Norway

Norway is a country that I had never considered visiting, but now that I have been here I am so glad to have come. It is gorgeous. The first day I wondered around to churches and museums with Laura, the art history professor. It was great because she would tell me the history of some of the old art work. We also saw several of Edvard Munch’s work that was great.
On day two I wanted to travel up to see some glacier mountains so I met up with Patrick, the Semester at Sea photographer and we hopped a train to a town called Flam. Once there we felt it was going to be too complicated to travel that far north so we decided to do some hiking around Flam and stay over night. We took the train back uphill and hiked down about 11km. It was gorgeous. We saw so many waterfalls I lost count. We stayed in a hotel and in the morning took a ferry to the next town over and hiked up to a waterfall and around some farmland.

The cute sheep!

One of the amazing things about Norway is their public access law. There are no trespassing laws and you can walk anywhere including on private property. We didn’t have to worry about someone calling the cops or pulling out a shotgun on us. Of course you have to be respectful and not trample their gardens, etc. We ended up talking with a couple of University students who were working in the field of the local agriculture college. They were picking weeds in a large garden. They had a great system where they would set the tractor at a very low speed, line it up on the row and then lay on this trailer designed just for this purpose. It seemed to be a very efficient system.

Just outside our hotel room

Today I walked around Bergen and visited the Fantoft Stave church that was rebuilt a few years ago. It was burned down by a satanic cult group in 1992. The original church dated back to the 11th century and so it was very sad to lose it to such an awful act of violence. It was rebuilt using the same tools and methods used back then. The unique thing about the entirely wooden church is that there are no nails. Everything is constructed to fit perfectly together without the addition of nails. In a few places where nails were necessary wooden ones were used.
On my way back to the ship I walked through the town center. There were a lot of street musicians and people selling things. I stumbled across three American Indian musicians playing in the street, quite ironic in Norway. It was especially funny to look over and see the Enthnomusicologist Professor and talk to her. Of course she was appalled.