Norway in a Nutshell

Saturday morning 11 of us met Lars at the train station. Lucky for us the Law school paid for him to come along. It is so much easier having someone who knows what's going on and can speak the language. With so many train, bus and ferry changes we would've been lost without him. It worked out great for him too because he not only got to go to Bergen for free, he had never done the Norway in a Nutshell tour before. The Norway in a Nutshell tour takes us by rail, bus and ferry through some of the most scenic landscape Norway has to offer. It is basically taking the long route to get to Bergen so that we can see more along the way. Here is a link to the Norway in a Nutshell website which has more information and a great video about the trip. http://www.norwaynutshell.com/default.asp These two ladies from Washington state sat with us on our first leg of the trip, which was a 4 hour train ride. I took so many pictures on the trip to Bergen it is going to be hard to narrow down which ones will make it on the blog. Prepare yourself for the numerous scenery shots that will follow.

I got a lot of great pictures just shooting through the windows, but the train made frequent stops where we could quickly jump off and snap some pics as well. We switched trains at about 1p.m. to the Flam railway. This is supposed to be the most beautiful train ride, however none of us had seats. Unfortunately they had way overbooked the train and though we all had tickets we didn't have seats. We spent most of this train ride standing in the aisles and crammed into an entryway. This train had a picture stop at Kjosfossen waterfall. When we opened the doors we were hit with the spray and had to yell above the sound of crashing water. From here on out there was waterfall after waterfall, but this one was by far one of the biggest and for sure it was the closest we got, but I've never seen so many waterfalls in my life. This quaint town was tucked in between the mountains. It was so perfect looking it almost seemed fake! After our second train ride it was time for a new mode of transportation. We took a fabulous fjord cruise on this boat.

This woman kept feeding the seagulls so there were a ton of them hanging over us and the inevitable happened on Diane's sleeve.

After the fjord cruise we boarded a bus that drove us up a frightening road that climbed a mountain with hairpin turns. There were definitely times I had my eyes closed on that ride! We stopped at a hotel at the top of the mountain to take pictures. The bus brought us to our final train. We were all getting tired by this point and felt a little overstimulated by all of the beautiful sights we'd seen. We spent the day with our faces pressed against the windows of whatever we were riding in and our cameras permanently poised to capture the next breathtaking scene. When we finally arrived in Bergen we walked from the train station to our hotel and then all we could think about was food.

We dropped our things off and headed out on the town to eat dinner and explore.

Beach Day at Bygdoy

As part of our program there are 2 planned weekend trips to other cities in Norway. Today we had no school because we were supposed to head to the city of Bergen, however things were a bit chaotic with the planning and by the time we bought train tickets today was sold out. We are heading to Bergen early tomorrow morning, so today we used our day off from school to go to Huk beach at Bygdoy. When we got down to the water there were sailboats everywhere. It was an amazing site. We took this ferry over to Bygdoy which is a peninsula off the coast of Oslo.

Erica and I decided to brave the jagged seashells and sharp rocks that cover the ocean floor and go for a swim. We swam out to this rock and stood analyzing whether or not it was deep enough to jump off the rock back into the water and whether or not we'd clear the smaller rocks next to it for quite some time. Apparently long enough for Leah to get my camera out of my bag on shore and snap some photos of us. We finally decided to jump and we both miraculously lived. It was so fun that we swam over to the green island seen in the picture below with the pole on it which we nicknamed "the grassy knoll" because it was covered in moss and looked so green from the beach - apparently my photo doesn't do it justice because you can hardly tell it is green. It seemed a lot closer until we actually started swimming, but we made it out and jumped off the knoll as well. We are animals, I know. When we got back from our swim we had our standard beach lunch of hot dogs wrapped in Lompe fresh off the grill.

Resistance Museum

Our current class is entitled Human Rights in Europe. After class today Prof. Gordon took those interested to the Resistance Museum down by the fjord. This museum chronicles Norway's resistance to German occupation during World War II from 1940 - 1945

Here Ron, Laura & Prof. Gordon listen to a speech by Norway's famous traitor Vidkun Quisling. Just around the corner from where they are is this giant display of weapons.

I liked how these documents were labeled "Most Secret."

The Resistance Museum is on a hill overlooking the water. This is the view right outside the museum. This is the path that leads up to the museum.

Hovedoya

Every time we have a field trip we meet here, on the front steps of the Law school. We'd heard about taking a ferry out to nearby islands so we decided to check it out today after school. We packed our swimsuits, bought groceries to grill and met up here to walk over to the ferry.

We rode this ferry out to an island called Hovedoya. We got to look at a few islands while on the ferry. This one had beautiful little summer cabins on it. Erica, Leah & Kara cooked up hot dogs and chicken dogs on these cheap disposable one-time-only grills. We rolled our hot dogs up in Lompe (a type of lefse) and all thought that tasted way better than the hot dog buns we had also brought along. We didn't get out to the island until about 3 p.m. and weren't ready to leave until after 9 p.m. It was just so beautiful and relaxing.

After hiking around and exploring the island a few of us braved the cold ocean water and went for a swim.