Noway or Norway

Like I said, I stole the pictures off facebook from Conor and Bruna so here they are:

You may ask yourself why so many of the boat pictures are only me or Conor, in otherwords.... where are the other tourists.... well it was a bit nippy this day so everyone stayed in the warm cabin of the boat including Bruna and Miguel, but Conor and I stayed on deck.... Im glad we did though because it really wasnt too cold and there was beautiful scenery all around.... like this picture for example (one of my favorites)

So for this one above, it may look very plain/uneventful but the first night we were in Oslo and the biggest building in the whole city happened to be a hotel with a giant glass elevator on the side. We snuck into the Hotel and searched everywhere to find how to ride the elevator.... we ended up sneaking past the bar on the top floor to find this employees only room and it had THE elevator in it..... we were so thrilled, and we got to see all of Oslo on the way down.

Norway: built fjord tough!

 This weekend I spent it in one of the most breathtaking places a person can have the pleasure of visiting.... beautiful Norway. One may ask oneself, Christen, why did you choose to travel to Norway out of all places? Well that is a very good question. It almost happened by accident. Towards the end of my orientation course, some people began to travel, and being a curious person I looked at some of the cheaper options, and it just so happened one could buy round trip tickets to Oslo for a mere 27 euros round trip. But who to go with? While talking with my friend Conor, who is studying right now in Granada, about where he was planning on going, he informed me that there were cheap flight tickets for him as well to Oslo the very same weekend, and really, who wouldnt want to go to Noway? After recruiting Bruna and Miguel, plans were made to go to Oslo and Bergen with two goals in mind 1)to see the fjords and 2) to see the northern lights (if possible).

We arrived at Oslo at about 4 in the afternoon on Friday, but the sun was already set (the negatives of travelling north in winter time), but we got a good look at Oslo. It is a nice city. I was surprised that as soon as you got off the plane, you felt like you were in Norway. Everything was so stereotypical Norwegian. Conor had taken a flight the day earlier, so got to see more of Oslo, and he told me there is a park with status of people helping out one another, the socialist way. One may also wonder if the language was a barrier at all, in fact it was not, Norway is one of the most english friendly countries in Europe. 

My inner Viking!

Norway's port

University of Oslo's Law school!

There are a lot of british and american influences, most notably that we could see were the restaurants, I think I saw around 6 TGI Fridays in Norway.

Me being a viking again

Found a touch of Germany in Norway!

Here you can see the Opera House, which was structurally really cool, it was right on the harbor and built so that you could walk up the sides to the top (the walls were slanted as you can kind of see)

View from the top of the Opera house

So at 11:00pm we hoped on an overnight train to Bergen, which is really a shame because it is supposed to be the best views in the world from this train, however it was about a fourth of the price to go at night, and since it was a 7 hour trip, it helped to be able to sleep the whole time. 

Here is us arriving at Bergen at 7am!! And boy did it feel early!

Conor had stayed the night in Bergen, so we went to pick him up and hit the Fjords. We ended up picking a tour that Rick Steves recommends, which I was kind of against, mostly because it was supposed to be expensive, but it actually turned out to be quite affordable since we are students and since we may or may not have sneaked our way into the boat ride without paying (the student discount makes it so that you buy all of the tickets for the trains, bus, boats separate, but all of the other people in the tour had bought it as a package so they just ended up not charging us for the boat). It was a full day experience that I would not have traded for any other, good job Rick Steves!

These trolls were everywhere, I am assuming they are some part of Norwegian folklore.

After taking the bus an hour or so, we arrived at the fjords, it is really breathtaking to walk around in the middle of a steep valley with waterfalls all around you and a thick layer of fog. I think it would have been the most beautiful place I have ever been to in my life and no picture that I took can really capture the beauty. 

Here is a picture we took from the dock. What the pictures cannot describe was how green the scenery is! every rock was curved like it had been sculpted by water with tons of lichens and other greenery growing on it. The water was completely crystal clear, and we could see star fish living at the bottom!

Dont know what I am trying to do here...

They had a place that did wood carvings and all of these boats were lined up next to it... like I said, even if no one would have told me I was in Norway, there is no way to escape the Norwegian feeling of everything.

Here you can really see the height of the fjord, and the beauty

Here we are on the boat. All of the towns we passed were very, very small. These fjords are rated on of the most unspoiled tourist destinations in the world, and one can really feel that. We were the only boat on the waterway and it really did feel as if we were discovering an uncharted land. The narrator was telling us that in one of the villages similar to the one above they are known for living a very long time, and they attribute it to the drinking water. I will say, the drinking water tastes very very good in Norway. I was filling up my water bottle multiple times a day, and not just because I was thirsty

Here is me and Conor on the boat in front of the Norwegian flag

Panoramic video!

An upper section of the fjord

Here is one of my favorites. Bruna complained a lot that the fog made the tour less enjoyable, but I completely disagree, I think that it made it even more majestic. 

We docked in a very remote-feeling town called Flam, there we got to explore a little bit before taking a train up into the mountain.... we took this opportunity to take more pictures and explore the waterfront rather than eat in the rather pricey cafeteria.

The pic above is one of my favorites that I took the whole time (Marbles 2 mom?) 

On the train up the mountain, they stopped one time to let us get out and take pictures by this waterfall, once again, you really dont get the feel of it by these pictures, right in front of us was the train and after the train was a 200 m dropoff straight down.

this is the view from the stop, you can see the train tracks right below me.

From here we got to take the train back to Bergen, which was right along the fjords the whole way. Really really stunning.

Here is a small clip that I took while on the train

Here was a slogan that I feel like represented our trip, it was hanging in Merken Gjesthus, where we stayed.

Sunday we woke up with the sunrise at about 9:00 to walk around Bergen. These houses are known as Bryggen, which were originally built in the 12th century, and remain some of Europe's oldest wooden houses. They smelled quite lovely if I do say so myself.

We took a cable car to the top of one of the mountains to get an incredible view....

Here is Bergen from above!!

We decided to hike back down, which then turned into off-trail hiking because it was more fun.

Here I am in Bryggen!

Looking in the supermarket for some dinner, and found tubes of meat... yummmm (sarcastic)

At 11pm we went on the train back to Oslo and then from there to the airport. I realized that I didnt take quite as many photos as I thought I did, but when Conor and Bruna put pictures up on Facebook of the trip, I will make another blog with theirs too! Just got back home after travelling  all day and all last night, so I am going to hit the hay. Takk!