We managed to catch an earlier train to Bergen than the one we had reservations for, and Jessica happened to also be on this train. I talked with her for a lot of the journey. We knew that Leonora and Thijs were also heading to Bergen next, but once we actually arrived in Bergen, we never saw any of these people again. Oh well, that’s what email is for!

I think the first evening we arrived, we just collapsed at the hostel. There was another actual kitchen that had pretty much everything (except a grater, somehow?) including a bunch of spices in the ‘shared’ cupboard. While Martijn checked that out, I went to the common room, where I’d heard there were amusements. I was wondering if there would be a piano…

And there was! So I sat down and started playing. It was a terrible piano with no tonal subtlety, no working una corda, and no dynamic nuance besides ‘loud’ and ‘louder’, but it had 88 mostly-in-tune keys.

Martijn: *in kitchen* I hear a piano. I should tell Jen… wait a minute… Continue reading →

This is the part everyone’s been waiting to hear about, partly because it’s the part most out of character for me. When I first told my parents, my mom was like “but you don’t even like camping” which is totally true… unless I’m the one who’s decided to go camping, apparently. And partly because holy freakin cowbells, Norway’s nature is nature at its finest. Anyway, we started out with a train from Oslo to Myrdal. (warning: longer post is even longer)

It wasn’t long before we started seeing patches of snow. At first we were thinking ‘that snow must be in shadow all day’ but then… I’m not seeing a whole lot of shadow in this picture, yes? Continue reading →

The first three days of my trip were spent in Oslo. The Oslo Pass Card gave us free admission to museums, free public transport (although the city isn’t that big, you can walk to most of the stuff), and if you get the 3-day version (we did), the mini-cruise around the bay is also free. So we used it. (beware: long post is long)

Technically, you’ve already seen Day 1 in the last post. So I don’t know if it was technically cost-effective, because we didn’t really go see anything on that day… but for the other two days, it was definitely worth it to not have to worry about paying for things besides food, just wave the cards at people and get let into things. We found this statue on the way to our first museum, Akershus Castle. Continue reading →

So as many of you may know, I went to the other side of the planet in search of foreign lands, adventure, blond Dutchmen, and “mountains, Gandalf, mountains!”. Found all of ’em and here is the photo-evidence.

Plane from Toronto to Reykjavik (and from thence to Oslo). Icelandair had the best deal pricewise (and I got to watch the Lego Movie on the way there!). I did have a brief stopover in Reykjavik both on the way there and back, but the way there was too short to do anything and the way back I was too tired to do anything more than sleep on an airport bench. Continue reading →