More vacation - this time in farm country

Norway has a wonderful law. Everyone has to get 5 weeks of vacation each year. The company rule is that you must take 3 of those weeks during summer, and the other 2 the rest of the year. Even though I've only been working there 2 months, I had over 2 weeks vacation and my boss kept asking me when I was going to take it. When Ed gets here, of course!

Our first week of vacation focused on cities - Bergen, Oslo, and Trondheim, the 3 largest. Our second week of vacation focused on rural Norway. We spent Monday through Saturday in Skei i Jolster (spoon in Jolster) on a huge glacier-fed lake (spoon-shaped, of course). We took day excursions with Katarina and her group of 5 tourists from Great Britain. We hiked to the toe of a blue glacier called Briksdalbreen. It was way prettier than the Carbon Glacier, which always looks dirty. Briksdalbreen is flowing down a steep cliff, and the ice looks clean and glowing blue internally. Katarina's friend invited us to after-dinner coffee up in her small hut on the mountainside. We hiked up there by the side of a stream over smooth rock, over a hand-built bridge, through two electric fences to keep down the cow-patty density, and there they were - a cluster of huts. With a small amount of wood in the iron stove, we soon had the room so warm that we had to actually open the door to let in some of the cold air. We had a nice conversation, and then headed down the mountain again about 11 pm. It was overcast, but still light enough that we could make out the trail until we got down to the tree level. That was a great memory to store away for future use.

There was a trip to the glacier museum, with a film about 4 people going across Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in Europe, on cross-country skis. It was almost an Imax quality film, with 5 screens wrapping around you. Wow! They also had the best ever exhibit on Oetzi, the Bronze Age man that was discovered in a melting glacier in 1991. (http://www.viewzone.com/oetzi.html)

One day was a boat trip on the Geiranger Fjord, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage site. Lots more pictures of the fjord and the waterfalls cascading down the steep cliffs lining it... We can't stop taking those pictures. The Norwegians probably figure tourists are crazy because they run around snapping pictures of every waterfall they see, yet they're all over the place! But they are gorgeous. On the Geiranger, the 7 Sisters falls are across the fjord from the Suiter, who is supposed to have failed to win any of the 7 sisters' hands. This is the Suiter.

We "discovered" one of the best Norwegian painters, Nikolai Astrup. (http://www.nicolai-astrup.com/gallery1.htm) Click on the gallery painting "Kari" and "A Clear Night in June" to see why we fell in love with his work. He lived in that area and painted the scenery there, all the while keeping the imagination of a child, so that many of his paintings have faces and creatures that you can see if you squint your eyes and open your imagination. We bought a print of Kari, and the shop owner told us an art detective story. An American tour guide came into his shop in the early 90's, and said she had seen a painting that might have been by Astrup somewhere in the US. By the time he got around to investigating, she had died. He found the tour bus driver, who found the guide's daughter, who used her mother's notes to figure out where he should look for the painting. Guess where it was! At PLU in Tacoma, in the Scandinavian Cultural Center. You can see what happened next at http://www.plu.edu/~scancntr/scandinavian-scene/sept-oct-1.html - scroll halfway down the page to "From the SCC Director...". Hint: it involves half a million dollars!

The weather gods were arm-wrestling overhead all week. We had sun on the first morning and the last day, and in between we had occasional sunbreaks.

This last picture is of the Norwegian dancing show at the hotel. The second man couldn't come because of work obligations, so the man in the middle had to dance with both the women. The women put on pouts and arm-akimbo acts whenever he danced with the other one. The musicians were a pianist and a Hardanger Fiddle player. Hardanger fiddles are fiddles with an extra 5 strings under the ones that are bowed. They make lots of harmonics, depending on how they are tuned. The musician had studied it at a school, and was very good. They let us see the fiddle and the clothes up close. Those are wool skirts and vests, so the dancers were red-cheeked by the time they did one or two numbers.

By the way, I would love to reply to some of your comments. Thank you for posting them! They're great fun to read. If you could drop me a separate e-mail using the little icon of an envelope under the posting, it will have your return address on it. If you post a comment, it doesn't tell me the address of the person writing.