Just got here via train from Norway, after a lovely day and a half in Oslo. My couchsurfer Matthias met me at the tourist center and led me back to his dorm-style apartment, where we enjoyed a dinner of spaghetti. I haven't really noticed until now how much I have been missing pasta (not a quintessentially French food) but boy, was that spaghetti good. He also had tortilla chips and salsa, which is something else I've never seen in my local Monoprix, so I ate half the bag and it tasted like America. Mmm. Matthias provided interesting company since he is not, in fact, Norweigan-- he's a German post-high school student doing social service work as a kindergarten teacher in Oslo before college.
"Do you speak Norweigan at all?" he asked.
"No, not at all."
"German?"
"Uh, well I took it for two years when I was little, but all I can remember is how to count to eleven, the word for father, and 'I am eight years old.'"
He looked at me dubiously.
"That last part is slightly outdated now," I clarified uselessly.
After dinner, some kid named Robert poked his head through the window (literally) and joined me and Matthias for some TV viewing. Actually it was really me who was joining them, since they apparently get together every night for a religious viewing of Friends.
Yes, Friends, which they watch with German subtitles. "Do you speak German?" asked Robert.
"No," I said apologetically.
"She learned it for two years!" Matthias contributed.
"Then we can all speak German!" exclaimed Robert.
It took considerable effort to explain, again, that the two years of instruction had faded into nothingness, but the boys seemed unwilling to believe me. "Typical American!" said Matthias jocularly. "Knows another language but doesn't want to speak anything but English!"
Eventually we stopped making fun of my language failures and watched our show. Matthias and Robert are up to season 3 and never miss a night.
"Sorry," Matthias apologized to me as he loaded the DVD into his laptop. "We cannot cancel the Friends just because there is a guest."
Fair enough. Robert asked me a few polite questions about the States, but conversation more or less ceased when he admitted that he had no idea where Michigan was. "Near Canada?" I ventured. "Surrounded by lakes? Looks like a mitten?"
"I don't really know my U.S. geography," he said with a shrug. Considering I didn't know where Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia were until I traveled there last week, I guess I can't fault him for it.
So that was the first night. The next morning I set out on a condensed tour of Oslo, since my train to Gothenburg left at 6. I walked to the Munch museum, which was really cool but didn't have The Scream on display, which was pretty much the whole reason I wanted to go. Apparently it's being restored and won't be back up until the end of May. I feel like they should at least charge less of an entrance fee to art musuems when the famous ones are out of commission. But the other paintings were worth the visit, too.
Then it was time to take the little ghetto ferry (I thought we were about to sink the whole time, what with the gnashing sounds of the motor and the creaking of the wood floors) across the bay to the part of Oslo with most of the museums. Lucky for you, I took some more home movies! We will begin with the Open Air Museum:
Then it was time for Viking fun!
Nerdular sightseeing makes me a little sad to be alone on this trip, because I just end up thinking about my friends. Justin and my family would have loved the Viking ships, for instance. Diane and I would have had a good time chuckling over the wife skills exhibit at the museum of Nordic culture. Laura would have been horrified by the Museum of Things in Little Bottles (I'm not even joking, it's real-- they claim to have the biggest collection of things in bottles in the world-- but I didn't have time to go) because she's afraid of all things mini. And I bet a lot of people from the Paris program would've enjoyed the Munch museum, and we even could have laughed together at the big group of students with notebooks and pencils in hand, moving from painting to painting as an instructor lectured in Norweigan. At least I didn't follow them and stare intently at whatever painting they were currently grouped around, as tourists often do to us at the Louvre, thinking the studious attention of our group is an indicator that we have discovered something Truly Great.
This trip is a lot of fun, but I think I'll be happy to come back to Paris.
4 comments:
haha scary little farmer houses, how sweet. those hallways seemed really small and dark. but yeah, too bad you couldnt go in the turf hut, that would have been pretty cool
I know you were wanting to live there because it is just like "Little House on the Prairie" and the mud hut was your favorite squallid part of their history.
Indeed, the viking ships were incredible - they may have been barbarians but those barbarians knew their aethetics - those scrolly tops sure had an artistic flair without substance! Very fine!
I am not a barbarian, I meant to spell aesthetics...
Barbarian is a misplaced term - the Vikings were known, rightfully, as ruthless pirates and conquerors, but there's so much more to their civilization.
Firstly, they were fantastic ship builders and navigators, pulling off such feats as the invention of a rudimentary "sun compass" perhaps earlier than the invention of the Chinese magnetic compass in global use today, and the use of "sun stones" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstone) to navigate in overcast weather. The Viking ships had several revolutionary features which were replicated by other nations, and the Viking trade network stretched far into the west, east and south, coming into direct and indirect contact with very distant cultures (excavations in Sweden have turned up a Buddha statue from India, most likely the product of several transactions that eventually brought it into the ownership of a Scandinavian).
Secondly, their society had several features that was "ahead of their time". Vikings bathed once a week (which was supposedly quite often considering it was the Viking age), and cleaned themselves with soap and combs. Women had the right to divorce their husbands for pretty much any reason.
The Vikings had their bad features, too, their system of honour killings being one and their widespread use of slaves ("thralls") another. To call them barbarians, though, places too much emphasis on the Viking raid tradition:).
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