Oslo Highlights

Viking Ship Museum:


Sculpture Park, nice version:


Sculpture Park, naughty version:


Sculpture Park, silly version:


Nilsen Hunting:

Norway in a Nutshell

Our flight from Stockholm to Bergen was a little over an hour, and we arrived late afternoon. Bergen is on the western coast of Norway. There isn't much to the seaside town, so we were able to walk most of it in a short time. Our hotel was old and historic. What it lacked in comfort it made up for in character, with dark wooden floors and patterned wallpaper. With the windows open we could hear the live music from the neighboring bar.

After checking in we hit the fish market. It seemed like a great way to try some local, fresh delicacies. Bryan and I both sampled some smoked whale - I'm pretty sure it was raw. The smoky flavor made it hard to distinguish what the meat tasted like (a smoky meat with a hint of fish is about the best I can do.) I tried some smoked salmon after that and liked it much better. Bryan ended up getting a cooked whale burger and I got some deep-fried shrimp. We both came to the conclusion that our meal had the quality and price you can expect from a restaurant aimed at tourists. What we had hoped would be our evening meal we decided was just a snack and went to a local pizza place for dinner.

The next morning we had to be up bright and early for our "Norway in a Nutshell" experience. This is a popular tour route for tourists that takes you from the west coast to east coast on a variety of different methods of transport. We had the option of doing the land version on the Bergen Railway, supposedly one of the most beautiful railways in the world, or doing a boat through the Sognefjord, Norway's longest and deepest fjord. It was a tough call but we went for the boat. It was a large boat and a smooth ride (oddly, with Bonanza reruns on a television in the boat). I expected jagged and rocky cliffs but got a mixture of rock and lush green, with cottony wisps of low-lying clouds spattered in between. We passed several towns with colorful cottages seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We eventually stopped for the night in one such town called Flam.



There wasn't really much to the town. There were three restaurants and a couple souvenir shops selling trolls and overpriced sweaters. We had a filling lunch of Norweigen meatballs and then had dinner at the brewpub, where we tasted several beers and I had a pizza with goat cheese from the neighboring town of Undredal.

This morning we got ready for the rest of our journey to Oslo. We hopped aboard the Flamsbanna, the steepest standard gauge railway in Europe at 2,831 feet. The cars are very old-fashioned, almost antique looking on the inside. The trip is only about an hour but is very picturesque, passing several waterfalls and running alongside bubbling brooks up the mountain, occasionally going through tunnels originally dug by hand. We switched to the Bergen railway in Myrdal and then eventually switched to a bus that took us through more modern looking suburbs before arriving in Oslo. It was lashing rain when we got here but we still hoofed it to the hotel with our bags, before finding a local restaurant called Nilsen Spiseri. We will probably hit a few more Nilsen restaurants/bars before we leave. Tomorrow is our last full day and we plan to take full advantage of it. More then...

There's Norway a McDonald's Hamburger Costs that Much!

Day 5 of our Scandinavian trip, and we find ourselves incredulously looking at our currency converter saying "this can't be right." This trip is the exact opposite of our Argentinian escape a few years back where we were eating like kings and imagining how expensive the equivalent meal would be in New York. In Finland things weren't so bad. For one, they are on the Euro so just the math is easier. In Sweden we started raising our eyebrows and saying "really"? By last night in Bergen, after seeing a McDonald's sign that advertised a $15 bacon cheeseburger, we started wondering what the heck is going on. A pint of Ben & Jerry's in Stockholm was $9, and in Norway it's $12. I don't know if it's the US dollar or if things are really just expensive. It's like the whole country is the mini-bar, and there's no grocery store around the corner where you can stock up on water.

But aside from that, we have been having a lot of fun. Bryan wasn't a fan of our "cruise-ferry," and spent the whole night tossing and turning, envisioning the Poseidon Adventure. I managed not to roll out of the top bunk. We did eat the ship's buffet; as Bryan put it, "a way to knock out in one shot a whole lot of gross foods we have to try." So we set about with all the pickled fish. Hardly a satisfying meal.

We got into Stockholm and stayed at a hotel owned by one of the folks from Abba. It was a great hotel, but due to the short duration of our stay there, we didn't get to spend much time there. There was no Pizza Hut meal since we've already done a Swedish Pizza Hut in Malmo back in 2001, though we contemplated it after walking about a half-hour to a place in my guidebook that was closed down. Our nice meal out consisted of Bryan getting a fish and me trying an Elk burger. It was all right, but I don't ever have to get it again.

We ended our night at the coolest bar we've ever been to - Ice Bar, where the entire bar, including the glasses you drink out of, is made of ice. The temperature is kept at 23 degrees and you are given special coats before entering. A free drink is included, but the cold temperature keeps people coming in and out. We only stayed about a half-hour, and I'm pretty sure that's the average. Now that we've done that, I have no desire to stay at that hotel with the same concept!

I think I'm going to lay down and take a nap while I can. I will leave Bergen, Flam and the fjords to Bryan, or will write more later.

Finnished

We arrived in Helsinki yesterday morning. We took a bus from the airport and were surrounded by white birch trees like the one in our front yard on Pine Street. Pulling into the town it seemed sterile and desolate. Apparently things don't open until noon on Sundays.

We checked into my new favorite hotel, GLO. The room was awesome and had a "sleep menu," which included different pillows, aromatherapy oils and even bedtime stories. All we ordered were a couple pillows, but we did our best not to use them until bedtime to beat the jetlag.

The weather is perfect - low 70s, low humidity - great for exploring the town on foot. The city isn't very large so we were able to see most of it. We had lunch at a local place and Bryan had filet of reindeer. I stuck with a shrimp and pasta dish. We did some shopping at Europe's largest department store, Stockmann, and went to the room to figure out a game plan. We shook hands that we would not, under any circumstances, take a nap. Bryan tried, but I caught him and decided we would go back to a little amusement park we'd passed on our way from the airport.

We hopped on the city tram and found it relatively easy to maneuver. The park was mainly a kids' park but they had two pretty cool looking grown-up rollercoasters (neither of which we rode.) We did find our treasure in an arcade that had about 8 pinball games (more than half of which we played.) We had intended to get back in town in time to have dinner at our 10th international Pizza Hut but unfortunately it closed at 8. So we found ourselves at a really great restaurant which we were most likely underdressed for. In the end, we actually managed to stay up til almost midnight and slept in until almost 10 this morning. Jetlag averted!

The only thing Finland is really known for is its saunas and its reindeer, so we figured that it was our duty to visit the hotel sauna; that, and it was included in the price! What a great way to end our stay in Helskinki. Bryan used the gym first, and I wanted no part of working out on my vacation, so I did the saunas and steam rooms. I had almost missed this awesome shower in the sauna area but luckily found it before leaving the area. I did the splash setting, then the tropical, then the side shower. It was heavenly. This was followed by a Pizza Hut lunch buffet! One of the pizzas had jalapenos and tuna, and they had some breadsticks stuffed with goat cheese and drizzled with honey that unfortunately you could only order when the buffet was going on. It was moderately priced in our vast experience of Pizza Huts abroad.

Now we are aboard the Silja Symphony on our way to Stockholm; a "cruise ferry." Unfortunately, when I booked it, I thought the price was per person, not per cabin, so I ended up booking two of the cheapest cabins. They informed us of this at check-in and offered us one cabin and half the price of the other back in "ship dollars." So now we are trying to figure out how to spend the rest on duty-free items before we return back to our bunk-bed nook below deck. Ah well... the worst experiences make the best stories! Though it's a big step down from our night at GLO, we are thoroughly enjoying ourselves. We are happy for skype and that Jackson is in good hands with his Grandma Diane.

Last days in Italy

I’m back almost a week now, enjoying the westbound jet lag that affords me the luxury of going to bed early and waking up early. Mom and I had such a wonderful trip that I would be remiss to leave out our last two days.

Our last day in Scalea was a “free day,” with nothing on our itinerary. The town is a really small town, one where taxis aren’t really an option, nor is any other form of public transportation. We had seen most of the town in our week’s stay, so we took the day as a day to relax. We slept in and then took the rest of Gramma’s ashes to the beach, where mom said her goodbye. I sat on the rocks and reflected for a while as mom combed the beach for driftwood. We then went back to the hotel where I read a book on our balcony in the sun and mom made her slideshows.

We had dinner that night with our new friends Cristiano and Carmine. They took us up some mountain to another hillside town where we had a nice steak dinner. When we ordered, they suggested we get a pizza as an appetizer and then we’d get two steaks. I thought, finally, they get it, that mom and I don’t eat like Italians, and we’re just splitting the entrees. That was until we saw the steaks. They were huge porterhouse steaks meant for two people. So of course the men were left with the task of doing most of the eating, but we still had a lovely night. We said our goodbyes and hope we can play host to them when they come to NY. The next morning Giovanni, our original driver and the owner of the restaurant, drove us back to the airport, using much more restraint than our original airport trip and left us feeling a lot more comfortable. After more big hugs, we flew back to Rome for our last night in Italy.

We arrived mid-afternoon and knew we had to get to the Vatican before it closed. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it. At this point, almost 4 p.m., we hadn’t eaten since 7 a.m., we were starving. Mom made a suggestion to do the most sacrilegious thing you could ever do, and I obliged. She’d seen a sign for Burger King, and once she’d said it, I couldn’t get my mind off it. So off we went. To eat at Burger King. On a Friday in Lent. A few hundred feet from the Vatican. It actually pained me to type that and admit to it, but ya know what? Damn, it tasted good! We’d had our fill of good Italian food all week, so we got some American fuel and then headed to St. Peter’s Basillica, which was open. Mom admired the beautiful paintings and took some pictures, then we went back to our convent hotel for a much-needed nap.

Later that evening we visited my cousin Jennifer, who married an Italian and lives in Rome with him and their two sons. She took us to a great pizza place where I proceeded to eat myself into a food coma. I got gnocchi with a truffle cream sauce and split a pizza with mom. Then when I saw that they had my favorite dessert, strawberries and cream, I couldn’t resist. After the meal Jennifer gave mom a night-time ride around many of the monuments, including the Colosseum. Then we went to some spot where you could look through a keyhole and get a perfectly framed view of the dome of St. Peter’s. We then went back to their apartment where mom kept her kids up way past their bedtime and I was still feeling lethargic from the meal. We had our last night of sleep in Italy, our last morning meal of cappuccino and croissant, and flew back to NY a few pounds heavier than before.

Adventures in Eating

Being pregnant and travelling through Italy has advantages and disadvantages. The main disadvantage is missing out on a lot of great wine drinking and some raw cured meats, like prosciutto and salami. The advantage is I can eat as much as I want and not really be concerned about the calories. I also got out of eating some terrible strong licorice yesterday after finding out, per our guide, that it's not good for pregnancy (who knew?).

Tuesday we cooked our last but best meal yet. Our starter was a stuffed eggplant. The stuffing was made of ham, egg, breadcrumbs and cheese. We then finished it with a tomato sauce. We made homemade fusilli as our first course. The fusilli was a little more challenging. The pasta was rolled and cut into about two-inch slices, which you then smushed a thin rod into and rolled until it was thin. Our sauce was a tomato-based sauce with sausages and ribs and pig fat in it. The second course was a thinly pounded steak, which we rolled the leftover eggplant stuffing into (with the addition of ground beef) and cooked in a broth of onion, celery and white wine. The meal was fantastic from start to finish. Mom has commented how much the cooking reminds her of how her father used to cook.

We then took a little road trip to a town called Aieta on the top of a mountain on a very winding road. There was an old palace on top overlooking the hills. There were sheep and pig farms everywhere. We had a nice little tour guide from South Africa who had married an Italian. We then travelled to Praia, a little beach town, for the sunset.


Yesterday we were up at the crack of dawn to cross through the middle of the country to the east coast town of Ciro. We stopped along the way to visit a licorice factory and museum. The town smelled fantastic, but the fresh licorice was bitter and horrible. We stopped for lunch at an old convent and had a feast so big that we never made it to the second course. Every appetizer you can imagine was brought out to us - from meatballs to breaded mashed potatoes to spicy olives stuffed with tuna. Our first course was tortelloni filled with fresh truffles and another with mushrooms. We were too stuffed to get to the steak second course, so we decided to get back in the van. We moved on to the town of Ciro and hit a winery which covered over 250 acres. Mom even tasted a few different whites (without mixing them with Coke.) We then made our way to a castle on the beach about a half-hour from Catanzaro, where my great-grandmother was from, and I left a little bit of my gramma's ashes in the ocean. On the way back we passed through the actual town and I marvelled at the fact that it had tunnels through mountains and visually resembled parts of Pittsburgh, where, coincidentally, Gramma chose to settle. Today is our last free day in Calabria, so we will have dinner with our new friends Cristiano and Carmine before heading to Rome tomorrow. I fear for the buttons on my work pants when I get back.

Adventures in Cooking, Part II

After a day of sightseeing yesterday, today we returned to the kitchen, where things went a little smoother, though the second course was a little less appetizing. Our starter was something called sformatta (sp?), which was essentially a quiche with ham, mozzarella and parmesan. This took maybe 10 minutes at most to prepare and then cooked for 40 minutes – it was delicious and something I’m sure I can make when I get home. The first course was a cavatelli pasta with broccoli and n’duja, which is a spicy local sausage consisting of all the parts of the pig you would never want to eat or think about eating. Cavatelli is a little like gnocchi but made of just flour and water (no potato). It was a little harder to roll, and there was a trick to making a little slit in it with two fingers. I never quite got the hang of it, but mom did, so I stuck to rolling and cutting it and she stuck with forming it.

Our second course was pigs' hearts and livers sauteed in olive oil and garlic with red pepper and a sundried sweet pepper. I think if it was a different kind of meat I would have enjoyed it more, but for now I’ll just say the baby wasn’t into it and it made me slightly nauseous. Cutting it was particularly gross and unfortunately I can still smell it on my fingers. Our side dish was chicory (spinach) with breadcrumbs and garlic, and that was delicious. The nice thing about having so many courses was I was able to say I was full by the second course and just tasted it without offending. Afterwards we went for gelato with Christiano, our interpreter.

Yesterday was a local sightseeing day. We first went to a farmhouse where many of the local fruits and vegetables are grown. One in particular, the cedro (a citrus fruit), is only grown in two places in the world, this region and in Lebanon. It is a fruit that Jewish people use for religious purposes as an offering. We went and saw where that is grown. Also grown in this region are olives, figs, sweet peppers and oranges. We also went to a little hillside town called Orsomarso and stopped for a cappuccino. We came back and took a little nap and then did a walking tour of Scalea, the town we’re staying in. Many of the villages in this region are very old and built purposefully of stone to defend the land from invaders from places like Turkey and Algeria. Many are actually walled-in cities with one entrance, usually very narrow, and everything is attached. Apparently most of these villages didn't even have running water until the 1970s. We walked over 200 stairs, enough to build up an appetite for dinner.

We've been eating every night at the restaurant and bouncing around the menu, getting a little more adventurous each night. I unknowingly ate rabbit last night. Our waiter doesn't speak English, so when I asked him what was in the sauce he put his fingers up by his ears, which I took for some reason to mean goat or a horned animal, but it was rabbit. And it was very good. They've been making the portions smaller for us now, though whether it's from the food or the pregnancy, the zipper on my jacket busted last night from my growing belly. At least the baby is eating good!

Tomorrow is our last class and Wednesday is a wine-tasting day, which unfortunately won't be much fun for me. A funny tidbit I'd forgotten: Anyone who knows my mom knows she doesn't drink. At all. Something the Italians don't comprehend. I tried to encourage her to at least have a glass of wine, and Christiano suggested that she mix it with coke and a lemon. She did, and she loved it. And when people mock her at home, she can honestly tell them (hopefully in a snobby voice), "Well, THIS is how they drink it in Italy."

Adventures in Cooking - Part I

This morning I faced my fear of inadequacy and went to the dark place where I am most inept in life: The Kitchen. The cooking class is held at a restaurant called Antica Osteria just a short while from the hotel in the town of Scalea. When we arrived, we were met by our chef, Genaro, and a translator named Christiano and a photographer named Carmine. While they were setting up, I had a cappuccino and a mom had a “caffe.” I had explained to her yesterday that a coffee here means a shot of espresso, but she’d forgotten and thought the tiny cup was hysterical (musing that my dad would need about 20 of these) and made several faces after tasting it.

Now to the kitchen. We started with our appetizer. I was given the task of peeling potatoes, and mom, cutting the peppers. Mom was a pro and was tossing peppers around and hamming it up for the camera in the time it took me to peel two potatoes. Soon she started to help me, thankfully, so we could move on to the first course. I found that while peeling potatoes was a weakness of mine, stirring them in a frying pan was a strength. Unfortunately I couldn’t do that for long, but the more time-consuming task of making gnocchi kept me busy for a good while. I especially enjoyed the little contraption that looked like a Play-doh fun factory. Once we made the dough, rolling it and slicing it kept me busy while mom cut the meat for our second course. The sauce for the gnocchi was an olive oil based mushroom, sausage, tomato and garlic sauce. The second course was a simple meat, carrots and celery with white wine sauce. We then did an after-meal course of tomato with a gratin of anchovies, capers, bread crumbs, garlic and parsley. The bread crumb maker was another cool contraption.

Now it was time to eat our masterpiece and neither mom nor I had the appetite to eat the whole thing, so by the time the second course came, we were really just tasting it as the chef lovingly yelled at us in Italian, reminding me that I’m eating for two, and making hand gestures of a microscope. Stuffed, we were able to relax for about an hour before our excursion to the town of Diamante.



Diamante is a town known for its murals. Apparently in 1981 an artist came to the town, once just a small fishing village, and talked the mayor into letting 180 artists come and paint murals all over the buildings. Much of the countryside we passed between the airport and here was made up of abandoned towns because there is no agriculture or any need for people to inhabit some of this land. But apparently the artwork revitalized the town and brought with it a tourism industry. Carmine walked us through the town explaining the murals while Christiano translated. They then took us for some gelatto before returning to the hotel. Now we are just trying to work up enough appetite to go back to the restaurant for dinner (which apparently they didn’t think we ate enough last night.) This has been an amazing trip so far and it’s only our first real day of the course. Tomorrow is a non-cook day and we are going to a museum of regional foods.

When in Rome... Bring Bryan

So I’ve been so consumed with making it through my first trimester that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time planning this trip. I figured this is my fourth trip to Rome, and the Calabria portion is all planned out. I bought a TimeOut book for all of Italy and left my TimeOut Rome at home because it was 10 years old. I never looked in the book to realize that it didn’t contain any maps or practical information. Mom and I got to our lovely little convent hotel in Trastevere, checked in with a nice English-speaking front desk person and showered and napped.

Once ready to hit the town, the front desk person now didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t have a map. Our neighborhood isn’t near a subway station so we would have had to take a bus to a train station. Without my TimeOut Rome I couldn’t even remember how and where to buy bus tickets (Bryan will tell you a story about that…), and alas we took a cab, feeling like a defeated American tourist. I realized, while I consider myself a fairly experienced traveller, just how much I’ve relied on Bryan for his willingness to try and speak the language of whatever country we’re in. I had at least bought an Italian phrase dictionary, but the minute someone started talking back to me I’d blurt out “Parlo inglese?”

A very random coincidence took place the day before I left, in that an Italian court reporter that I’ve met at various international conventions named Fausto found me on Facebook. So at least now mom and I had an Italian-speaking friend to do the talking and take us somewhere off the beaten path. He suggested we meet him at the Pantheon and we’d go from there. This was a great area that gave mom plenty of great photo ops, as we were also close to the Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain. He took us out of the tourist trap area and took us to this awesome little wine bar that had a smorgasbord of Italian goodies for free as part of a happy hour. We said our goodbyes and headed back to the convent where I entered Time Warp Hell.

I did what I never do and broke the cardinal jetlag rule: I took a nap when I got in. I tried to justify it by saying, well, I’m pregnant and I nap now and it doesn’t keep me from falling asleep at night. WRONG! While I fell asleep by 10, I was up by 1 for the rest of the night. To make things worse, our room had no clock and we had no watches. Mom bought an international cell phone, which we didn’t realize that the time zone was defaulted to Chicago time. So we had thought the time difference was seven hours all day long. In the middle of the night I realized my iPod had clocks of the world, and didn’t realize that my iPod’s EST was on daylight savings, so that would make the time difference five hours. Long story short, I called Bryan to see if he could look at a computer and tell me what time it was, and he wasn’t home and couldn’t. We were supposed to have a wakeup call at 5, but I got up at 4 (which I thought was 5), and that was how our day started.

We flew to Calabria this morning and had a driver drive us to the seaside town of Scalea where we will be staying for the week. I feared for both our lives as it was the scariest display of driving I’ve ever experienced – a 2.5-hour drive took less than 2 hours and we played chicken as he passed several vehicles on the two-way road. Now we are settling in and have our first cooking lesson at 10 tomorrow. Hoping now that we have the time zones figured out, the jetlag will wear off by tomorrow.

Where it all began...

Patty and I have been enjoying our trip so much as of late that we haven't really kept up with the blog as much as we'd hoped. So after yet another wonderful day here in Dublin, I figured I'd post some pics and write a little bit about how we really got here.

As most of you know, Patty and I met at a pub in Ireland. I mean where else could you possibly meet anyone in Ireland, right? The name of the pub was/is the Wicked Wolf, and it's in a little town called Blackrock where we both happened to be living in 1999. There's a long storybook version of how we met that I'm sure Patty would love to see down in writing, but I'll spare you all for now. If you're interested sometime, just ask.

Anyway... thankfully, our pub is still there!

A jovial man by the name of Bobby Arnold was standing out front when we stopped by and he offered to snap that photo of us if we'd agree to come in for a pint. We gladly accepted his offer. However, we didn't realize though at the time he offered that he'd had quite a few pints of his own before taking that picture! After showing us his master photography skills, he examined the photo further and said something along the lines of, "I probably should've aimed a little lower, huh?"

After telling Bobby briefly that we had met 10 years earlier at his favorite pub, he proceeded to tell everyone in the bar our story. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone.

Patty and I had actually met for the very first time in the upstairs bar which is typically only open in the evenings and was off limits during the day. After mentioning our story to the barman, and with a little extra encouragement from our new friend Mr. Arnold, we were allowed to go upstairs to have a look around. The place looks pretty much the same, although the upstairs bar is now called "Club Eugene" after the current owner. Here we are at the corner of the bar where it all began.

After snapping a few photos upstairs, we went back down to finish our pints and head back into Dublin for the evening. Bobby couldn't get enough of us and our story and offered to take another photo of us. This one actually came out pretty good!


On the way out of the pub, we got a few congratulations from some locals seated at the bar and then Bobby Arnold blurted out, "You two are the greatest Yanks in all of Ireland!"

I love this country.

Maybe tomorrow I'll actually get around to posting some more pics and filling in some gaps. There's a lot to catch up on.