I'm here!

The trip went well, nothing out of the ordinary, just two hours on the plane during which I finished a good book and ate a sandwich. I left home at 1:40pm and was here at around 8:30 ... so a pretty long trip, and still in 'little' Norway. :-) Now I'm ready to go out and explore the town. Shop for postcards, perhaps. ;-) And of course take lots of pictures. Check this out, it's the view from Elin's living room. :-o

Warsaw 2009: Downtown

We passed through the downtown area a number of times, several times a day in fact ... our hotel (centrally located :-) was sort of on the wrong side relative to most of what we wanted to see. :-) But Warsaw is an easy city to make your way around in - the public transport system is wonderful, with lots of streetcars and buses. There's also a metro covering part of the city. We used the streetcar mostly. I love watching a strange city go by through the window of a moving streetcar or bus ... it makes me feel I'm getting to know the place a little. :-)

These are some of the pictures I took from around the city center.

The Palace of Culture, and a streetcar, on a foggy day.

The Palace of Culture by night. One of my previous Warsaw posts has more pictures of the Palace; look here.

The Muzeum Narodowe, ie, the National Museum. It houses a collection of various art treasures from different periods. The most impressive things we saw there were the enormous paintings by Jan Matejko ... these were kept concealed from the Nazis during WWII, so that they never left Poland, in fact AFAIK never left the city. That sounded reasonable when I read about it in the guide book, but when I saw the paintings ... !! o_O The biggest one of them is bigger than my living room. And I'm not exaggerating. It's deeply impressive to me that they managed to conceal and preserve these priceless treasures for years under such horrible conditions.

A peculiar building along a street that we passed daily. I don't remember what it was now ... if I ever knew. And looking at it I really can't begin to guess. :-D

And if only I could remember what this building was ... !! We were told what it was like three times but immediately forgot it every time. :-D It's something important, anyway, as I'm sure you can tell. ;-)

My mother outside the famous Fotoplastikon ... of which I had never heard before our visit. :-) But it was pretty cool though, I'm glad we went to see it. And the price was unbeatable. :-) Unfortunately all the pictures I took inside totally suck ... but we both really liked this old water fount set in the wall outside the entrance. Fancy. :-) There are a couple of interior shots on the site I linked to if you're curious.

There were several fancy-looking multiplexes, and we did want to go to a movie, but because the Poles dub all foreign movies it would have been pointless. :-( That's something we Scandinavians aren't used to; only movies for children are dubbed here. If you come to Oslo, or any other Norwegian city or town big enough to have a movie theater, you can safely go to any movie screening except the most babyish ones ... they'll only be subtitled. If you're here in the summer and there's a big Norwegian blockbuster on (such as they are ;-) you may be in luck and it may be subtitled in English for your viewing pleasure. :-)

In the courtyard of a random apartment building.

Many buildings were beautifully lit after dark ... and there were lots of billboards and other ads all over the place. Not very Eastern bloc to my eyes. :-) I wished I could have gone to see Coraline, but again, pointless.

One of the main streets crossing the main square, close to the main railway station, and one of the biggest malls in the city. And of course people waiting for the streetcar. :-)

To see the rest of my shots from downtown Warsaw, go here.

Some pictures from London ...

One for Anéa ...

... and one for me ... ;-)

Seen in some tube station or other on August 6th.

And in closing, a totally unrelated picture for my best friend C. because it is her birthday today!! Hooray!! She is 33 years old today and I hope I will be able to get to somewhere where I can call her and wish her a happy birthday. (Phones don't work so well in the mountains. :-)

C., I also hope you will have a wonderful day today!! Whether I get to talk to you or not. :-) This picture shows how I feel about you, or rather us:

Kjempeklem til deg!!! :-)

Mountain vacation 2008. Bjørneborg & Bjørnhollia

Time for some pictures of our cabin and of Bjørnhollia. (Which I wrote about rather extensively here.) Starting with the latter ...

This is a view of Bjørnhollia from the shortcut, a path that I normally use to get down there ... the road curves and takes up to several minutes more to walk. ;-) The red T is the symbol of the Norwegian Tourist Association; they use it to mark the accepted tracks through the various wildernesses in our lovely country. :-)

Front left: the managers' house; front right: the old sleeping quarters. Back left: the employees' residence. Center: the main building, which houses the kitchens, the common room, cellars, dining hall, various sleeping quarters.

Front: the byre; back: employees' residence and main building; center: the dormitory building.

A view of the whole place, seen from across the valley, ie, the slope of mount Musvollkampen.

These pictures (above) were all taken in the summer of 2005. But nothing's changed since then. :-)

This is our cabin; the front view when you come walking down the path from the road. This entire side of it is the new addition. Well, 'new' addition. :-) The tiny building in the background is the new outhouse.

The back of the building. That's my mother you see putting some fresh varnish on the window frames in the kitchen. :-)

The old outhouse (left), now part woodshed and part storage shed, and the new woodshed (right). The new outhouse also doubles as an extra woodshed. We like to know we have plenty of wood to burn. :-)

Side view of the old outhouse. My grandfather built this in the fifties.

The new outhouse, right, and the new woodshed. (Yeah, they're not new, we just call them that ... cause everything else is so much older.)

The cabin seen from outside the new outhouse. The old outhouse in the foreground ... as you see.

A couple of views of the living room. We spend most of our time either outside or in this room.

The kitchen. Not entirely tidy ... this was taken on the day we were leaving.

My grandmother's room. My room now, I guess. :-(

Mount Musvollkampen seen from our property.

The cabin seen from the path from the road. When you're standing where I was when I took the picture, you're literally a few seconds' walk away from the house. So it's pretty well concealed. From the road you have no idea that it's there. :-)

You can see the house in this photo, but just barely ...

In closing, another view of Bjørnhollia - a very charming one if I do say so myself - with mount Musvollkampen in the background. This picture was taken this year. Doesn't it look wonderful there? Don't you just want to walk in there and put your feet up and get a nice cup of coffee? :-)

You'd be more than welcome to!! :-)

Mountain vacation 2008. August 17th

Yay, Sunday ... and warm and sunny! :-D Exactly as we'd hoped. So we packed our bags - that is, my Hitachi backpack that I got from a supplier at work ;-) - and set off on my favorite hike. This is a hike through varied and uneven terrain; it takes between three and four hours, depending on the pace you set. Its goal is a valley on the other side of lake Bergetjønn ... a valley that has two names, one official and one that's generally used. ;-) The official name is Skjerdalen (dal is the Norwegian word for valley) which I can't tell you the meaning of, and the name that you will more often hear is Villmanndalen - Wild Man Valley. :-) I'm not entirely sure where this name originated. But it's to do with the spectacular scenery in the valley which is bizarrely different from everything else in the area. The valley is narrow and its sides vertical cliffs; there is a great deal of water on the valley floor and cascading down the cliff walls. All of this combines to form a kind of natural greenhouse. The valley is enormously fertile compared with the surrounding area, and a number of plants grow there that aren't found anywhere else in Rondane. It is so weird being there ... you descend a short distance and suddenly it is as if you were in some other world. The plant life grows so wildly down there ... so many different plants and such abundant growth. At the far end of the valley, you ascend a few meters and you're back on the mountain plateau with nothing growing but moss and some stunted birch and juniper bushes. And the temperature may drop noticeably as you move from the protected valley and up onto the plateau. A very strange feeling.

Part of the path along the further side (to us) of lake Bergetjønn.

The far side of lake Bergetjønn. Mount Svulten in the background to the left.

A view of lake Bergetjønn from the far side. Bjørnhollia just visible. Taken from the cliffside on our way up to higher ground on the far side.

A view of mount Musvollkampen from the top of the cliff on the far side of lake Bergetjønn.

My mother on the top of the cliff, with lake Bergetjønn in the background. It's great for fishing, btw. :-)

A view towards Bjørnhollia from the top of the cliff.

We never bring anything to drink, because there are lots of brooks and streams along the way with wonderfully clean and cold water in them. We just bring little wooden cups to drink from. This is mine. It's ridiculously small ... but that's for a reason. We all had these cups made for us by my grandfather, my mother's father. He was a very talented woodcarver and he made (among many other things) these cups for everyone in the family. But then he died when I was only six years old. So my cup is made for the size my hand was when he knew me ... he never had the chance to make a bigger cup for an older and bigger me. There are lots of other wooden cups I could use, if I wanted to ... but I always use this one, because this is the one that he made for me. :-(

This is an old shieling, built entirely of stone, that is at about the halfway point on the way to the valley. We normally take a little break there. Fun story: this place was built as a shieling by some farmers from the Atna Valley (where Solvang is), but it isn't in the East Valley (which the Atna Valley is part of), it is in the Gudbrand Valley (the borders are tricky up there), and when people from the latter heard about this shieling they immediately set out to make sure it wasn't used by those pesky East Valley fellows. And it never was. It was never used by anyone from the Gudbrand Valley either - they didn't want it for themselves, they just didn't want anyone else to have it. (Typical!!! ;-) So it was just left to fall down for now almost a century. Oy vey ...

Finally, down in the valley.

My mother on the opposite side of the valley. She thought it seemed safer, but ...

... ended up having to cross the little river on the valley floor. She made it across OK, but wasn't entirely convinced of that when she set out. ;-)

Some views of the valley.

The waterfall at the halfway point of the valley. A lot of people turn back here, thinking they've seen it all. More fools they.

Me climbing the waterfall.

A view of the first part of the valley, seen from the waterfall.

A view of the second part of the valley.

A view across the mountain plateau just after we got back up there from the valley. Mount Musvollkampen in the center of the image.

A view of mount Musvollkampen from the nearer side (to us) of lake Bergetjønn.