Swiss Countryside

When planning the Switzerland leg of our adventure, Jay and I were certain we wanted to go on a scenic train ride in/near the Swiss Alps, but we weren’t sure which one to pick. Our decision was quickly made by three other Swiss stereotypes: cheese, chocolate, and castles. The Golden Pass Line runs a train called the Chocolate Train from Montreux, on the shores of Lake Geneva, to Gruyéres for a tour of the cheese dairy and the Gruyéres castle, onto Broc for a tour and tasting at the Masion Cailler-Nestlé factory and then returning to Montreux. Sold.

The tricky part is that the Chocolate Train only runs a few days a week and only a small portion of the tickets are sold online. Our book said we could buy tickets at any Swiss train station, but the folks in the Zürich station had no what we were talking about, so basically we had to go all the way to Montreux and cross our fingers that there would be tickets available for the next day. We were slightly comforted by the fact that another scenic line, the classic Golden Pass Train, also left from Montreux, so at least we’d get to do that, but it was still a gamble. The universe happened to be on our side last Wednesday at 3 pm: Not only did we get two of the remaining four seats on Thursday’s Chocolate Train but we were also able to nab an upgrade to the “Special Panoramic VIP” seats on Friday’s Golden Line Train for a mere 10 Swiss Franks a piece.

There’s not a lot to see in Montreux itself. It’s on Lake Geneva, which is gorgeous, and there is a famous castle near by, but otherwise it just feels like Aspen: over the top swanky and not a good place for budget travelers. To me it was a necessary evil for the two days of train gloriousness that followed and at least it was pretty.

Chillon Castle, Lake Geneva, "Pre-Alps"

The first day, we woke up bright and early and went to the train, where we were served a breakfast fitting for an experience called the Chocolate Train:

Breakfast of Champions

 Then we were off, zig zagging up the valley walls above Montreux and along the side of the mountain range to Gruyéres. I have never been to a cheese dairy before, I didn’t eat cheese until about a year and a half ago, and there are still very few kinds of cheese I like, and yet the visit to the Gruyéres factory may have been my favorite part. That’s how cool it was. Cheese making is a compact process, with 95% of things happening in the same large room, so it is perfectly set up for tours. From one place, you can see the curdling of the milk, the transfer to the cheese rounds, the pressing of the rounds, and the submersion in the salt bath. Though there is some assistance by machine, the process is still primarily done by hand, with the cheese makers tasked with timing all the steps in the process by taste. 

Cheese maker says: "ready!" then those things on the left are filled with curd and pressed.

The sheer numbers involved are also astounding: in one day, a cow eats 100 kg of grass and drinks 85 kg of water which makes 25 liters of milk; 400 liters of milk becomes one 35 kg round of Gruyéres cheese; the factory does four cycles of cheese making per day, turning four 4,800 liter tanks of milk into forty-eight 35 kg rounds (twelve rounds per 4,800 liters of milk). We were given a sample pack of cheeses aged three, eight, and ten months and Jay and I purchased a bit of mild cheese that I liked and some meat to have for lunch with our bread before visiting the castle.

Cheese!

That's 1/140th of a round

The Gruyéres castle was a pretty standard European castle—we didn’t spend much time inside opting to read in the sun instead—though it was being used as a exhibition space for this cool sculptor from Zimbabwe, which was a fun twist. From there we headed off to tour Cailler, an upscale chocolate subsidiary of Nestlé. Having just been in Belgium and heard claims of Belgium superiority on the chocolate front, I was pleased to learn that the two countries are not actually in competition for this title: Belgium is famous for their dark chocolates with hazelnut filling whereas Switzerland (and actually Nestlé specifically) pioneered milk chocolate. I say, there is enough room in the world for two superior chocolate countries as long as it means more chocolate for the rest of us.

Coming from Gruyéres, the Cailler factory tour felt impersonal and industrial. First, you are shuffled though this fully automated, Disneyland-esque, mutli-room, multimedia demonstration of the history and production of chocolate. It may have been cool, unfortunately we had the pushiest Indian family ever and their obnoxious uncontrolled child in our group. Then, you walk through a “production line” of one of their chocolates that is clearly just a tourist demonstration and completely isolated from the rest of production. However, the saving grace of the tour is the tasting at the end: you are set to roam free in a room of chocolate samples, more than 20 to try in total. Predictably, I tried to make it through all of them and discovered the factory’s secret sample limitation plan: a wicked stomach ache. 

Chocolate tasting is serious business

Chocolates!

From there we boarded the train and were whisked back through the Swiss countryside to Montreux, where the next day we woke up, boarded another train for the Golden Pass Line, and discovered the glory of the Special Panoramic VIP seats: You are in the front row of the train, surrounded by huge windows with nothing impeding your view. Well, almost nothing, the windshield wipers were in the way, but the driver sits above your head. 

Best view ever

VIPs. clearly.

The scenery on the Golden Pass Line exceeded my expectations. We hugged the western side of the Alps the whole way and passed many beautiful green hills below jagged mountains. I also really enjoyed seeing all the Swiss Chalets, reminiscent of Fraser before the mini-mansion boom (especially the carved porch rails). The tunnels were also cool, because in a normal train you never really get to see the tunnel. We had to switch trains twice during the five-hour trip (because the track changes and the same car cannot go all the way from Montreux to Luzern), the weather turned on us, and train fatigue definitely set in but it was an awesome day. There is a reason the route is nicknamed “Switzerland in a Nutshell”:

Just, wow.

Ski area in the middle!

The one on the far right was one of my favorites

Brussels, Bruges and Bonnie!

So Belgium is definitely not the country for me. After four days in Amsterdam, Brussels is a huge let down—the city feels very generic and dirty in a way that makes it seem unloved. Sure, it has the standard European ornate buildings (churches and palaces and such) but most of them look like they haven’t been cleaned in over a decade.

Ewww.

Brussels also houses the EU headquarters, which is in a completely separate part of town and is primarily made up of unmemorable glass office buildings. Jay and I only had a short while to explore Brussels and we didn’t even use all the time we had, opting for laundry and rest instead.

The next day, we headed out to Bruges, which was much more enjoyable than Brussels and a nice place to spend a day. Lots of old fancy buildings, lots of red roofed old buildings, lots of canals. My favorite part of the town was climbing up the 366 steps to the top of the Belfry. The views are great, the 47-bell carillon (like a big music box) was another fun feat of engineering to admire, and the stairway clearly not intended for two-way traffic was quite amusing.

Bruges from above

Carillon with 30,500 teeth!

Stairwell built for one

But by far the best thing about Bruges was seeing Bonnie!! Bonnie is a classmate from MIT whom I lived with the summer I was working in DC. We’ve been close since then, though we don’t see each other often because that's just what happens after graduating, following jobs around the country, and letting life get started. She was in Belgium for a wedding and though we didn’t try to force coordinating schedules, the timing just happened to work out beautifully and we were both in Burges the same day. Modern communications are great but there really is no replacement for seeing a friend face to face and I am so thankful to have old friends who make time to see me when they can.

Bonnie and Elena in Bruges!

Kinderdijk

As a day trip from Amsterdam, we went to see the Kinderdijk windmills, a recommendation from my Dutch roommate on my Tibet tour. I expected the windmills to be a huge tourist draw but was pleasantly surprised by the small crowds, mostly just locals and Asian tourists (Kinderdijk was not in our guide books, but I suspect it made it into the Chinese ones). We took a bit of a scenic route to get there, taking a bus from Utrecht to Rotterdam (Kinderdijk is on the Rotterdam side of the route), which was actually awesome because we had a chance to see where most of the Dutch population lives. The area felt extremely pastoral, with many canals and green pastures and thatch-roofed houses, yet the population density was high. It’s not quite rural but definitely not suburban; I can’t think of a comparable area in the States.

The Kinderdijk windmills themselves were seriously one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Built in the 1500s, both the concept and the engineering was more advanced than I expected. First, there is the sheer size of the system: Kinderdijk is made up of 19 windmills (eight round stone windmills, eight octagonal thatched windmills and three specialized windmills) that move water between a series of canals to regulate water levels and maintain proper irrigation for the area’s fields. Each windmill is huge, and then seeing 19 along a few canals is quite the sight. And just think about the coordination that must have been necessary to get the mills to work together and move water to the right places at the right times—yippie for early systems engineers!

Octagonal thatched mills

Round stone mills (on the right)

Second, there is the mechanics of how each mill works: A big ship steering wheel at the base of the mill spins the whole top of the mill to point the blades in the right direction to catch the wind. The blades were half shingled and half cloth, so the cloth could be tightened to catch more wind when the water needed to be moved faster. The wind spins the blades which turn an axle attached to a wooden cog that turns another wooden cog with an axle all the way down to the ground where another cog set spins the water scoop to move water from one canal to the other. There’s also a gigantic brake pad controlled by a rope near the steering wheel for when enough water has been moved. I think it’s a bit easier to see than describe.

Windmill Mechanics

The mill is huge, so naturally the parts of the mill are huge and the precision of the engineering is impressive, especially considering they were made by hand before the time of the water lathe. 

Each of the 19 windmills housed a mill master and his family who were in charge of maintaining the mill and turning it on and off at the right time. And the crazy part—PEOPLE STILL LIVE IN THE MILLS!!

This one has a museum in it. But others had families!

Such a great day trip on all accounts, with three closing thoughts to share:

1. Jay and I have slightly different sightseeing preferences (i.e., I don’t care for churches and have a low tolerance for art museums whereas he appreciates both) but we were both captivated by the inside of the windmill. Thus, these “feats of engineering” (as Jay calls them) are sure to feature prominently in future European adventures.
2. When visiting religious ruins in Peru, Cole and I talked a bit about the interesting transition over time from man worshiping and living at the mercy of nature and man trying to control and rule over nature (ancient cultures the former, Conquistadors the latter). The Kinderdijk windmills struck me as a near perfect balance of these two sides. Instead of trying to control nature or getting complacent about their lack of control over nature, the 16th century Dutch learned how to live in harmony with it, moving the water around where they needed it but fundamentally understanding that they lived in a place with near constant flood risk.
3. Standing in Kinderdijk, you can see construction in all directions, sometimes within about 500 meters. Since the start of my trip, I’ve poked fun at the concept of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, mostly because it seems to encompass everything of interest in the places I’ve been (sometimes whole towns) and is emphasized inconsistently—some places are very proud of it, some places don’t mention it (Mesa Verde, for example, is a UNESCO site. I've been there many times, including right before leaving the country last year and I had never heard of UNESCO before Nepal.). But watching an old man show his granddaughter around the windmills with construction cranes looming in the background made me understand why UNESCO protection is such a valuable thing—even if the whole surrounding area becomes skyscrapers and subdivisions, the windmills and the canals should stay exactly as they are today for future generations to enjoy.

Bikes and Boats

Amsterdam is an extremely loud and chaotic city, full of energy and people all over the place—in trams, on foot, on bicycle and in boats. The full range of things that may hit you at any given moment makes it a bit difficult to appreciate the cool things around you, so Jay and I decided to go on a three-hour walking tour with the New Europe company as a mindless way to get oriented. The idea is simple but cool—they provide free tours in major European cities with freelance guides working just for tips (the guides pay the company a fixed rate to pick up a shift and then pocket 100% of what they make). About 150 people showed up for the tour we went on, they broke us up by language and then into smaller more manageable groups of around 20 for the tour. The guides do not have canned language, but instead audition to be a guide and are told the route, then are on their own to come up with historical content and fun anecdotes. Our tour guide was outstanding (an out of work Irish actor who followed a Dutch girl to Amsterdam) and it was a great way to see the city and learn a TON. I think I might know more about Amsterdam now than Denver. Amsterdam is a really walkable city because it is pretty small and very densely populated. The tour took us all over the place, from the famous historical buildings (Royal Palace, various churches, the Dutch East Indian Company headquarters) to the most relevant culture areas (Squatters district, Red Light district, coffeeshops). Of course I could only absorb a fraction of the information the guide threw our way, but here are some of my favorite tidbits:

• Amsterdam really should not be where it is. The city is reclaimed land on a flood plan below sea level (the highest point is 2.3 m above sea level) and if it wasn’t for the amazing Dutch canal system winding through the city, the whole area would be under water. 

Cool mural at the hostel showing the altitude of various things in Amsterdam

• The city was first and foremost a merchant town, and many parts are designed with that in mind. The clearest example is the architecture of the houses along the canals. They are the narrowest houses ever because they were taxed by the width of the water facing side since canal access was so valuable. (The merchant vessels came all the way into the city canals.) Most merchant houses doubled as their warehouses and because of the flood risk, the products had to be stored in the attic. But since no one wanted to carry goods up and down the stairs (especially the steep stairs resulting from such narrow houses), the houses have hooks from the roof for pulleys to haul goods from the sidewalk to the attic storage area. To prevent the wind from catching the load and blowing it right through the bedroom window, all the houses are built intentionally tipping forward into the water, giving the pulley system some more swinging space. How cool is that!

Pulley hooks

It's hard to photograph building lean

Narrowest house in Amsterdam: 1 meter wide

• The city is full of incongruities that actually make good practical sense upon closer inspection. For example, the Old Church is smack dab in the middle of the red light district because the priests wanted to keep their mistresses close. This served the port city well because sailors had their sins and their confessional right next door. Pretty quickly confessing after sins turned into paying per-indulgences, alms to make up for sins you were about to commit, which seems like a very strange concept to me. It works for the church though--it made good money off the sailors for many years, and allowed the building to grow into one of the biggest structures in Amsterdam.
• Contrary to popular believe, marijuana is not legal in Amsterdam, it’s just decriminalized and accepted. This and legalized prostitution are good examples of the city’s long history of economically-driven tolerance policies. In the Dutch mind frame, anything goes as long as it’s kept quite, it’s not hurting anyone, and it’s good for business. One of the really nice stories the guide told was about World War Two and how the economically-based tolerance policy morphed into moral tolerance  too: Amsterdam was the first place in Europe where non-Jewish citizens (non-military) stood up for the Jews at their own expense.

I learned lots of other things too and we enjoyed the tour so much that we also did a special tour of the Red Light District with the same tour company later in the visit. In addition to the two walking tours, we went on a canal tour. It wasn’t as good as the free walking tour, information wise, but it was still awesome to get a different vantage point of the city. There are so many canals and so many boats trying to navigate the waters its a bit of a madhouse—there are four way intersections, stop lights, and many traffic jams. I can’t imagine driving a boat around Amsterdam is much fun, yet there were lots of people out for a Saturday afternoon joyride.

Boat crossing

Amsterdam canal: cleaner than Venice because they actually drain the water (what a concept)

The two museums we checked out were the Van Gogh Museum and the Anne Frank House. I liked the Van Gogh Museum because you get the unique opportunity to see one artist from the early stages of development all the way to the end of his life. It’s a pretty crazy 10 year story: Van Gogh just decided to become an artist one day, rejected traditional art training and instead just painted a ton until he honed his talent. During that period, he moved from a grey, melancholy Dutch style to the optimistic French style he’s more known for, tried (and failed) to create a rural artists community and created amazing influential Impressionist works. Then, he got too sick to keep painting and shot himself in the chest. That’s a lot for one man in a decade. The Anne Frank Museum was outstanding but I don’t feel ready to write about it yet. Maybe after I finish rereading the diary and we visit a few more Holocaust remembrance sites.  

All in all, Amsterdam is an awesome city. It’s a bit exhausting because of all the noise and people but there is lots of cool stuff to see and do, and the whole place just has a great vibe. Plus, how can you not love a city with an indisputably bike-centric infrastructure and a multi-story bike parking lot?

Train station bike parking

Norway Redeems Itself

I’ve had to keep reminding myself that during the winter, Scandinavia only has a few hours of sunlight a day, because the Norwegian coast is so beautiful it’s tempting to runway here. After my day in the hospital (toe is improving nicely now, by the way!), Jay and I spent another two and a half days in Bergen, exploring the nearby fjords, the hills around town and the must-see attractions in the town itself. (I say “town” because it feels small, but Bergen is the second biggest city in Norway with 265,000 residents.)

To see the fjords, Jay and I did the “Norway in a Nutshell” tour. It’s pretty cleaver: instead of piling a bunch of tourists into a guided group, Norway just uses the existing transportation systems and does the leg work for you to do the trip “independently:” All the different transports (three train rides, a boat ride, and a bus ride) are compiled into one ticket, you are handed the time table you are to follow if you wish to do the whole loop in one day, and given an info book describing the sights throughout the trip. There is no “guide” per say, but on the Flåm train and the boat there are recordings (on the boat, you get to hear about the fjords in nine languages!).

From Bergen, we took a train inland to Myrdal, where the Flåm railway starts. Norway seems very proud of this railway, which is the steepest normal gauge railway line in Northern Europe with 20 hand-built tunnels, including one that houses a 180-degree switchback. Honestly the train didn’t seem that impressive to me—I’m pretty sure I’ve been on steeper railways (Jay says narrow gauge trains can go much steeper) and I didn’t even notice the 180-degree turn because it was inside the dark tunnel. Flåm itself is a little itty bitty town with a prime location at the end of the Aurlandsfjord, an arm of the Sognefjord, one of the big famous ones. When we visited, Flåm looked ridiculous because there was a cruise boat in the port that was several times larger than the town itself. 

Big cruise ship, tiny town

From Flåm, we boarded a boat that took us up Aurlandsfjord to Sognefjord and down Nærøyfjord to another tiny town, Gudvangen, where we took a bus then a train to get back to Bergen. I still don’t quite understand the process, but to the best of my understanding, fjord creation goes like this: when the Ice Age was on its way out, glaciers created cracks in the mountains, then those cracks were gouged out by ice and water until they were deep enough to connect with the ocean. Then throughout time, the glacial waters/avalanches/rock slides brought deposits to the bottom of the walls and created fan-shaped land masses on which small villages were eventually built. So that’s why fjords have the unique features of the straight up and down walls that go down beneath the surface of the water (versus rivers that tend to round out under the water), a direct connection to the ocean, and the variable depth of the water (the same fjord can go from 1,300 meters to 12 meters deep), even though there are sill villages on their edges. I also still don’t quite understand what makes one fjord more remarkable than another. Sogneford is famous because it’s really really big. And Nærøyfjord is narrow and shallow and thus (evidently) considered by UNESCO to be a World Heritage site. To me, the fjords all pretty much looked the same (beautiful, but the same). I guess I lack a connoisseur’s eye for geology. 

Mouth of the fjord

Fjord walls

The next day, we did a very relaxed exploration of Bergen and the surrounding hills. We started off checking out Torget, the (unexciting) fish market, and Bryggen, the historic waterfront buildings that mainly housed craft workshops and bars for Hanseatic Germans. Bryggen’s story is kind of funny—it’s another World Heritage site, but the original buildings from the 1400s burnt to the ground in 1702. Apparently the 1702 residents had the foresight to rebuild them following exactly the same line, and thus the area is still considered a historic remnant of the 1400s.

Bryggen

Wood warp: hazard of wooden buildings

From Bryggen, we took the Fløibanen railway up to Mount Fløyen, one of the six hills bordering the non-water facing sides of Bergen, from which you have a panoramic view of the city. From the top of the hill, I could finally see how 265,000 people live in Bergen—the tourist map only covers the pretty part by the water, but the city extends quite far inland and then out on a few other peninsulas farther away from the historic areas. From the top of the railway there are a ton of hiking/walking/running trails, reminiscent of Jefferson County Open Space. We walked a short distance to a lake, then the 45 minutes back down to the city center. 

Bergen from above

That alone would have been just a lovely day, but the cherry on top was when I headed back out in the early evening to hang out with the penguins at the Aquarium. I think I will have to be a penguin for Halloween this year because they are so funny to watch and imitate. (If you don’t believe me, check out the Penguin cam, the best procrastination device ever invented.) The Bergen Aquarium has a whole bunch of penguins and I happened to be there during feeding time and got to learn some about them. I like their mating process: a male penguin picks a rock and presents it to a female. If she likes it, she accepts, that rock makes the first rock in their nest, they collect many more together and are mated for life. If she does not like it, she squawks and shoos him away, game over Mr. Penguin. Talk about high pressure rock selection!!

Can you see why I love this picture?

A final cool thing about our time in Bergen was that we were there just before the start of their two annual festivals, a Jazz festival and some kind of international drama/art festival. For one of the two festivals, a whole bunch of different teams were building all these intricate geometric sculptures around town and we were able to watch them from start to (almost) finish. Here are some of my favorites: 

Built the structure, then built the scaffolding to burn the structure from

Oslo Sightseeing

In attempt to leave Norway with an overall positive feeling towards the country, I have segregated the rocky parts of the first few days to a separate blog post. Here I will only talk about all the cool things we saw in Oslo!

Sightseeing in Oslo proper:

• The day we arrived in Oslo was Constitution Day and tons of people were out in traditional clothing and/or three-piece suits. Imagine landing in New York City on the 4^th of July, but formalize it a ton. It was kind of like that. It was really cool to see, though I didn’t fully appreciate it because of the overwhelming jetlag.
• In 2008, Oslo built a new opera house right on the water, the largest cultural construction in Norway since 1300!! The building was beautiful and we had fun climbing all over the roof.

Opera House

• Vigeland Sculpture Park is this really cool 80 acre park completely designed by one artist, Gustav Vigeland, from the layout to the lake placement to all 212 granite and bronze statues. The majority of the statutes were human figures displaying the whole range of human emotions.

Vigeland Sculpture Park (or one small part of it!)

• One of the last things we checked out was the Akershus Fortress and Castle. I think we’ll probably see more impressive castles elsewhere in Europe, though this was a good introduction. The funniest part was how proud the audio tour seemed of the fact that it is still a functioning castle, used for important state events. I have to admit it was pretty funny to see a modern mechanical coat check in the middle of a historic castle.

Across the bay on the Bygdoy Peninsula are a whole bunch of museums dedicated to Norway history and culture. It seemed like a bad idea to get museum-ed out during our first week in Europe, so we just checked out three:

• The Viking Ship Museum had three Viking boats, all found as burial boats on the Norwegian coast. It’s weird to think that these boats were built roughly the same time as Chan Chan in Peru (800s AD), I wonder what would happen if a Viking met a Chimú… The boats weren’t too exciting, though I love that the Viking ships were built without plans—they just started from the bottom and built up by look and feel!

The Oseberg Ship

• The Norwegian Folk Museum was my favorite of the three museums, though there was definitely too much information to process in one visit. Instead of having designated historical buildings out and about the country as we do in the States, Norway uproots the historical buildings and puts them all together in a 35-acre open air park. Many buildings are refurbished to the appropriate time period on the inside too, and you can wander around for hours jumping from the 1700s to the 1970s. My favorite houses were the ones from rural Norway in the 1800s which were on stilts to avoid rotting in the melting snow every spring.

Built to be above snow, with food storage below

• The Fram Museum was built around just one boat—the Polar Explorer (“Fram”) boat used by Norwegian crews to explore the north and south poles. The boat was unique because it was designed to freeze into the arctic sheet and float over the pole instead of attempting to prevent freezing like past polar boats. Now, why anyone would want to sign up for six years in the Arctic Circle is beyond me, but the pure volume of scientific data they collected makes the MIT grad in me very grateful for the crew. 

Polar ship Fram

Overall, Oslo was a really pleasant city to explore (if you ignore the prices). It’s a manageable size, well laid out for wandering, clean, friendly, and right now there are only about 3 hours of darkness each day!

Culture Shock

Who knew there would come a time when Western culture was a shock to my system? After four days in Norway, I am having an extremely hard time adjusting to it all. First, I am generally travel fatigued and although I’m pretty travel hardened for developing countries, it’s not translating well here. Second, the prices are so far off the high end of my scale that I’m not dealing with them terribly well. And third, I’m in the middle of my first travel medical emergency.

I think I turned into a thrifty grad student overnight when I quit my job. And then of course six months in Peru and Nepal did nothing to prepare me for Norwegian prices. Over Christmas I nearly had a breakdown in City Market over whether to buy a $4 jar of pesto for dinner, and when I decided to “splurge” for it, I told Cole that meant we couldn’t afford eggs for breakfast. Maybe that should have been a sign that I’d fallen off the deep end of cheapness. Instead, I went off to Peru, a fertile feeding ground for my inter cost consciousness, and I got even more thrifty.

Enter Oslo, the most expensive city in the world. Hotels six times more expensive than Peru and a complete dearth of cheap (or even reasonably priced) food has not mixed well with my inner cheapskate. The sticker shock has been rough. And of course my reaction to this sticker shock has been the logical and calm reaction you have all come to expect from me: don’t eat, because it costs too much.

I started out this trip travel fatigued from Peru and not eating probably made my body weaker, so somewhere between Denver and our second morning here, I developed a nasty infection in my toe (left leg, why do you continue to let me down?). I probably should have taken a day to get it taken care of in Oslo, but because the country is so expensive, I decided we should continue on to Bergen en route out of Norway and get it taken care of later. This plan backfired completely because it did not occur to me that we wouldn’t be able to find a room in Bergen at 11 pm at night. The Peru logic goes: hey, it’s still light out, so not too unsafe to walk around, and the hotels want our business so someone will for sure let us in. Not so. Eventually we ended up biting the bullet and staying in the one hotel we could find with a receptionist still on site (tip: find one attached to a bar!), at a price that would have paid for a good four days of travel in Peru. (This is starting to look like a trend: later we tried to book a hotel two days in advance and the town was already full. In Peru I was foiled by planning to much in advance; here it's by not planning enough. Hopefully there is a happy medium to be found.) At that point, my toe was looking worse than the worst pictures I could find online, so Jay and my mother were able to run a successful intervention to get me to rest for a day, eat and find a doctor. I’m still not sure if I can get over the sticker shock of Norway in time to really enjoy our days here but I’m going to try. Whether my toe will get better with this first round of treatment is also TBD. But on the plus side, we unintentionally discovered the one reasonably priced thing in Norway: the hospital!! Thank goodness for nationalized health care and $50 ER visits.