We were sweltering hot in Italy and seriously in need of some cooler weather. For that we headed to Scandanavia. Our excursion to the land of the midnight sun started and ended the same way; sleeping on the floor of an airport. Sort of. We left our hosts in Sarzana at around 10 in the evening to head to the Pisa airport because our flight to Oslo, Norway was at 6:30 the next morning and we could not get a train early enough. We passed a few hours reading and wandering around the airport before finding what seemed like a good place to sleep. Lisa fell right asleep and at 1am I was just dozing off when the security guard came around and informed us that the airport was closing and that we had to leave. Who has ever heard of an airport closing? There were about 20 to 25 other people in our position so we just followed the crowd outside where we found another 30 people or so sleeping in the grass in front of the airport. So we joined the campout on the grass until the sprinklers went on. We then moved to the side walk to try and get some sleep.
After about a total of 20 minutes of sleep, we arrived in Oslo early in the morning and Lisa´s friend and ex-client who had just moved home to Norway came and picked us up. We stayed with Anna and her family for a couple of days in a town south of Oslo called Porsgrunn. We went hiking around the fjords, slowly because her kids Lena and Niklas (and Lisa too!) were more interested in picking the wild strawberries and raspberries along the way. We also went climbing one day on an undeveloped crag but lost interest after not being able to make more than a move at a time without a huge hold breaking off. We did get a little bouldering in though.
We left Porsgrunn and headed to Oslo in the morning to spend the day seeing the city before catching a late afternoon train across the country to Bergen. Oslo was nice but pretty boring compared to some of the spectacular cities we had just been in in Italy. Every thing was exceedingly clean and everyone spoke perfect English. Not quite the adventurous feel of southern Europe. The train ride to Bergen was stunning. It meandered between fjords before crossing a glacial plateau with little red cottages with sod roofs in front of blue glaciers and tundra as far as you could see.
Bergen was beautiful as well, sitting on a fjord on the west coast. The first day we were there it poored all day. We had planned on it though because Bergen gets 340 days of rain a year. We just spent the day wandering around town. Our second day there was clear but cold. It was only about 45deg. That's what we came for though. We decided to try and climb. Not surprisingly though the rock was soaked. I don´t know if they can ever climb there! We did however get a nice consolation prize in a huge hanging ladder that we found!
We left Bergen on a night train and it was strange to wake up on the glacial plateau at 2am with light still in the sky!
We arrived back in Oslo at 6 in the morning and spent the rest of the day climbing just outside of town. It was really nice climbing but we are upset to be getting rusty! That afternoon we hopped a train to Gothenburg Sweden where a friend of Lisa's from high school, Anders, lives. Anders showed us around the city our first day there. That night we went to his friend, Stephan's, sister's house for a garden party. That was great because there were about 10 kids between 1 and 3 running around to entertain us. Stephan and his 3 sisters were a lot of fun as well. They are Icelandic and taught us the differences between Swedish and Icelandic. They are also a very musical family so we got a great private concert. After the party we went to an outdoor bar. We found Swedish style to be an interesting mix of 1980s pop meets the Fonz. There were very very blond guys with dark rimed glasses, white tee-shirts and colorful sweaters. Most people looked like they would have fit in in
Ferris Bulers Day Off.
The next day we went to the local amusement park because Anders used to work there and got us free tickets. It was a lot of fun but we felt old when we felt sick after only a few rides. That night I made dinner for Anders and Stefan. After dinner Stefan was excited to take us to a club where he sometimes worked because the most popular Swedish DJ was playing. We felt really cool when the head of staff met us outside and let us in the back through a curtain skipping the huge line (and the huge cover charge)! The club was fun and packed (Yes Cait and Caitlin we did go out two nights in a row!). We later found out that it was the record night for cash flow at a club in the city's history. No thanks to us.
The next day we took a train a few hours north to Anders families summer home on the coast. It was absolutely beautiful with granite domes coming right out of the water. It had the same cutesy sailing feel as Cape Cod or Northern Michigan.
After a couple of days there with Anders parents we headed South to the college town of Lund where Anders generously gave us the key to his apartment. From there we went to Copenhagen for a day before spending another night in the airport and flying out early to Berlin. Copenhagen was a really nice city. Again not exactly adventurous feeling because everyone spoke perfect English and everything was spotless, but it was beautiful none the less.
We went to an area called Christiana, that we thought was going to be a cool hippie neighborhood with shops and cafes. Not so. It was a hippie shanty town inside an old military base. It was made up of little shacks and all that was sold there was pot, totally in the open, and bongs. It was interesting to see and there were really cool murals everywhere but not exactly the neighborhood we wanted to hang around for too long. Otherwise we just took up our usual wandering around the city (in the rain again) and seeing as much of it as we could. We loved all the cool towers everywhere. Late in the evening we called it a day and headed home to the airport. Luckily this one did not close!
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