I have made it to Stavanger! My escape from Copenhagen was a real fiasco, my worst experience with trains in recent memory. My problems started as soon as I left my hostel, when the bus to the train station took thirty minutes rather than fifteen to get there. When I got to the train station, I learned that every train to Malmo that morning had been cancelled due to a "problem with the signatures"; nobody there knew when the next one would be leaving. Eventually, after switching platforms a few times, I was able to board a train to Malmo, though it was one of the passengers, not a train official, as there were none of them in sight, who told me that the train would be going in that direction. The train was not literally full, as more of us could have fit into it if we had been stacked on one another, but we were standing elbow-to-elbow, with nothing to hang on to but one another's luggage for balance, as the train finally left the platform, perhaps fifteen minutes after I had gotten onto it.
The ride in the train was not actually that bad once we started moving. I was fairly certain that I would be late for my connection from Malmo to Copenhagen and would have to negotiate another ticket, and there was nothing that I could do about it. My neighbor in the train, a double bass player with facial piercings, described the music scene in Copenhagen, Malmo, and Gothenburg, where he was from, and told me the fastest way to get to the main hall of the train station as I was leaving.
As soon as I was in Malmo -- as soon as I had left Denmark -- everything was fine. A very kind railway employee gave me a new ticket for Stockholm on account of the technical problems in Copenhagen despite the Swedes' having a different rail company from the Danes, and I was soon on my way to Stockholm.
The Swedish countryside abounded in dense woodlands, isolated farmsteads, gently-sloping hills, and, more than anything else, water; when we were not crossing a river or moving next to one, some part of the sea or a sound was often visible. We passed groves of pine, and cedar, and young birch, simple, solid houses, and stone churches. The kind old man in the seat next to me talked about his previous travels with me, making a drive through the north of Finland, Sweden, and Norway sound especially interesting, and was able to tell me about the various industries driving many of the cities that we passed.
I will, as usual, have to truncate some of my descriptions: Stockholm is the most extraordinary city that I have seen on this trip. I did not get to see much of it on the day of my arrival, as it was almost dinnertime when I arrived, but I was immediately struck by its clean streets, modernity, and drivers who followed traffic laws. The man sitting next to me in the train had told me how architecturally varied the town hall was, and he had recommended that I visit the Vasa Museum, which contains the only fully-preserved 17th-century ship in Europe. When I looked at a city map in the evening and saw that an entire island in Stockholm was a reconstructed 19th-century village, I realized that Stockholm had way more than I could see in one day, and I decided to skip Drottninghom Palace, which I had expected to be one of Stockholm's few highlights, in order to focus on its historic center and surrounding neighborhoods.
Stockholm is a city of 100 museums and at least as many churches. I started my day yesterday by visiting a church, at which I happened upon a free concert performed by the best pianist whom I had ever heard live; she played pieces by Brahms and Ravel, the best that I had heard in concert besides the Shostakovich piece that I heard in Moscow three years ago. I met the pianist's mother, a Russian emigre next to whom I had happened to sit down, and then the pianist herself; we exchanged contact information, and they told me about the two Slavonic churches in Stockholm, one of which was going to have a service that very morning. As I left the church, a local saw me looking at my map and asked if I needed help finding something, completing the city's conquering of my heart.
I spent the next few hours wandering through Stockholm's historic center. Its old town is well-preserved and chock full of museums, and the city, it turns out, is not ultra-modern entirely by choice. Numerous conflagrations from the Middle Ages onward gutted the city of most of its historic buildings, but even so it breathes its history. One of its many islands, which appeared at first to have little more than a few museums and some trees, was connected to the mainland by the city's oldest wrought iron bridge, and it had a whole collection of early 20th-century boats on display with plaques explaining their historic importance. I was already tiring as I left that island after only a few hours of walking; I was wearied by the sun; and so I only took a short walk through a museum district before heading back to my hostel, having seen only a little bit of Stockholm and very interested in coming back.
Stockholm is a city of order, sea breeze, and cultural riches. I would love to return to it with a little more time and enough money to see some of the museums, none of which I saw the other day, as I had little time and no money beyond what I would need for groceries and a ticket to the airport. Stockholm had too many cars downtown and too few pedestrian walkways between bridges; I got free bread at the church in which I heard the concert; and its youth, according to the Russian emigre with whom I spoke, fiercely resist their parents' traditions and are badly educated. I could never have guessed, based on what I read about Stockholm and the pictures of it that I saw, that the city would be so fascinating, just as I could not have guessed how much Copenhagen would suck. The level of incompetence of its rail employees, impossibility of finding any useful information in its train stations, and ineffectuality of its transport system vastly exceeded that which I had seen in any other country besides Slovenia, in which people at least knew what to do when things broke down, as they break down daily. Thankfully, I will be able to avoid Denmark entirely in the future, and I should be able to visit Stockholm again due to knowing people in and relatively near it, as well as potentially being able to spend a month working at the University of Uppsala within the next few years. This was one of those visits in which I was delighted to have had a taste of the place that I was visiting, as I tasted the food in Angers, rather than disappointed that I could not stay for longer (or, in the case of Denmark, skip the place entirely -- who knew?).
My trip to Stavanger was relatively easy, though it proved that even the Norwegians are not invincible. My flight was delayed by a few minutes, a technical problem prevented our leaving the plane for a few minutes when we arrived, and the luggage belt stopped moving for a bit when I arrived at the airport in Oslo. The Norwegians have an idiotic system of flying within the country: rather than giving one all of the boarding passes that one will need to reach one's destination and checking one's luggage in such that it will automatically reach one's final destination, they make one pick up one's luggage in the airport in which one has a layover, check back in, and pass through security again. On the plus side, they are excellently staffed, and, just like in all of our stereotypes, the vast majority of its staff members are blond.
My flight from Oslo to Stavanger was the best of my life. Much of the landscape between the two cities looked uninhabitable. Barren, rocky ridges ribbed with snow eventually gave way to barren, rocky ridges with a little tree covering, which, in turn, became plateaus speckled with little towns. The area just east of Stavanger is composed largely of small, separate islands and mountains lumbering out of the water, misty and heavy blue. By the time one reaches the Stavanger airport, one is flying over a fairly standard-looking, small city with barely even a hill in sight; the residents of western Norway built their cities, naturally, in the only places in which it was possible for them to thrive.
Stavanger itself was a pleasant town with such signs of its past as the old warehouses in which people worked when it was a major port, the building used for customs, its defensive tower, and its cathedral. People here are friendly and helpful; my hotel was easy to find; the center of the city is on a lake and rings with the cries of seagulls; and, to my horror, groceries were reasonably priced. I wanted to find something further to carp about, but I was able to find enough groceries for three or four days (in addition to the bread that I brought from Stockholm) for a little over thirty dollars. The tourist information center was easy to find, and I arranged to take the two hikes that I had planned over the next two days. The only thing that I am likely to miss on this trip is Norway's most famous crag, the Troll's Tongue, which will probably be too far form Bergen to be doable as a day-trip. I will probably do a different, more accessible day-hike from Bergen when I am there; it is not the greatest loss in the world.
Norway so far seems like an idyll to me, though it is too expensive to visit a second time (even ignoring the reasonableness, or seeming reasonableness, of grocery prices), and it would be impossible to live here if one had not grown up here, I should think. One of the most interesting things that I have seen here was a heavy metal concert taking place in the gazebo outside of the cathedral, on the edge of the lake, just after dinnertime. People played Frisbee right next to it or strolled by, while families sat on benches or on blankets on the grass listening as though it were an ordinary way to spend a Thursday evening. I have met several more very nice Australian tourists and, today, a tourist from Seattle; every reminder of home is like gold to me. The cost of transportation for the hikes that I will be taking over the next two days is not actually any more than that of taking public transport to Whistler and back and skiing for a day, to be honest, and it might be cheaper than driving, as gas here is reported to cost $10 per gallon. I saw a chapel in the Oslo airport, which had free restrooms, though the stewardesses walked down the aisle trying to sell people water on the way to Stavanger. I will not have the chance to write over the next few days, as I need to catch up on sleep and want to take advantage, to that end, of being in a very nice hotel. I may, ironically, end up with more Norwegian kroner than I will need, but only time will tell. Finally, I am running out of things to read, but I have enough to last until London, which will have overpriced bookstores coming out of its ears.
The ride in the train was not actually that bad once we started moving. I was fairly certain that I would be late for my connection from Malmo to Copenhagen and would have to negotiate another ticket, and there was nothing that I could do about it. My neighbor in the train, a double bass player with facial piercings, described the music scene in Copenhagen, Malmo, and Gothenburg, where he was from, and told me the fastest way to get to the main hall of the train station as I was leaving.
As soon as I was in Malmo -- as soon as I had left Denmark -- everything was fine. A very kind railway employee gave me a new ticket for Stockholm on account of the technical problems in Copenhagen despite the Swedes' having a different rail company from the Danes, and I was soon on my way to Stockholm.
The Swedish countryside abounded in dense woodlands, isolated farmsteads, gently-sloping hills, and, more than anything else, water; when we were not crossing a river or moving next to one, some part of the sea or a sound was often visible. We passed groves of pine, and cedar, and young birch, simple, solid houses, and stone churches. The kind old man in the seat next to me talked about his previous travels with me, making a drive through the north of Finland, Sweden, and Norway sound especially interesting, and was able to tell me about the various industries driving many of the cities that we passed.
I will, as usual, have to truncate some of my descriptions: Stockholm is the most extraordinary city that I have seen on this trip. I did not get to see much of it on the day of my arrival, as it was almost dinnertime when I arrived, but I was immediately struck by its clean streets, modernity, and drivers who followed traffic laws. The man sitting next to me in the train had told me how architecturally varied the town hall was, and he had recommended that I visit the Vasa Museum, which contains the only fully-preserved 17th-century ship in Europe. When I looked at a city map in the evening and saw that an entire island in Stockholm was a reconstructed 19th-century village, I realized that Stockholm had way more than I could see in one day, and I decided to skip Drottninghom Palace, which I had expected to be one of Stockholm's few highlights, in order to focus on its historic center and surrounding neighborhoods.
Stockholm is a city of 100 museums and at least as many churches. I started my day yesterday by visiting a church, at which I happened upon a free concert performed by the best pianist whom I had ever heard live; she played pieces by Brahms and Ravel, the best that I had heard in concert besides the Shostakovich piece that I heard in Moscow three years ago. I met the pianist's mother, a Russian emigre next to whom I had happened to sit down, and then the pianist herself; we exchanged contact information, and they told me about the two Slavonic churches in Stockholm, one of which was going to have a service that very morning. As I left the church, a local saw me looking at my map and asked if I needed help finding something, completing the city's conquering of my heart.
I spent the next few hours wandering through Stockholm's historic center. Its old town is well-preserved and chock full of museums, and the city, it turns out, is not ultra-modern entirely by choice. Numerous conflagrations from the Middle Ages onward gutted the city of most of its historic buildings, but even so it breathes its history. One of its many islands, which appeared at first to have little more than a few museums and some trees, was connected to the mainland by the city's oldest wrought iron bridge, and it had a whole collection of early 20th-century boats on display with plaques explaining their historic importance. I was already tiring as I left that island after only a few hours of walking; I was wearied by the sun; and so I only took a short walk through a museum district before heading back to my hostel, having seen only a little bit of Stockholm and very interested in coming back.
Stockholm is a city of order, sea breeze, and cultural riches. I would love to return to it with a little more time and enough money to see some of the museums, none of which I saw the other day, as I had little time and no money beyond what I would need for groceries and a ticket to the airport. Stockholm had too many cars downtown and too few pedestrian walkways between bridges; I got free bread at the church in which I heard the concert; and its youth, according to the Russian emigre with whom I spoke, fiercely resist their parents' traditions and are badly educated. I could never have guessed, based on what I read about Stockholm and the pictures of it that I saw, that the city would be so fascinating, just as I could not have guessed how much Copenhagen would suck. The level of incompetence of its rail employees, impossibility of finding any useful information in its train stations, and ineffectuality of its transport system vastly exceeded that which I had seen in any other country besides Slovenia, in which people at least knew what to do when things broke down, as they break down daily. Thankfully, I will be able to avoid Denmark entirely in the future, and I should be able to visit Stockholm again due to knowing people in and relatively near it, as well as potentially being able to spend a month working at the University of Uppsala within the next few years. This was one of those visits in which I was delighted to have had a taste of the place that I was visiting, as I tasted the food in Angers, rather than disappointed that I could not stay for longer (or, in the case of Denmark, skip the place entirely -- who knew?).
My trip to Stavanger was relatively easy, though it proved that even the Norwegians are not invincible. My flight was delayed by a few minutes, a technical problem prevented our leaving the plane for a few minutes when we arrived, and the luggage belt stopped moving for a bit when I arrived at the airport in Oslo. The Norwegians have an idiotic system of flying within the country: rather than giving one all of the boarding passes that one will need to reach one's destination and checking one's luggage in such that it will automatically reach one's final destination, they make one pick up one's luggage in the airport in which one has a layover, check back in, and pass through security again. On the plus side, they are excellently staffed, and, just like in all of our stereotypes, the vast majority of its staff members are blond.
My flight from Oslo to Stavanger was the best of my life. Much of the landscape between the two cities looked uninhabitable. Barren, rocky ridges ribbed with snow eventually gave way to barren, rocky ridges with a little tree covering, which, in turn, became plateaus speckled with little towns. The area just east of Stavanger is composed largely of small, separate islands and mountains lumbering out of the water, misty and heavy blue. By the time one reaches the Stavanger airport, one is flying over a fairly standard-looking, small city with barely even a hill in sight; the residents of western Norway built their cities, naturally, in the only places in which it was possible for them to thrive.
Stavanger itself was a pleasant town with such signs of its past as the old warehouses in which people worked when it was a major port, the building used for customs, its defensive tower, and its cathedral. People here are friendly and helpful; my hotel was easy to find; the center of the city is on a lake and rings with the cries of seagulls; and, to my horror, groceries were reasonably priced. I wanted to find something further to carp about, but I was able to find enough groceries for three or four days (in addition to the bread that I brought from Stockholm) for a little over thirty dollars. The tourist information center was easy to find, and I arranged to take the two hikes that I had planned over the next two days. The only thing that I am likely to miss on this trip is Norway's most famous crag, the Troll's Tongue, which will probably be too far form Bergen to be doable as a day-trip. I will probably do a different, more accessible day-hike from Bergen when I am there; it is not the greatest loss in the world.
Norway so far seems like an idyll to me, though it is too expensive to visit a second time (even ignoring the reasonableness, or seeming reasonableness, of grocery prices), and it would be impossible to live here if one had not grown up here, I should think. One of the most interesting things that I have seen here was a heavy metal concert taking place in the gazebo outside of the cathedral, on the edge of the lake, just after dinnertime. People played Frisbee right next to it or strolled by, while families sat on benches or on blankets on the grass listening as though it were an ordinary way to spend a Thursday evening. I have met several more very nice Australian tourists and, today, a tourist from Seattle; every reminder of home is like gold to me. The cost of transportation for the hikes that I will be taking over the next two days is not actually any more than that of taking public transport to Whistler and back and skiing for a day, to be honest, and it might be cheaper than driving, as gas here is reported to cost $10 per gallon. I saw a chapel in the Oslo airport, which had free restrooms, though the stewardesses walked down the aisle trying to sell people water on the way to Stavanger. I will not have the chance to write over the next few days, as I need to catch up on sleep and want to take advantage, to that end, of being in a very nice hotel. I may, ironically, end up with more Norwegian kroner than I will need, but only time will tell. Finally, I am running out of things to read, but I have enough to last until London, which will have overpriced bookstores coming out of its ears.
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| This is part of downtown Stockholm -- I cannot remember which part. |
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