Stuttgart, Germany

Arrived happily in Germany on Friday evening and on Saturday morning headed out to a children's museum with my hosts who I had met in Congo (with me buckled between the children and happily in child world being regaled with stories of their family safari in South Africa!) We toured two floor before departing with hunger - it was incredible and had crazy amounts of interactive exhibits about all kinds of things, musical instruments, energy, engineering (power circuits and bridge structures) and it was tough to leave! But on the promise of return another time we sat down to lamb and spinach ravioli: Maultasche (traditional German dish) and headed back to yummy potato soup for dinner.

On Sunday my host Kristen and I got in a nice run in the preserved forest near her home and went to church in the city. On our return, the kids and I played Life and Star Wars Monopoly (both with rules we invented) in between the kids taking turns to have time with their German tutor and eating dinner. 

Monday dawned and Kristen and I headed to Crossfit for the most intense workout of my vacation thus far (and it was only to get more intense the next day!) and then to tour downtown Stuttgart. As the smog alert was on, it was cheaper to take the train and we rode around happily (very hilly city, Stuttgart! Which keeps the pollution in and causes smog issues...), shopping and almost finding the Sound of Music gazebo (not!)

As Stuttgart was an important manufacturing center during the war, it was bombed frequently so the churches are a fascinating mix of old and rebuilt. The city administrative building:



And my favorite billboards of my trip... I want Nutella with my name on it!



We ate lunch at a department store in the city center, shopped and drank coffee and took the "tooth/teeth" train back up the mountain to get the kids from school (via the coffee store selling "long arm shirts"?!? and a glorious smelling bakery!) and play more Monopoly!

Tuesday brought more Crossfit and house projects. We made Valentines after school and sat in front of the fireplace in their beautiful home. Wednesday Kristen participates in a hiking group so we got to hike from a beautiful German town into the gorgeous cold woods with her friends and their dogs! The monastery in the village was so pretty and we had a nice time! After school we got to ice skate, which was so fun! This morning we got in another run before my departure. Germany was the coldest place thus far (Kazakhstan is coming up! So it was nice to use the winter clothes that I packed and sleep cozily under the duvet in the lovely guest room!

Thank you thank you to the Toths for hosting me. I enjoyed playing and laughing with all of you and being able to participate in your lives for a short while. I really appreciate it! 

Cambridge, England

Sorry for the delay in posting! Between a good book and trying to figure out how to fly easyjet for the first time, I didn't get to in-transit posting about Cambridge. Also didn't take pictures so I'm terribly sorry about the word-heavy post. Arrived in Cambridge by train in late afternoon after watching bunnies frolicking at the station in Stevenage with a fellow traveler. Enjoyed cake and tea (!!) at Hot Numbers Cafe while waiting for a ride from my friendly host Rosie and her mom. Headed to her and her husband's house to enjoy more cake and tea (and curry and laughing) while watching A Knight's Tale and quizzing Rosie (a historian, among other wonderful things) about the realism of the outfits and deciding that the movie is just excellently bad (or badly excellent). 

I headed out the next morning, Wednesday, to explore, finding Rosie and her husband's mildly hidden favorite bakery, another good cafe called Espresso Library (but I didn't drink coffee the whole time I was there, tea only!) and the museum of Anthropology and Archeology. The colleges in Cambridge have an immense wealth of artifacts which they are very good about presenting (for free) to the public. I enjoyed the exhibits about excavations around/near Cambridge (old pots!!), what we can find out about children through artifacts (the sewing samplers through the generations were cool) and fufu in Congo! (I was even wearing my Congolese dress! The museum had a special exhibit as they partner with an NGO in Congo.) The upstairs was full of a stunning array of artifacts from a stunning array of places, including an 14 meter Inuit totem pole that barely fit in the building and so many other fascinating things (hats from Central Asia, amazing Japanese pottery, beadwork, old videos, very cool). We chatted that evening and made Scone Dough Pizza (which sounds like Scondo Pizza and is quite good!) 

The next day I managed to get in to Rosie's gym to work out and then I went to the bakery again to retrieve lunch. I headed to Rosie's office/job/library to eat with her and check out the exhibit of the library's artifacts that she had created educational materials for (history is ALWAYS better when Rosie interprets it!) Saw Little Fanny books for kids (a while ago!) a teeny tiny embroidered bookmark scandalously found in a religious text that did not match the religion of the quotes embroidered on it, hair that men sent Charles Darwin to disprove his hair color theories, and other crazy things! 

Continuing into Cambridge for the Fitzwilliam and Polar Museums, my museum capacity was kind of waning but I enjoyed the really old pottery (have a fish shaped and painted lidded pot to unveil your fish!), cool fans, and pretty landscapes (another one from Norway!) as well as the mummies and interesting spiral staircase only accessible portrait gallery in the cool old building. Paintings arranged slightly more thematically and nationally than by time period (as at other museums on this trip) so that was cool. The Polar Museum was quite small, but very modern and streamlined and I learned more about explorers other than Nansen and Amundsen and continued to marvel at the crazy passion and adventurous spirit that led these people to these immensely inhospitable places, with often dire consequences. Just amazing! Prepared leek roll after another tea at Espresso Library (not terribly original but very tasty time in Cambridge) and then went for a nice swim with Rosie at her gym and ate said leek roll while watching an interesting education documentary. Headed out the next morning after avocado toast at Hot Numbers Cafe and navigated with my previously acquired Oyster Card all the way to Gatwick without incident. Though I was worried, I successfully completed my first trip using a boarding pass downloaded to my phone and got to Stuttgart happily!!!!

Thank you thank you thank you to Rosie and her husband for their kind hospitality and excellent conversation. I appreciate it very much!!!

Edinburgh, Scotland

On a relatively uneventful Friday the 13th, I met my friend Natalie in Edinburgh and we found our accommodation easily. (What did we do before google maps?) We headed up the 'Royal Mile' in the Old Town to find some food and settled on 'The World's End' where we ate Haggis, Blood Pudding, and yummy shrimp. Turned in early to prepare for an early morning photo op at the top of Calton Hill. It was very chilly but beautiful at the top!

  

We headed down to find coffee and the departure point for our free walking tour where we learned a lot about Edinburgh, including the fact that it was 'Bobby Day', the anniversary of the death of Greyfriar's Bobby, a dog who stood at his owner's grave for 14 years after his owner had died. So to celebrate, Cruachan (3 and 4, I think?) the official Shetland ponies of the Scottish army had come to the churchyard for a ceremony!

 

With bagpipes!



We were very cold by this point but had a good overview of the old town (the new town was built as overflow from the old town once there was less threat of invasion and the old town was too full). We found lunch and headed to the National Gallery where we found a nice collection of paintings, including some from Norway, artists whose work I had seen in Oslo just a few days before. How odd! We rested for a while before heading out on our nighttime walking tour. We found out that 'The World's End' where we had eaten used to be the pub at the end of the street in front of the gates to leave the city and you used to go there before leaving (as leaving the walled city was quite dangerous) to have a drink! Now the street is much longer and essentially leads all the way back to our accommodation, but we were pleased for having chosen such an excellent pub quite by chance! The night tour discussed grave robbing, pall bearers dying from falling down stairs, ghosts, witches, canibals and other creepy things but overall very good (not too creepy) and we chose another pub for Cullen Skink (yummy Scottish fish chowder) and more goat cheese for me (the blood pudding had had goat cheese the night before and this time I had vegetables with goat cheese, yum!).

Headed out the next morning on a lovely tour of more of Scotland. Map here:

We saw cows! (The tourist area where they usually are didn't have any in winter so we were able to do a special stop as we had a small bus!)

And sheep

And deeply beautiful scenery (I can't remember the names of all the places we were, but it was lovely!)

 
 

This was Glencoe, I think, very valuable house because you can't build anything new in a national park so only existing structures are allowed to stay! According to very nice tour guide, Jamie.

We elected to take a longer Loch Ness cruise and only see the Urqhart Castle (Whoops Aunt Laurel!) but it was great to be on the boat and searching for Nessie!

A crown in the trees... I bet the queen planted that!



No sign of her :-(

We returned to Edinburgh for light dinner and bed, sleeping in the next morning before our informative tour of the Scottish Parliament. Scotland gets to decide things that are specific to them in their own parliament, plus have representatives to the U.K. Parliament. It was very interesting to hear about the very conceptual architecture of the building (combination of representing nature, boats, and people of Scotland) and the way they govern. (They have kind of a combined House of Representatives and Senate in one body with some people elected by region and some elected by proportion of population in that area.) Scottish people on the tour with us were very curious about the costs associated with building and maintenance! Understandably! But it is a cool place! We ended as we began, with lunch at 'The World's End' for mac and cheese with local Cheddar and amazing brownie dessert. (Not Scottish, but delicious) I saw Natalie off and slept (with some exercising) until it was time for my train yesterday morning. Two transfers later I am now successfully in Cambridge and lazing about getting up energy for exploring! Scotland is beautiful and it was lovely to spend time with my friend and get a feel for the city. 

Oslo, Norway

Corrections to last post: Arctic Cathedral, not attic, and they are not open 7 days a week, 23 hours a day (duh!) like I thought, but from 7am to 23pm! I got it!

Arrived in Oslo and did a fun treasure hunt for the apartment keys in the baggage storage area at the train station because it was so late the hosts wanted to go to bed. Easily found the apartment without incident and slept. Up the next morning (not early, but the happy thing about Norway tourism in January is a lack of lines!) to the Norwegian version of the Shelburne Museum. (Norwegian  Folk Museum) It was a little depressing to walk through the buildings in the cold drizzle, and it was a bit underwhelming at first because many of the buildings had nothing inside (you couldn't go in them) but as I went through the various exhibits (towns) I really started to appreciate how cool it was! Stave church: 

Beautiful woodwork:


Sod roofs:



and just the oldest wooden dwelling in the world, (1238) just sitting here, no big deal!

 

All the buildings were original and had been moved there from towns all over Norway. (Hence fire extinguisher you can see above) There was a lot of information about the arrangement of the farm buildings in relation to one another, which I appreciated when seeing the real thing the next day on my tour. All the massive logs and the functions of the different outbuildings were really cool (slots cut in doors to allow for air flow to separate wheat from chaff, VERY short cow stalls for, I assume, very short cows) I also loved the funky Norwegian fences. How do you pound these fence posts?



They do have animals at the farm who use these fences but I didn't get to see them because it wasn't the weekend. Brush fence:

 

There was also a Sami hut and a more modern area where they had moved an Oslo apartment building onto the grounds and decorated the apartments from different eras. The building was a lot like the one I was staying in so it felt very voyeuristic to just wander into these apartments but it was cool. I guess my biggest take away was how much work, how gargantuanly difficult, everyday jobs used to be. It's shocking how much things have changed! Need grain? Now: call grain man. Then: grow, chop, carry, dry, separate wheat. Spreading manure? Now: get manure spreader. Then: dig manure out of the barns and move it by sled out to the fields and fork it off. Holy cow.

Headed down the street (hands were freezing at this point but otherwise fine, had mittens off too long for photo purposes!) to find THE BOAT!!! (Named the Fram) In my previous post I mentioned the guy who froze a boat into the ice? Well his boat, which went on not one but THREE voyages (with different explorers) is in Oslo and I got to see it!! I could go on and on about this guy and all the insanity surrounding the voyages and explorers in general, because apparently now I'm quite interested, but I will spare you all. You can look it up if you like. My fave: on the third voyage, someone got to the North Pole before them, so they decided at the last minute to just turn around and go to the South Pole instead. Because that's the same. Crazy crazy people!

 

(Model of the real thing, obviously) You can go right in the boat and poke around! It was so cool! Headed back to try to sleep but not with much success.

Next morning up and out to retrieve tickets for a "Norway in a nutshell" tour (not really a tour with a guide so much as a package of tickets for various time-complementary public transport). Train to Myrdal and another to Flam, boat to Gudv, bus to Voss, train to Bergen, and then back to Oslo on the night train. I didn't take too many photos but it was great to be on the train (forgot how much I loved that) seeing the scenery change and the farm configurations of the buildings, beautiful scenery (including the backs of my eyelids for a little nap)

At Myrdal we got on the one of the steepest rail lines in the world (lots of braking noise) to descend 2000+ feet into Flam. It was intense with lots of tunnels and views!

 

Once we got to Flam we had a little while to look around the museum and then we got on our boat to head out on the fjord to Gudvangen. The scenery was, as you can imagine, staggering.



Very difficult to do it justice! There were 8 of us on the boat, then 7 to Voss by bus (dark at this point and very cold rain), one person went back to Flam for the night. I got soaked getting to the train in Voss but did find this friendly guy. (Troll!)



Another nap and we were in Bergen, a world heritage site, for a few hours. I went to walk around the buildings where German Hanseatic traders traded fish for wheat a long time ago (or something like that, forgive me if I'm confused by this point!) Very cool narrow alleys and old buildings! (Obviously) with art studios and offices and restaurants and shops in them now.

Slept really well on the train and more at the apartment and then went yesterday to the 

National Gallery (beautiful Norwegian landscapes and Edvard Munch painted some stuff A LOT prettier than "The Scream"!) and the National Museum of Contemporary Art (some gorgeous stuff by Sidsel Paaske and some other really bizarre stuff, I am not contemporary in art taste!). Both were free on Thursdays. Headed to Crossfit after pretty walk to the Modern Art Museum (un-free haha) and back to sleep! Up early for flight to Brussels and here I wait for Scotland!!! Some weird internet issues (perhaps this post is too long, let me know and I can try to break them up!) but I hope it will work. Phone blogging is new for me. Norway is gorgeous but I am happy to head out to somewhere with slightly longer days, almost cried when I saw the sun yesterday! 

Tromso, Norway

As a trial blog post I am told the previous one looked ok with minimal weird formatting issues (my giant pet peeve) so I will try again! Arrived in Tromso on Thursday evening to a personal chauffeur from my airbnb because they couldn't wait for me to take the bus! They had other plans. The wind was incredibly intense and I am told there were northern lights that night but I missed them, unfortunately. I passed out! The next day I walked around the city (very small as my host had noted) and went for a practice run and groceries. I went to some nice free exhibits (photographs and sculpture: marble pillow!)

 

like 6 minutes walk from my accommodation. The evening welcome dinner at the aquarium was good, photos in previous post.

On the next day I headed out to the Polar Museum, with a lot of detailed descriptions of how they trapped and killed animals in the past - while of course necessary to live in this climate (skins and meat) it was a little grim. Then I went to the third floor and found an entire exhibit about a guy named Fridtjof Nansen who decided in 1893 to build a ship strong enough to get frozen into ice and then drive it into the sea above Norway and see if the current would bring it, in ice, across the sea. Mind. Blown. What an insane idea, a, and b, imagine making a ship that could withstand that? Oh my goodness! There are a lot more details that are too long for this already long post, but go read about him if you like! View from museum:

 

Headed back to prepare for my (HALF marathon) race and got to the starting line only to realize my watch was dead as I had forgotten to charge it. So no documentation in my watch of my personal record, but I definitely achieved one. The day before had been very icy (crazy Norwegian teenagers sliding down hills on their heels, not my idea of fun!) but this day was just slush. I did decide to run with spikes despite my lack of training in them, and it was a good decision as there was minimal damage to my shoes and I felt a lot more confident even though there was no ice. I was elevated a bit off the slush (still wet feet!) and not subject to filling my shoe tread with slush and then sliding on further slush. Out and back course (ran all the way to the airport and back!) and despite some hard snow pelting is it was warm (between 30 and 40) and comfortable. I did really well and really enjoyed myself though I was obviously tired at the end. Took 25 minutes off my previous time which felt pretty good. A few small/medium hills but overall very level and fun. Headed to the post race ceremony and buffet afterward, a little disappointing that many of the female winners didn't come get their awards (not as big a problem for the men, don't know why) but interesting to see. They also Skyped with Norwegians researching in Antarctica who had completed the race at the same time we had. Hilarious! They had mailed them medals so we got to see them put on their medals on Skype! Many male and some female winners from Tromso, many gyms around and it appears to be a strong running culture here. Ate with some nice people and had a good time. 

The next day I was very lazy (though not sore) except that I went on a reindeer sledding tour in the evening. Asked lots of questions!! Did you know that there are 17 possible ways to notch a reindeer ear for identification purposes and with all the 17 possibilities of notches in each ear there are enough different combinations to give every reindeer herder their own individual "brand"? We got to feed the reindeer lichen to aid their digestion and have reindeer stew. He said no reindeer farmers are in it for the money, it's a way of life and that he prefers the city so he brings some of his reindeer here to near Tromso to run this business instead of staying in the remote areas to herd his reindeer (his are with his family's and they watch his for him).

 Today decided to walk across the bridge to the attic cathedral (triangular building in top left of port photo above)

 

It'll be fine, she said, you're not afraid of heights anymore, she said! Yikes! But it was a nice walk and glad I did it! Was not that impressed by the church but the view was amazing. Waiting now at airport for next leg: Oslo! Plane had to go elsewhere to get fuel because they made it circle too long while they were snow plowing here so it might be a while! A few things I have noticed (then done I promise!):

• The weather blows through so quickly, the sky clears and darkens, storms and stops, very quickly. This morning looking out from the church I saw what looked to be a ski jumping doodad like a half mile maybe to the north and looked back 5 minutes later to see again and it was gone into fog. Very interesting weather (on Gulf Stream?! Whatever that means)
• It seems they really like automatic doors, to the extent that I thought the customs lady (who was not impressed with me running in January in Tromso) was trying to keep me from passing until I realized the door was going to open if I kept walking!
• Busses with chains!
• Cars, casually stopping, on very steep grades coming downhill at intersections leading to the main streets. I only saw one accident and I have no idea how that is! Good tires, good driving!
• Green license plates for commercial vehicles. 
• While there are cars, the downtown was relatively calm and lots of people walking around at all times of day. (People with spikes on walking around sounds like horse shoes!) Including at 9:30 at night after my reindeer tour on a Sunday people were waiting for the bus! What accommodating public transit!
• Mercedes plows (short nose big trucks attached to sanders) that shake the house, but often they are just sanding, not plowing.
• Bucket loader plows with snow box attachments on the front.
• Several giant grader-style plows running in tandem at the airport.
• (Relatively) large rocks used as traction on sidewalks (not sure about the roads), so big they were stuck in my running spikes!
• Grey crows (I thought they were black but maybe grey) and back/white birds (magpies) sticking in snowbanks in the wind and gulls flying even in the insane wind, blowing them every which way.
• Beautiful red, yellow, blue or grey houses with seemingly impossible driveways. Just gorgeous and crazy to think of people surviving and thriving this far north having to import so much! (But not reindeer or shrimp! Yum!)
• Supermarket open 7-23. Which hour are they closed? Dying to know!
• Very good time in Norway thus far! On to the next adventure! (When the plane arrives!) Update: arrived at Oslo apartment 1am!