We've arrived in Europe safe and more or less sound. The flight over was your average sleepless overnight transatlantic voyage with crying babies, unspeakable food, and an air-system that sucks all the fluids out of your body leaving you red-eyed and chapped. Still, we did get a decent movie ("Love's Labor's Lost," which I think is just charming) and a row to ourselves. I'm reading a book called Parrot Pie for Breakfast: An Anthology of Women Pioneers by Jane Robinson, which consists of excerpts from the letters and diaries of eighteenth and nineteenth century English women in the wilds of America, Australia, Africa, and the like. It is a nice reminder that as much as I might suffer from the indignities of economy class, my trip is pretty much cake. Here's an excerpt:

"[May 22, 1845] Steerage very sickly...Children in the Small Pox become rapidly worse; as yet, no other positive cases appear though several are suspected....[a] child dangerously ill of inflammation of the chest. No leeches on board. Many suffering from rheumatic pains and gatherings in the ear...Conversed with a very respectable woman who, with her child, was walking on the deck. 'Oh! Madam," said she, 'we suffer terribly from the want of room and comfort. Sometimes we cannot cook, for all the fires are put out by the spray, and the wind, and the rain, and we have nothing to warm and nourish us after this dreadful sickness.'

"--Sara Mytton Maury, An Englishwoman in America, 1848"
From Parrot Pie for Breakfast

And this trip took a couple of months. I think I'll survive six hours.

Amsterdam, July 20
If you're ever looking for a city that's sure to be maximally surreal when you haven't slept in 24 hours, I'd definitely recommend Amsterdam. Our sole reason for stopping there was to sleep before we flew to Oslo (we had to do the flights this way so as not to be bilked out of a couple thousand bucks), and that's pretty much what we did. We did, however, have to wander the streets for a couple of hours before our room was ready. My only solid memories of those 24 hours is a) the fact that, despite our best efforts, our suitcases weigh about 500 pounds apiece, especially over cobblestones, and b) an image of an obviously stoned American college kid trapped in a Ben and Jerry's by paranoia and a crippling case of the giggles. Made us proud to be..."Canadian." We'll return on August 1, so we'll be able to speak more intelligently about this fine city then.

Oslo, July 21-22
We flew into Oslo on SAS, which is just the most adorable airline. Traditionally excellent Scandinavian design was in abundance: the coffee cup handles fit gracefully and precisely over our index fingers, and I could swear they were selling the silver and violet barf bags in the giftwrap section of IKEA last Christmas. 

As we landed, I was overwhelmed at just how much the landscape resembled the Puget Sound area. True, there were no majestic snow capped peaks in evidence (but that's the case as often as not in Seattle anyhow), but the sky-line was jagged by Douglas Firs and the clouds hovered low in the great bowl of sky. Riding into the city, it was easy to imagine that I was in Renton or Issaquah. Except that all the signs were in Norwegian. 

Oslo is beautiful in a quiet way. The quality of light is so similar to that in Seattle, just more so. It's 9:41 PM on my watch as I write this, and the sun is in no hurry to set (it never got darker than deep twilight last night).  It makes me shudder to think what the winters are like. On an interesting note, it seems as if just about every seven or eighth woman we see on the street is about six months pregnant. We think there might be a connection.

Today we visited the Norwegian Resistance Museum, which was very well done and enlightening. It is obviously a popular grade-school field trip destination, as one large red swastika (part of a larger exhibit) was covered with "Fuck you Hitler" in childish pencil scrawls. The museum is located in Alkershus Slott castle overlooking the harbor. We then walked all the way out to Royal Palace, stopping for coffee. See Rob's photos.

- lisa