ScandiTrip 2006

The first stop on our honeymoon was Oslo, Norway. And even though the airline lost my bag, I still really enjoyed the city. Here’s my top three list.

One. The Vikingskiphuset or the Viking Ship Museum. This museum has two excellently preserved Viking ships. The reason they are so well preserved is that the boats were never used as they were burial boats. There is also a third boat that isn’t as well preserved.



Two. The folkemuseum or the Folk Museum. This was our first experience with an open air museum in Scandinavia. The museum has collected buildings from through out Norway and reassembled them in one location. There are old buildings from all over Norway.





Including an 800 year old Stave Church.



Three. Frognerparken with Vigeland’s sculptures and museum. I took so many photos here that the park is going to require a post of its own. Basically Oslo bribed Gustav Vigeland to come back to the city by offering him a big studio and an even bigger park to display his work in. The results were amazing.



Once I get all my photos of the park uploaded, I’ll post all about the park and museum.

It's the middle of the night and I'm wide awake. So, I thought I'd take advantage of this time and have my first look at the pictures that I took. This is the first time I've seen them other than through the tiny little screen that is on the camera and they turned out pretty good.

I took a little over 1200 pictures! Geez... That's nearly twice as many as our last trip. Obviously I won't be posting all of them. But, tonight, I have posted 24 that are available in a single set on Flickr.


Here is the link.

Ah, it's good to be home again.

We got up early to catch our 7:25am flight from Helsinki to Frankfurt. But, the flight was delayed getting into Frankfurt because Frankfurt was so busy. By the time we landed, we only had about 30 minutes to make our connecting flight. But, since this was a flight to the US, we had to go through another round of screenings and inspections and the line was very very long. It was a madhouse. Passengers were yelling at the security people, the security people were yelling back, and passengers were yelling at each other. Ugly.

We did managed to skip ahead a bit by saying that our flight was already boarding, but we still had to wait in line for about 20 minutes. When we finally got to the screening station, they found my contact lens eye drops (all liquids forbidden). I told them I needed the wetting drops for the dry-air plane ride and actually put a couple drops in my eyes to prove they were not explosives. They let me keep them. We then franticly ran to our departing gate, only to find that they were holding our flight because about a quarter of the booked passengers still had not boarded yet. The plane ended up waiting nearly an hour before finally taking off.

Other than that, it was a smooth and uneventful flight back. I did see a rather large forest fire in the Canadian Rockies, a beautiful look at Rainier, and we practually flew right over the west rim of Mt. St. Helens.

Tallinn was everything that I had hoped for, and as a bonus we got some wonderful sunny weather (and great pictures too). It's a small Medieval walled city with many winding cobbled stoned streets that end with open squares, impressive buildings and large churches. We got there a little before 10am and walked around town until nearly 3:30pm with only a short break for lunch. The old town reminds me of Rothenburg, Germany, with the stone walls and towers. But, there is one noticeable difference. Tallinn is still getting a feel for the tourist trade compared to mature Rothenburg. Although there were plenty of restaurants, cafes and nick-nack stores, there wasn't any of the riff-raff carts and most notably no ice cream stands. There is much fix-up in progress. We saw much street repair, building painting, etc. Estonia was under Soviet rule for over 40 years during the cold war. It was the first time that I had ever visited a former Soviet town. Aside from some rough edges, it wasn't that much different from anywhere else in Europe. A very nice town well worth the visit.

Tomorrow is our last full day on our trip. We were going to do some train hopping, but have decided to just explore Helsinki some more. Sunday is the, ugh, long flight home. Despite the flight, it will be good to be back home again.

-ge

We got in this morning around 10am. The overnight cruise was sort of strange but interesting. Aside from all the cabins, it has about 6-7 restaurants, a casino, and a nightclub. However, we spent most of our time on the deck watching the beautiful Swedish archipelago go by. Many pictures.

Helsinki is small and modern. Not much in the way of narrow winding streets or old castles. But, we did see the famous "rock church", which was carved out of solid rock and has a circular copper roof. The acoustics in side are excellent and there was someone playing the piano while we visited.

Helsinki also has an excellent national history museum. It is well laid out and walks you chronologically through Finish history from the stone age, through the middle ages, and into modern times. The best we've seen on this trip.

We booked a day trip to Tallin, Estonia for tomorrow. We leave and 8am and will be back a bit after 4pm. The boat trip takes about 90 minutes each way, so that should give us plenty of time to see this very old capital city. Looking forward to it!

Probably post again tomorrow (since our hotel has a nice internet station!).

-ge

Sorry about not posting recently. We were unable to get internet access while in Stockholm. Our hotel's internet station was out of order and the near by kiosk rip us off for nearly $2. The bastards. Anyways, despite the lack of access to the net, we had a great time in Stockholm. I am typing with just a few minutes of time purchased on board the Silja, which is our over-night ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki. It is amazing that this ship has internet access. Welcome to the 21st century.

Not sure I can now remember everything we did while staying in Stockholm. We had 6 whole days there and did many things in town and did several outings as well. The highlights were certainly the Vasa museum. This was a Swedish warship that was built in 1628, but sank on within 20mins of being launched. Bad for 17th century Sweden, but great for today, as there is a giant, almost entirely complete, 400yr/old ship for us to look up on. Amazing! Lot's of pictures that I will post as soon as we get home.

Yesterday we took a ferry over to an old Viking settlement called Birka. There has been much archiological excavations here with findings dating back to the 800's AD. We got a great guided tour and also had time to just explore. Great trip.

The day before we made our way up to Uppsala. This place is also well known for it's viking past that includes a series of large burial mounds. Very interesting.

Besides these outings, we spent much time in the old part of Stockholm known as Gamla Stan. Wonderful old winding coblestone streetings and no less than 3 old churches (one Swedish, one Finnish, one German) all in one island.

In addition to Gamla Stan, we wondered around the rest of town a bit. Saw several musums besides the Vasa (old ship) museum. Probably the best of those was the National History museum. Great prehistory and viking times exhibit.

Well, running out of our 2.5 Euros of internet time. Will try and type again in Hellsinki. But, we will be back in Portland on Sunday and will do some wrap up then as well as begin to post all the photos (we're talking thousands, folks)...

:-)

We spent our last hours (and Danish Krones) in Denmark today. It was a bit of a mop up mission. Yesterday got called on a count of weather. The plan yesterday was to see some various sites around Copenhagen. We managed to get to Roskilde, the site of a nice little town, cathedral, and interesting Viking museum. Then, it was on to Hillerød, which boasts Denmark's nicest castle called Fredriksborg Slot (slot means castle). But, as we toured the amazing castle, it started to rain. Rain hard. Like, really really hard. It kept raining, and raining, and raining. Eventually, we had to walk back to the train station. However, we were only in the rain for a few minutes before we were soaked. Ugh. After that, we decided to cut the tour short and head back to the hotel room for change into dry cloths.

So, today we set out to finish our trip from yesterday. However, we had to check out of our hotel and move our luggage to a train station in southern Sweden called Malmö. This is the train station that we will depart today (overnight train) to Stockholm. They have giant lockers in the train station that both of our big packs would fit into. Then, we got on a train that was headed back to Denmark and up north to a Helsingør.

Helsingør is famous for a certain castle called Kronborg. Big deal? Well, the English call this castle Elsinore as in the castle in Shakespeare's play Hamlet. Although the guide books are quick to point out that Shakespeare never visited this castle, and the (barely) historic Hamlet died several centuries before this castle was built, the local tourism board still plays up the connection and has many plaques and banners with Hamlet references. That's especially important on the interior, which is sparsly furnished (compared to the more impressive Fredricksborg castle from yesterday). But, we still enjoyed the tour and took many pictures (mostly of the exterior). Then, we took a ferry across the stait to Helsingborg, Sweden.

Helsingborg is a bit larger than Helsingør. However, it's castle was trashed by the Danes several wars ago and all that is left is a single tower. Despite this, Helsingborg has a very nice old town with winding coblestoned streets. We spent an hour or so here before hopping a train down to a college town called Lund.

Lund was very nice. It has a huge grey cathedral with beautiful twin towers. But, the highlight of Lund was it's open air museum (our third). More like Århus' than Oslo's, the museum featured a cluster of 3-400yr old open-timbered old houses, most of which were open for us to go into. Lots more pictures here.

Then, it was back to Malmö. Malmö's castle was closed by the time we got to town, but there is this huge music festival going on. The streets around the main town square are packed with people and we could hardly walk threw it. We finally found a cafe on the pedestrian only street that had an opened table. We had a very nice meal and I had a local beer (pilsner, but still flavorful). Ahh.

That's it for now. Tomorrow, we'll be in Stockholm.