4-30-09 Frankfurt

This is it - our last full day on the Continent. We had competing priorities - to try and squeeze in as much fun as possible in our final moments, and to try to stay rested and not ruin a good time by being tired and sore. This is a delicate balancing act, one which usually errs on the side of the former.

An internet review of our hotel said that the free breakfast was only cornflakes, so we opted to pay for a nice sugary breakfast at Starbucks. Here as usual, we try our best to speak German, but the staff always act annoyed and switch to English. My pronunciation could use a little work but Natasha's sounds perfect, and yet people act like they cannot understand us. We'd like to practice and get better but people seem intent on forcing us to speak English.

In Frankfurt we found the Film Museum, which happened to be having an H.R. Giger exhibit. We saw tons of antique cameras, special effects, the original robot from the silent film Metropolis, and of course, the Giger exhibit.

Outside we found this giant Euro sign, which we understand to be outside the official bank of the European Union.
Also, the architecture of this mall, called the MyZeil Centre, was intriguing. We found out later that it was designed by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas. The windows apparently have to be cleaned by workers using mountain climbing gear to get inside these strange "tunnels" that snake through the building.
Natasha found her favorite copy yet of Alice in Wonderland in a small bookstore over the river. It was a little expensive, so we decided to see if we could find a more reasonable one somewhere else. We saw a Turkish restaurant on a boat moored to the side of the river. As the day wore on, we were not having much luck finding bookstores, and the ones we did find did not have copies of Alice in Wonderland. Finally we decided to go back to the store, only to find that it had closed 90 minutes earlier. This put a damper on the day.
Once again we had walked ourselves sore, but it was worth it. We returned to the hotel.

4-29-09 Oslo to Frankfurt

We bid goodbye to fair Norway today. My Norwegian friend had given us a 50 NOK bill when he visited us in Seattle, so we returned the favor by leaving him a US dollar (which is only $1 compared to about $7 that 50 NOK is worth, but we did our best). Most of the day was spent in uneventful travel - a walk to the train station in Drammen, then a train to the Torp airport, an easy flight to Frankfurt, a long bus ride to the Frankfurt train station, and then a short train ride to the hotel.

One thing about the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof is that they have a really large store that sells nothing but magazines - but magazines in dozens of languages and on every subject imaginable. As is common in Europe, the pornographic magazines are on full display and well within the grasp of anyone who might want them.

We found to our surprise that our hotel is right on the edge of Frankfurt's red light district! In fact, there was a strip club and sex shop right next door. This didn't affect our stay at all, because Frankfurt's sex industry is legal and tightly regulated, and therefore doesn't make for the same seedy and crime-ridden environment you might find elsewhere.

Our Frankfurt hostel room had a private shower and free wifi. Whatever else a room has, those two things make it a king's mansion compared to some of the places we've stayed in. They even have paper towels (something I hadn't seen in many weeks)!!!

4-28-09 Oslo

I've heard many things about Oslo over the years, some good and some bad, but everyone will agree on one thing: this place is expensive. More on that later.

It was a relatively short train ride to Karl Johan's Square in central Oslo. This is near the centers of government and major universities. We happened to be there while some Canadian dignitaries were visiting, so Canadian flags were raised all along the main street in front of the palace (Norway has a king!) and parliament building. Throughout the day we would catch glimpses of fast driving limosuines with police escorts, but we never did figure out exactly what was going on.

Our first stop in Oslo was their National Gallery, where several paintings of Norway's best known painter, Edvard Munch, are held. This one of the places that Munch's famous painting The Scream keeps getting stolen from (the other being the Munch Museum, which we did not visit). We got to see their Scream (multiple copies exist) as well as The Day After.

I can only speak for the time I was actually in Oslo, so perhaps it isn't like this all the time, but Oslo repeated a pattern we noticed in Europe: the farther south you go, the more reckless and chaotic everything is, and the further north, the quieter and more orderly things are. Oslo was a big city, but it wasn't crowded with people or traffic. People drove relatively slowly and didn't honk at each other as is the case in most other big cities I've been in, both in the US and in Europe. I could get used to this.

Now, the expense. Although eating at McDonald's in every country had thus far failed to be a rich cultural experience, we couldn't just stop at the last country. We found one nearby and had a relatively simple meal. The food was exactly the same as it was everywhere - except for the startling difference in price. We had double cheeseburgers, small fries, and small sodas, which would run about $8 in the US. When we looked at our reciept and converted the currency, we found that we had just paid over $20 for the same meal!

Next, we had ourselves a little adventure. My friend was at work in Drammen, and he was supposed to call us to arrange a meeting place somewhere in Oslo so he could show us around. Unfortunately, Natasha's phone died, leaving us with no way to contact him. We tossed a few ideas around, and one of us half jokingly suggested that if we could find a Mac store we could borrow their charger for a few minutes. Lo and behold, there was a Mac store right next door to the McDonalds.

We went in there and found the iPod Touches on their charging docks. The docks are universal, meaning they will charge an iPhone if you have the right insert for the dock. Luckily, if you remove the iPod insert, you can just sort of sit the iPhone on the leads and it will be unsteady, but will charge. We pretended to fumble with it for a few minutes before a salesperson asked us if we needed help. We then stalled him as long as possible, asking about the charger. When he said they didn't have docks with a first generation iPhone dock insert, we stalled him longer asking where we could find one. He proceded to give us very complicated directions in broken English, which we had him repeat for clarification several times.

By the time we got out of there, the phone had been charged just long enough for a few minutes' conversation, which we used to get ahold of my friend and arrange a meeting time and place. We had just enough time before he would arrive to go to the Resistance Museum. This was a small museum dedicated to Norwegian resistance to the Nazi invasion and occupation during WWII. It contained several dioramas and historical artifacts, including a sculpture of WWII rifles all bound together, pointing at the incoming visitor as if to drive home the peril of the time.

After this, we met up with my friend. We were supposed to meet up with another friend of mine from Anarchy Online, but he turned out to be busy with work. My friend's plan was to go bowling, either in Oslo or Drammen. We looked for a place to bowl in Oslo, and found one - in the basement of the Hard Rock Cafe. The entire room was lit with screaming black lights and flourescents, and the "bowling" turned out to be a kind of virtual game where you roll a real bowling ball down half a lane and then a computer figures out which pins you would have hit and displays it on a screen. It was noisy, crowded, and expensive. We decided to go back to Drammen instead.

Why is there a statue of a tiger in front of the train station?

We took the train back to Drammen and went to the bowling alley. My friend promptly beat us in two games, then beat me at air hockey as well (which nobody has ever been able to do consistently. Amanda comes close!). As we were leaving, Natasha and I were shocked to discover that two games of bowling for three people came to $60!!! Norway is a great place, but if you visit, come loaded with cash.

Also of note, we discovered a soda that is excellent, called Villa Champagnebrus (which is a kind of carbonated vanilla drink, tastes similar to scotch&soda but not quite the same thing). Later on, we visited a Norwegian import store in Seattle to see if we could find this stuff, but the lady there said that whenever she tries to order it, they only send her boxes of expired bottles. She can only get it when she goes to Norway personally around Christmas. A shame we won't be around here then.

4-27-09 London to Drammen

It was time for us to leave Isles behind for this trip. We had to board a bus to the airport around 5am. We changed some money at one of the relatively expensive places in the airport, and enjoyed a short and easy flight to the Torp airport in Norway. At the airport, we saw the duty-free shop (selling mostly alcohol) but the lines were too long and we didn't really need anything that badly. We ate something that resembled a hot dog at the airport before continuing our journey.

From Torp, we caught a bus to a train station that was little more than a few benches by the tracks, and boarded the train which took us into the town of Drammen. We had picked Drammen because we were able to stay with another friend of mine from Anarchy Online, which helped us with the otherwise unbearable cost of living in Norway. My friend was still at work, which left us wandering in Drammen with our luggage for a few hours until he got off.

We crossed a bridge into Drammen's shopping district, found a few malls and a few bookstores. I bought a Rubik's Cube (I knew my old one was wrecked and I needed something to keep myself busy), which I paid the standard obscenely high price for. Natasha found yet another bookstore while I waited outside, trying to remember how to solve the cube.

My friend finally got off work and met us back near the bridge. We dropped our stuff off at his apartment and then we ate some lunch at Subway (which is exactly as it is back home, as far as I could tell). He then took us grocery shopping, where we bought some fascinating Norwegian products such as Trollbrus (a sugary strawberry soda-like drink) and some chocolate with a very high milk content which my friend had introduced us to when he visited Seattle a few months earlier.

Video game nerds may be interested in this item, a replica of Cloud's sword from FFVII, which my friend imported from Canada:

Back at his apartment, we Skyped his girlfriend back in Vancouver, BC, and ordered a pizza for dinner. A local pizza place calls their sausage and pepperoni "Stars and Stripes." Over pizza, I had a chance to read their version of Calvin and Hobbes, dubbed "Tommy og Tigern":

4-26-09 London Day 5

In the morning we took a short visit to Buckingham Palace, which is widely denounced in the tourism literature as an underwhelming experience. Today, at least, there was a marathon going. Other than the historical significance of the site, the literature is quite right. There isn't much to do or see here.

Since the British drive on the wrong side of the road, they are compelled to point out to tourists which way they should look for oncoming traffic (and this really does help, trust me, as it is not so easy to reverse years of ingrained behavior):

After that we went to the Tate Britain, to see one of Natasha's favorite painters, John William Waterhouse. We were disappointed to find that they only have one and it was on loan. There was plenty of other interesting stuff to see, including...Rothko. I've tried and tried to appreciate this type of art before, but time and time again I am left in dismay when I see it. To someone without an art history background, these appear to be simply shapes on a canvas. I must confess I have little formal art education, so perhaps I'm missing something important, but I think I understand what this art is trying to convey, and I still think it is shallow and self-indulgent. It seems more like a big joke that everyone is in on except me. Nevertheless, I keep trying my very best to give it a fair shake.

Later we saw 4 bookstores on one street in the Theatre District (London's version of Broadway). We finally found cupcakes at a coffee shop, which weren't very good compared to those back home but hit the spot anyway.

4-25-09 London Day 4

Today we visited the British Library, home to some of the world's greatest literary treasures. We were able to see the Gutenberg Bible, some of the original Magna Carta documents, originals of the Brontës, Woolf, some of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches, old Zoroastrian religious texts, very old copies of the Qur'an, and the King's Library, an enormous collection of 60,000 books owned by English kings.

Unfortunately, three of the things we came to see, namely Beowulf, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and most importantly, the originals of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland, were on loan. This had happened to us a few times already (see Florence Day 2 when Machiavelli's tomb was covered in scaffolding) so it was a little easier to bear, but still disappointing.

Attached to the Library was the British Library Centre for Conservation, where old and damaged books are taken to be restored and stabilized for storage, exhibit, and loaning. Tours were by appointment only, so we had to be content with their 1 room "museum" which had plenty of interactive exhibits, videos of restoration techniques on loop, examples of restored works, information about sources of damage and repairs made, and more. For a book geek, this is a playground.

Parting ways with the British Library, we headed down to Bloomsbury to check out a small bookshop called Collinge & Clark, that served as the backdrop for a British TV show we like called Black Books. We arrived at the store (which was closed, thankfully), and found it to be unassuming, small, and specializing in antiquarian books. We got some shots of Natasha out front just for kicks :)

Earlier I promised a bit of info about the street names in London. The thing about London is that street names can change without warning, often from block to block. As we were trying to navigate our way to the British Museum, we walked down one street that changed names 4 times in 4 blocks. My hypothesis is that they have more famous dead people than they have streets, so they rename streets midway to fit more of them in. But I digress :)

In the British Museum we found the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon friezes, and much more. Normally the museum carries a preserved corpse from Northern England, called the Lindow Man, who is suspected to have been killed as a human sacrifice in a Druid religious ceremony. However, like Chaucer and Beowulf, he too was on loan that day.

That night, we decided to try the pizza place near our hotel. The pizza was average. What was exceptional was the dessert - the menu had a warning that the "Chocolate Challenge" was for two or more people to share, and the price wasn't terrible, so we decided to go for it. This is what we ended up with:

If I recall correctly, this has chocolate cake, chocolate syrup, vanilla ice cream, layered with more syrup, whipped cream, chocolate discs and more syrup. We finished about 2/3 of it. I could have continued but I was sure that I would have poisoned myself in the process. Be warned, America is not the only place where hedonism takes on fantastic proportions :)

4-24-09 London Day 3

Today we were set to see Romeo & Juliet at the Globe Theatre. Knowing we had to stand in the cheap seats throughout the entire production, we decided to take it easy most of the day. We visited a few bookstores in the shopping district, one of which was the largest in the UK (called Waterstone's). We might have actually bought something if they carried used books (which I have sworn to buy exclusively whenever possible). We then went to the post office to ship some of our excess baggage back to ourselves - mostly guidebooks and souvenirs. This cost a fortune, as you might expect. After everything we've done on our trip, this little bit was enough to exhaust us, so we went back to the hotel for a midday nap.

We got to the Globe Theatre just in time. The actors and actresses were amazing - this night was the debut for the girl playing Juliet! She messed up one line but did a fantastic job otherwise (so far as I know, as I am not a theater critic). We stood through the intermission, which happened very late in the play, after Romeo's banishment and the beginning of their plan to reunite him with Juliet. Our bodies could not take the punishment of standing in place in the cold for any longer, so we left the play early.

I had a headache when we got back to the hotel, so we went to the drugstore for some pain medication. I was able to buy 100 ibuprofens for 0.35£!!! That's like 50 cents or so! Some things about Europe are just so much better than they are in the US.

Tired and hurting, we opted for a little comfort food at McDonalds, even though we had already gotten our once-per-country visit out of the way. We ordered a sandwich called the "M," which was basically a beef burger with a hard bread bun. It tasted OK, just a little bland because of a lack of condiments.