake. Norwegian pat-a-cake is like other versions, except it never ends.
The Bergen-Oslo rail trip is spectacular. Towns of white wood houses spilling down green mountainsides. Reflecting-pool lakes and torrential rivers. Red boat sheds on blue glacial lakes. Little homes on tiny shelves of land between a mountain and a fjord. It's a landscape that, like Greece, sort of pushes you into the water. There is nowhere to expand to; you just slide off into the sea. Natural enough that Norwegians came to be seafarers and explorers.
The train climbs for a while, and stupendous landscapes flicker past between long tunnels. We spend some time at altitude: Mountain tarns, snowcaps, blue, lichen-covered rocks. Barren rubble fields with occasional neat wood houses, like another planet settled by the Amish. Rockfall netting above the tracks. A couple of tunnel-boring machines parked on the rails. Huge aprons of scree. A town called Ål. (There are also some villages just called Å.) This is one of the frustrations with train travel: I would have loved to get off and wander around any of the little mountain towns.
Around Oslo, there's green land that's not at a 45' angle, and it's clear why this seemed a more natural spot for a capital once dried fish and pillaging monasteries had ceased to be the economic mainstays. Oslo itself is new as European cities go, partly because of the Norwegian tradition of building things out of wood and the related Norwegian tradition of town-leveling fires.
In Oslo (and Bergen, and Stockholm), I've been staying in OK business-type hotels with breakfast buffets, which are great to have, but sort of dispiriting. The wet slap of cold scrambled eggs hitting plates, the polite jostling around the espresso machine, breakfast buffet veterans stopping in the middle of things to size up this particular buffet and plot their path through it, people bumping into each other with soft bumfs like low-speed blimp collisions. A hundred querulous complaints about the organization of their tour blending together into a kind of awful music.
In the early morning, the low-angle sun burns through the drapes like a death ray, so I hit the buffet and look around the city. Oslo has a grand European central square. Clipboard people who wear badges around their necks like magical amulets that give them the power to compel passersby to fill out surveys. Patriotic red white and blue public toilets standing in a row. Thomas-the-Tank-Engine trains for people worried that the usual red double decker sightseeing bus is too dignified. Statues of important national figures with seagulls resting on their heads. The national theatre, with a statue of Ibsen out front and another of what's probably another famous Norwegian playwright for symmetry. A piano in a wooden shed out in front of the university with someone inside playing. Someone else teaching himself the saxophone by playing 'Over the Rainbow'. Putting the final seal on the area's noteworthiness, a Hard Rock Cafe.
Oslo's fortress is called Akerhus, and it's so freshly-painted and its grounds so bench-lined that it's hard to visualize it in action. You imagine it being stormed by Disney characters, and no one gets hurt because something happens that teaches everyone a valuable lesson about friendship. High parapets with no guardrails, but with signs observing that letting your children run around on them might not be smart. Tourists lined up on crenellated battlements as though waiting to repel an attack of something equally silly.
Inside, the family ahead of me have worked out that they can all share one audio guide if they use it as a boombox. Slightly sparse rooms that make you wonder whether the roots of the austere Scandinavian aesthetic could lie partly in a certain historical lack of stuff.
From Oslo, I took a train to Stockholm.
