Oslo

Last weekend, we went to Oslo. This was a particularly exciting adventure, since neither of us had been to Norway before. As much as possible, we try to avoid places that one of us has been to. (But see Loire Valley vacation, to come next week). We love exploring new places together and trying to figure it all out for the first time.

And Oslo is a pretty cool place. I especially appreciated it as an amateur architectural aficionado. Oslo presents an extraordinary diversity of building styles, and they seem to construct very few low-quality structures.

Oslo City Hall

The Nobel Peace Prize museum

Housing on the fjords

Oslo would also appeal to any nature-lover. Although it was cold and rainy the entire time we were in Norway, the landscapes were still wonderful. The trees were changing, and there were a lot of leaves to change.

Vigelandsparken, in Frogner Park

The trees seem to only turn yellow, never red.

We really wanted to see the Norwegian fjords while we were there. Unfortunately, almost all of the boat trips shut down at the end of August, so we had only had one tour to choose from. We were wondering why on earth the Norwegians would close down one of their major tourist attractions when there were clearly still at least some tourists visiting, and we quickly learned the answer. It is COLD in Norway after September.

The boat provided multiple blankets per passenger. I might have gotten frostbite without this provision.

Although we shivered the whole way, we learned a surprising amount about Norwegian geography. Fjords, which are basically just inlets surrounded by big mountains, are formed not just by water carving out the rock, but by huge tectonic shifts in the rock bed.

Check out the ripples in the rock. This kind of rock is formed by sedimentary deposits under pressure. After  the rocks were formed in flat layers (like pancakes stacked on top of each other), the moving plates floating around on magma wrinkled and turned all of the layers.

A good rule of thumb with fjords is that the inlets are as deep as the mountains are tall. The mountains around Oslo aren't terribly tall, so the fjords we went on weren't as impressive, comparatively speaking. I still thought they were really cool.

It's not a huge cliff face, but it's still beautiful. This fjord has no reason to feel inadequate

The Norwegians also think the fjords around Oslo are pretty cool. The country's most expensive real estate is on the banks of the fjords.

You can't afford this house.

By the way, saying something is "the most expensive ___ in Norway" is quite a statement. The country is very pricey. This is mostly attributable to Norway's massive oil wealth and its refusal to join the Euro zone. At $62,000/year, Norway has the third-highest national per capita income. So the Norwegians walk around loaded with money and consider a $40 meal to be super cheap.

An artist's description of Norwegians walking among peasant Euro-zone members. (Not really)

Remarkably, though, the royal family of Norway doesn't possess vast stores of wealth. Perhaps this is due to the recent re-emergence of the Norwegian monarchy. The Norwegians elected a king in 1905. Or maybe they just find massive royal wealth tacky.

The palace of King Harold V. It's no Versailles

 Can I sell of my share of the Nobel Peace Prize to help pay for this trip? Here, I took it upon myself to accept a [chocolate] medal on behalf of all Europeans. It was delicious.

My favorite free entertainment in Oslo was Vigelandsparken, a sculpture garden filled by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland. Vigeland was pretty cool. In these works, he works exclusively with the human form, creating structures and scenes out of nude figures. Some are funny, some are intimate, and some are just innovative.

Through the bars, you can see a pillar made of humans.

If done properly, a visit to Vigelandsparken is highly interactive.

 

 "Vigelanding," similar to "planking," is taking off in some parts of Europe. Specifically, anywhere that Catherine is. The goal is to make all of the other tourists give you funny looks and then imitate you.

Lastly, no trip to the land of the Vikings is complete without a trip to the Viking Museum. The museum contains three well-preserved ships and three well-preserved Viking skeletons. I was most surprised by how sophisticated Viking culture was, given my stereotypes about Viking invasions. I don't think the museum did a good job of portraying them as gentle, though. The museum said, "But the Vikings didn't just pillage and rape and kill.  Occasionally, they also farmed the land after conquering it."

When you see this, you know your village is doomed.

Closeup of the bow of the Viking ship.

Viking shoes! Perfect for plundering.

We spent a full weekend in Oslo, but I still felt like there was much more to see. If I ever save up enough money, it's a city I'd love to go back to. If you already have money and are considering the trip, there's no reason to hesitate. Everyone in Oslo spoke perfect English, and the city was easy to navigate.

By the way, I've added a lot of links to this post for people like me who always want to learn more about what they read. Let me know what you think!

Traveling by train in France

One of the greatest things about living in Europe is the ease of travel. France has a wonderful network of railroads that connect seamlessly to the tracks in other European countries. Thanks to high-speed rail (Trains de Grand Vitesse, or TGV), it's possible to hop to another country in a couple of hours.

Travelling by train in Europe is amazing. It is a wonderful and pleasant experience. It's cheap, and it's fast.

This is a picture depicting how exciting it is to take the trains in France:

OMG I'm so freaking excited about train travel!!

"But we have Amtrak!" you say. No. Amtrak is terrible.  One time I took an Amtrak train from Boston to New York. Without explanation, they dropped all 400 passengers on a random local service platform in northern Connecticut. We had to find our way home on our own without any help from the company, and Amtrak didn't automatically issue refunds for the tickets.  (To their credit, they did issue a voucher after I sent them three nasty emails.) Also, Amtrak doesn't offer direct service between the majority of U.S. cities.

So, how do you take the train in France? First, show up at the train station ON TIME. I am not good at this. On a recent trip to Strasbourg, I had a lot of time to sit around and take pictures because I missed my train by two minutes. It was long gone from the platform.

Oooh look at the pretty ceilings. Seriously, is my train here yet?

Incidentally, the era of massively increased state funding for train travel has coincided with the era of thinking that 18th-century buildings were sooo passé and the cool thing for the next two centuries would definitely be super-modern glass architecture. A lot of the train stations look like they'd make really good spaceships.

When SNCF starts offering service to space, I want to fly out of here.

Second, find your train's quai assignment. Because you're in a country with an awesome train system, there's probably more than one train going to your destination today. Don't get all enthusiastic and jump on the earliest train you see. You'll have to buy a new ticket if you do.

Picture from http://www.jug-muenster.de

Third very important step: you must "composter le billet" by sticking your train ticket into a little yellow machine to be stamped. Like many things in France, this is entirely an administrative redundancy. They check your ticket on board and clip it then, so you're not going to get by using a ticket twice. And as mentioned before, you'll probably have to buy a new ticket if you hop on an earlier or later train, so refusing to time-stamp your ticket isn't going to get you far. But the French love their administrative redundancies, so they impose a fine on everyone who forgets to stick their tickets in the machines.

This machine works 35 hours per week and can't be fired.

Fourth: get on the train! The trains are shaped like bullets because they go really fast. SNCF, the French national rail company, holds a number of high-speed records using these trains. Yours will probably go about 300 km/h though. That makes it the world's fastest passenger rail system.

Currently not zooming. 

It's always nice to have a window seat, but it isn't really helpful when the train is going 300 km/h. Unless you're a really big fan of blurry French countryside. On second thought, maybe it would be really fun to sit by the window if you were an amateur impressionist painter.

"Landscape Auvers-sur-Oise" by French impressionist painter Auguste Renoir. Alternative title: "View out my window on the train from Amiens to Paris"

So enjoy your aisle seat and your massive legroom. Look, the person in front of you can't lean his seat back into your face!

 

Not getting smushed.

Last step: enjoy your trip and arrive refreshed at your destination! Or, if that's not your thing, drink to your heart's content in the café car.

Returning from Champagne on the TGV.

One final tip: although the ride is generally quite smooth, it's much harder to balance on the train after a few glasses of champagne.

How is Paris?

That's the question people keep asking me.   Maybe I'm a bit jaded, but living in Paris isn't terribly different than anywhere else I've lived.  There are a lot of subtle differences.  There are pluses and minuses, but nothing that makes miles better than anywhere else, nor worse.

There are some pros.  Paris itself is very pretty.  They put a lot of work into keeping it clean (despite the fact that a lot of people think it's acceptable to pee in the street when they're drunk and it's late).  They have these tiny little street sweepers that get into tiny passages and on the sidewalks.  They come by about once a week.

The view outside our window.

It's also nice living with Catherine.  We did long distance for almost three years.  It was nice getting to have our own friends, but it made it hard to save money ($420 in transportation every 8-12 weeks for 16 months total), put a lot of miles on my car (about 20000 in the year she was at Rice and another 5000 or so in the years after that), and used up most of my vacation time (my last vacation longer than 4 days was November 2009).

On the plus side though, I don't have to drive in traffic here.  I can take the Metro wherever I want in Paris and train to anywhere in France and nearby surrounding countries.  We're going to Brussels this weekend via train for $50pp each way.

 Seven years ago, Jeremy Grace told me to do this.  I've never consciously tried to do it, but I apparently have.  And now I'm in Paris.

Communication has been a mixed bag.  People are willing to try to communicate with me through hand motions, air drawings, etc.  They're always more patient than I am; I usually give up before looking up the words I need.  However, there's one thing that I just don't get: when I say, "Je ne parle pas le Français" ("I don't speak French") I am often met with more French spoken more rapidly.  Maybe they think if they keep talking, I'll suddenly reveal hidden French skills. They seem to keep their English skills hidden: when I ask a French preson, "Parlez-vous anglais?" ("Do you speak English?"), they will often say no but can magically later produce perfect sentences in English when they see how bad my French is.  Michael Watson told me that it's usually much better to ask, "Comprenez-vous anglais?" ("Do you understand English?") because they're much more likely to reveal how much they know and how much they can produce.

Cotton candy is understood to mean "happiness" in any culture.

Other forms of communication are great: my cell phone service is 20€ per month ($25-$27) and includes free unlimited calls to the US. Fiber internet is included in the rent.

Of course, if you know me, you know I have a bird.  She's here too, so I'm happy about that.  She's a bit cool to Catherine (cue Catherine describing it as hatred) since Elissa is so bonded to me, but she's getting better.

Elissa maintaining maximum distance from Catherine.

I suppose that's all for now.  At least I have another person here to take photos of me.  When I got back from Italy in December 2006, my dad said to me, "We're not really sure you were actually in Italy -- in your thousands of photos, there are none of you!"  Here's proof I'm here:

Me in front of the Élysée Palace.