Alt for Norge

It's 5:40 am here in London. The sun doesn't rise until 7:33 am, and (hopefully) Hillary will have been here for about 30 minutes by then. I leaving for Heathrow shortly to pick her up and bring her back to school with me, then going to my class then showing her around the city for the rest of the day (and letting her get some sleep and shower at some point).

Norway... was... AMAZING!! I always wanted to go to Norway, but it always looked a little too much like New Hampshire to me. But truly it is an absolutely beautiful country. Oslo is such a wonderful city, the architecture clearly has some very Eastern influences, the people are all so friendly and willing to help and it's easy to get around on public transportation or even just walking.

And it wasn't even that cold.

Our hostel was in the red light district, but it wasn't even that bad. There was a strip club a few doors down that we had to walk past every night, but everyone was friendly. Even the prostitutes on the corner were friendly. One night we saw someone passed out in the crosswalk right in front of the hostel, and promptly ran up to the hostel to watch his friends and passers-by get him into an ambulance. Practically no one goes out during the day in Norway, everyone waits until the sun sets (and it sets early in the winter) and then they go out and get pissed beyond recognition. We stayed away from the bars and the clubs, because Norwegians can get pretty wild when they've been drinking.

I've honestly never laughed so hard in my life. My stomach is literally in pain from laughing at my friends so much. There were seven of us, and we would go back to the hostel and sit in our room, which was this narrow hallway of a room with two bunk beds (we had two rooms all together) and just laugh and laugh for hours.

On Saturday, which was our only full day, we went to Vigeland Park, which is the statue park with the huge fallice. We got up early and it was a very crisp morning, but when we were there the sun was just coming up. The roses are still budding, some are even blooming, just like they are here, making me think maybe the flowers are just confused because of the bizarre summer weather we all had.

We saw Akershus, which is the old Castle and Fortress right in the middle of Oslo fjord. We watched the sunset from the battlements of Akershus, taking in the beauty of Norway. We also saw the Nobel Peace Center! It's so cool to be able to say that we've been there!

We went to the Oslo National Gallery and saw Edvard Munch's The Scream among many other very famous pieces. I believe that the National Gallery is the most robbed art museum in the world, and if you even breathed on a painting the wrong way an alarm went off. My friend actually TOUCHED a painting, because it was "shiny," like a fool, and the security guards came running like she was actually going to walk off with it.

Norway (particularly Oslo, and I'm guessing the other major cities like Bergen) is an extremely expensive country. It's one of the wealthiest countries in the world (who says socialism doesn't work?), and also one of the healthiest with one of the highest standards of living. They tax the hell out of you though, and don't even get me started on kroner. I nearly wept when I went to the ATM as soon as we got there and my options were anything between 500 and 2000 kroner (which is approximately 50 and 200 USD).


This is us, getting ready to leave Norway, taking our last picture in front of the Opera House


The inner view of the Viking Ship


A ship from The Viking Ship Museum


Oslo at Sunset


Sunset


Sunet over the docks


The Nobel Peace Center


In front of the Royal Palace


The Royal Palace


Vigeland statue Park


Being a creep


Angry dancing baby?


My obsession with flowers


And again

It was nice to see the country my father's father left behind. I hope I get to go back some day soon.

I may not be back here for a while (or I may be back every day, it depends on what we do). Hillary and I celebrate our one year anniversary this Friday, in Paris. We leave Thursday afternoon and return Saturday evening, then Hillary leaves back for the states on Sunday. If I drop off the face of the Earth for a week, have a great week, everyone out there!

Spain

We had a wonderful time in Spain. I absolutely loved Barcelona and would go back in a heartbeat (and once back, it would be very hard to force me to leave, it is just so entirely beautiful there).

Madrid... however... was a living breathing nightmare. I will NEVER go back to Madrid. Furthermore, I will NEVER fly Iberian Air, EVER again.

My mother had an early flight on American Airlines yesterday morning, so my friend (who had been in Spain with us) and I took the transfer to the airport with her. We got up around 6 am, finished last minute packing and showering and breakfast, etc.

We said our goodbyes to my mother when we dropped her off at terminal one. The transfer brought us to terminal four, five miles away, and we then tried to check in for our flight back to London.

The time changed while we were in Spain. Spain was six hours, then five hours ahead of home, and London was five hours, then four hours ahead of home. You guys on the East Coast changed your clocks back this morning, so now we're five hours ahead of you in London (again). It's all very confusing.

We walked into the 20 minute check-in line empty handed, thinking it wouldn't be a problem since we had our passports and they could just look us up on their pretty little machines. Oh how wrong we were.

We got to the front of the line and, I kid you not, four of the desk attendants got up to go on their breaks. At the same time. So we waited about 10 more minutes and finally someone freed up. But she was on the phone, having a personal conversation might I add, and she had no interest in us.

I don't speak Spanish very well, I have a very heavy American accent and I don't like speaking Spanish because of my accent, particularly around native speakers. But I do understand Spanish almost word for word. I hate it when people assume just because I have white skin and red hair and blue eyes that I only speak English, that I am a dumb American and that I can't understand what they are saying. Molly, if you're reading this, it's like people assuming that you're not Cuban when you totally are, and that's not right at all. Assuming makes an ass out of you and me.

So she was on the phone and we gave her our passports and, because of the time changes and our confusing, we knew our flight got in to London around 2:30 but we had no idea what time it left. I knew it was about a 2 hour flight so I said it either left around 11:30 or 12:30 (major confusion). The woman looked at me and said the only flight to London was leaving through British Airways (an affiliate of Iberian Air and American Airlines, for your future information) at 12:30. I looked at her, perplexed, and explained that we had a round trip from London to Barcelona and Madrid to London. She didn't understand what I was telling her, since we flew Air Europa to Madrid. She was pretty much a c*nt and I could have reached across the counter and smacked the smug look off her horse face.

She said she checked every single flight on Iberian for that day and that we weren't on any of them. She said, because we didn't have a flight to London, it would cost us around 600 euro (that's roughly equivalent to $1100, which is roughly 2 times what we spent on our round trip tickets from Boston to London and then back). Tears were already welling up in my eyes at this point, while I frantically tried to call my mother, who had turned both of her phones off. We were on our own for this one.

She directed us to tickets and sales, where we gave the girl our story and she said she checked all the flights as well and we were on none of them. I could have died on the spot, but she told us to go to information and customer service, which we did.

When we got to customer service, we gave the woman our whole story. At this point we had been enduring this process for the better part of an hour. After we told her our story, her exact words to us were "So?" in the snottiest voice ever. "What do you want me to do about it?"

In my head I was screaming "Hello! We are your customers! Serve us!" But outwardly I was just welling up with tears and trying not to burst out crying, successfully might I add. I held it together very well, actually.

She directed us to British Airways, since the general consensus was that we were probably just confused about which airline we were flying. We got to the queue at British Airways and the woman at the top of the line, who was directing people here and there and everywhere, looked at us and asked us if she could help us.

We said "We don't know, we think we're flying Iberian, but everyone thinks we're flying British Airways, and we don't have a flight and we have to get back to London..." and basically we were about to burst into tears in front of this poor woman, so she told us to go right into the line and they would help us.

We got to the front of the line and went to the desk of a man named Constantine. God bless this man. He was confused about our story at first and thought that we were flying from Madrid to Barcelona and Barcelona to London, but eventually we helped him understand. He said "No you're not on any of our flights."

And then, with a nod and a smile he found us on Iberian Air, the 1:15 flight to London.

All the people we had gone to beforehand who had told us that they looked everywhere and couldn't find us had been lying to us. They had looked us in the eye and told us we needed to pay 600 euro for tickets to London, that we weren't on any of the manifests and therefore weren't booked to go to London.

I am so. fucking. mad. about all the shit that happened yesterday. This man was the only one who bothered to help us. We told him everything we had been through and all the different people we spoke to and he told us that it is a common problem with Iberian (we had a similar, but much less devastating experience on our way from London to Barcelona with Iberian) and that he was sorry that his co-workers didn't do their jobs. An apology from him meant to world, I just wish all the others hadn't put two twenty year old women through such hell, apparently for the sheer fun of it.

So we got on our flight, at last at last, and headed back to London. We were seated in the emergency row on the plane (and because of our bad luck that morning we were pretty terrified that we were going to be the cause of the misfortunate of the entire plane), but it was really nice to have some extra leg room.

We went through customs and got our luggage and got on the Heathrow Express to Paddington tube station. We were so emotionally exhausted (and my friend had developed a nasty cough) and just wanted to lay down and sleep, but we had to soldier on and carry our heavy bags all over God's green earth and all through the stations, etc.

An Australian man ran up to us at Paddington, apparently in distress, with tears welling up in his eyes. He was short, with grey hair and very bad teeth but he was kind and very sincere. He said he was headed home to Australia with his family and they needed 13 pound 50 pence more for the Heathrow express to Heathrow. We couldn't overlook a fellow traveler in distress, so we handed him 30 pound and went on our way. He offered us his camera, anything we wanted in duty free, but we declined. He took my friend's email address and promised us that God would bless us.

The way I see it is, God blessed him for giving us a miserable day and causing us to have pity on a traveler in distress. Everything happens for a reason, the reason we had such a terrible day yesterday was so that we could help that man and his family to get home to Australia. I don't even care if I'm out my last 10 pound because of it, and I don't even care if he didn't really need the money or if he was just going to rob us and say he was going to get in touch with us and repay us, he looked sincere and I'm not one to judge.

I'd want someone to help me if I were frantic and just trying to get home.

Other than yesterday, the trip to Spain was very lovely. It's good to be back in London, though. So good to be back.

Doesn't Anyone Understand?

We toured Toledo today. The city is very beautiful, very old but very very beautiful. We saw the oldest synogogue in Western Europe. It's no longer a working synogogue, but now more of a museum. For a long time in Toledo there were three groups, Jews, Christians and Muslims. The three groups lived in relative peace and harmony, as far as any records can tell.

Then Queen Isabella came and ruined it all and had all the synogogues torn down and all the jews basically converted or killed. Very unpleasant times indeed.

The Spanish didn't take part in WWII (from what I recall from high school history lessons), because they were dealing with their own civil war at the time. Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain from the 30's until relatively recently, being a facist, let Hitler use his country and his people for target practice for testing out bombs and weapons of destruction. That's where Picasso's famous "Guernica" comes in (I'm seeing it tomorrow, I hope I don't weep). Joan Miro, my most favourite artist, has some very insightful pieces reflecting on the civil war and the years of tumolt for Spain. We went to the Miro museum in Barcelona, which was such an astonishing experience for me. The first time I saw a Miro first hand was in Hartford in 2004, I believe, at the Athenium (if you're from Connecticut you've probably been at one time or another, it's very small but it's a cute museum and I believe it's the oldest public art museum in the United States, but I could be mistaken). He is a contemporary artist, and most of his works seem very primitive and unrealistic, but what you really must do is look beyond the figures, the paint, the frame, the palet, and make the painting something for you. I like art that becomes whatever you want it to become.

But this wasn't meant to be a rant about Miro.

In Toledo today, I noticed there to be a lot of graffiti of swastikas. I don't understand how anyone, particularly someone in Europe, particularly someone whose country suffered under a fascist dictator for decades, could possibly promote the fascist way. Don't they know how their parents and grandparents suffered? Don't they know how all the people of Europe suffered? Fleeing from bombs falling here and there, shrapnal everywhere, air raids, no food, never knowing if you'd live to see tomorrow or if your children would live to see the end of the war. Or worse, if you were one of the direct victims of the fascists, if they stuck you in a ghetto and then huddled you into a cramped box car and sent you off to never be seen or heard from again. Spain is a Catholic nation, don't they know what the Nazis did to the Catholics? Don't they know, don't they understand? How can anyone draw the swastika without silently killing their soul?

Sadly those aren't the first swastikas I've seen in Europe. There is a little shrine, with candles and swastikas in chalk on a stoop near my school in London (in one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in London, might I add). I got so angry and sad when I saw it, that I blew both the candles out, and I don't even care if CCTV saw me do it. They're English, the Nazis tried to wipe London off the map of the world, don't they understand?

On a MUCH happier note, I just got word that Obama signed the Hate Crimes Bill into LAW! How awesome is that?

Perhaps there is hope after all. Yes, I'd say there is a lot of hope. Things are getting better all the time :)

http://www.hrc.org/13699.htm


Miro, 1973, "The Smile of a Tear" very appropriate for today

Eleven Months

We are in Madrid this lovely warm evening. It's been a very long day of traveling and touring and eventually eating, so now we are resting for the night.

Today is my eleven month anniversary with Hillary, and it is sad that we have to spend our anniversary apart.

However, we'll be together next month for our one year anniversary. We'll be in Paris then, it will be que romantico.

I can't believe it's been eleven months, it feels like just yesterday we were driving home from Ani, got hungry for Wendy's and spent the better part of an hour sitting in a dark parking lot eating and talking about life, silently telling each other that we couldn't put on this facade anymore.

Love happens and it knocks you right off your feet. It's the best, most stupifying feeling in the world, to be sure. Perhaps numbing is a better word for it. I don't know if I like the feeling of numbness, or fluttering about, but I do love being in love with a wonderful person and I am very glad that we found each other in this big scary world.

There is no one out there who would climb mountains with me on a whim, who would stand by my side from 3,000 miles away, who would so thoroughly entertain me while simultaneously captivating me. I fall in love with every pretty face I see, but I have never been so completely in love with not only a pretty face, but a wonderful mind and a beautiful soul.

Here's to Madrid and eleven months with Mogli.

Barcelona

Welcome to Barcelona!

This city is AMAZING! I wish I had come here to study abroad instead of crumby old London. There is so much here, and the weather is beautiful and there are palm trees everywhere.

And the food... magnificent.

Tonight at dinner we shared our meal with a little black cat who was walking amongst the tables. She was a skinny little cat so I dropped her some of my salmon. But she wouldn't eat any of my salmon, which was curious because she looked hungry. Then she disappeared. A little while later she returned, followed closely by a kitten, who proceeded to consume all of the salmon I had dropped for his mother. I stroked the cat while she watched her kitten eat, and I swear she was smiling at me. I fed her some salmon so I was certain she had eaten, and she ate every last drop. Then another kitten came, and it all got too crazy and we were leaving the restaurant but it broke my heart to part with the cat, she was such a sweet cat, and she knew exactly how to make me fall in love with her (it's probably because I miss my Kitty).

Earlier this evening, we were walking down to the beach so my mother could put her feet in the Mediterranean Sea, when we came across a man on a bike. Not just any man on a bike, though, a man on a bike wearing... only a bike. He was completely nude!

I got pictures. It'll take me a while to figure out whether Americans are sexually repressed (in that we giggle at nudity and think it's obscene) or if Europeans are too sexually liberal.

Barcelona is amazing, we've walked all over the city so far. This morning we went to Monserrat, which is this really interesting old Monastery in the mountains outside of Barcelona, but it's more like Disneyland in the mountains, with music and dancing and food and liquor. It was awesome.

My internet isn't working (I'm writing this on my friend's laptop right now) so I will upload pictures when I get back to Londontown or if the internet in Madrid works after Tuesday :)

Please Return Your Tray Tables to the Upright and Locked Position

And don't forget to have the worst flight ever. Ugh, I do not even know where to begin.
We left Disney for the airport at about 4 in the afternoon, for a 6:30 flight on Delta. Little did we know that, upon arriving at gate 77 in Orland Intl. Airport, we would discover that our flight was delayed until 8.

I wasn't terribly upset, seeing as I really had nowhere better to be and doing better to be doing with my time. So I sat down with my new Vonnegut novel (Jailbird... it's really good so far!) and a mini box of wheat thins and I was completely satisfied with life.

My mother, on the other hand, was ripshit, and made it known to anyone who cared to listen. Eventually, the flight was delayed even further to 8:45, while we waited for the flight crew to come in. They were apparently delayed by weather, and we were assigned a new flight crew something crazy like that I have no idea what the hell was going on. All I know is we would all be arriving in Hartford at least 2 hours after we were originally scheduled to be arriving.

Finally the flight crew arrived, and we boarded the plane. The seats were 3 across on one side and 2 across on the other. We were sitting in a row of 2, directly across from where they keep the peanuts and diet cokes. Oh and where one of the emergency exits were located. Not cool, at all, totally not on the flight plan. It was SO noisy right there. AND the arm rest in betwen my mother and I wouldn't go up, so whenever I would stretch my seat would recline because my thigh rubbed against the little recline button.

Up until that point I was being my regular cool calm collected self, taking everything in stride and generally pissing my mother off with my mellow-ness. But the arm rest killed me. I was cramped, uncomfortable, and very pissed off. I travel a lot and this was by far one of the worst air travel experiences I have had thus far.

So Delta, if you're listening, you guys need to step up your act. I'm a frequent flier, and I'll start flying Southwest or American if this happens again.
Otherwise it was a very enjoyable, if not educational, vacation.

I'm dreading calling in to work and asking for my hours. I'm just dreading work in general. I would so much rather just lay around by the pool all summer and work on my awesomeness.

Oh, we're opening the pool today too! I'm super excited, it should be fully operational by Wednesday. My dog and I are so going to be the first "people" in the pool this year, we can't even wait. I can see the anticipation in her big brown eyes. The pool water is green right now, but pretty soon it's going to be crystal blue and oh man I just cannot even wait.

Speaking of amazing things, when we finally got home last night (walked through the door at almost exactly 1 am) I was pleasantly surprised with a banner and balloons at the bottom of the stairway right in front of the main door. My friends (who had been pet sitting for us and did WONDERFUL job) had left me a "happy birthday" banner, a "happy birthday" balloon and an "it's a girl" balloon. It was so cute and touching, I freakin love my friends. Molly and Kate, you guys are THE BEST (and so are you Natasha, I know you would have been in on it if you weren't in Poland... COMING HOME TOMORROW!!). Last year, for my 18th birthday, I woke up that morning to a "CONGRATULATIONS IT'S A GIRL!" sign on my front lawn. We left it there for a long time, and I still have it (I'll so have it forever).

There really are beautiful things in this world, like flowers and babies and rainbows (I saw a rainbow over the magic kingdom the other day, it was way cool). The most beautiful thing of all, though, is friendship. There is nothing like it in the world, and with friendship, anything and everything is possible.