After exploring Berlin, I moved on towards Amsterdam, and to get there I had to travel via Köln, also known as Cologne.
InterRail 2010 – Part 3: Köln
Norwegian Patriot
Yesterday was the Norwegian Constitution Day, so I figured I would write a bit about how I feel about Norway.
While not being very vocal about it, I do feel patriotic about Norway.
And to be clear, when I say patriotic, that is what I mean,
not nationalistic
Norwegian Russ Celebration
The Russ Celebration in Norway is in many ways like the American Spring Break, with many partaking in an excess of sex, alcohol and silliness.
Brady Haran – South Pole Explorer
Doctor Brady Haran had done many great things before conquering the South Pole.
He had started countless educational YouTube-channels, made the worlds best podcast Hello Internet with his robot pal CGP Grey, received an honorary doctorate and climbed Mount Everest!
My Cabin Trip to The Planet Hoth
In 1997 I, my younger sister, my father and my mother all stayed at a cabin in Finse, a small mountain village in Hordaland county, Norway. Also known as Hoth.
InterRail 2010 – Part 2: Exploring Berlin
After my unsavory experiences in Hamburg, I was very happy to finally start doing some real touristy stuff in Berlin.
Not a lot interesting happened to me in Berlin. I just had a nice day, walking around, taking pictures. Then I moved on to Amsterdam.
A lot of places in Berlin had this very interesting mix of old majestic architecture and new degradation.
It was also interesting to see regretful war memorials for World War 2. Most war memorials I have seen other places, were put there by the victorious forces.
All in all, I very much enjoyed my day in this lovely city.
In the next part; Köln!
If you want to see more of the pictures I took in Berlin click here 🙂
InterRail 2010 – Part 1: From Bergen to Berlin
I am continuing my project of curating my own Facebook photos, and this post is the first in a long series about an InterRail-trip I took during October in 2010.
I had just finished a year in the military, stationed quite a ways way outside of a city in the northern parts of Norway. It was cold, boring and mostly lonely.
Being stuck somewhere you don’t want to be, for the better parts of a year, really makes you want to spread your wings and experience the world.
Trading one location for many, if you like.
I started in my hometown of Bergen, Norway.
From there I travelled via Sweden and Denmark, down to Hamburg in Germany, where I stayed for the first night.
I only ever saw Hamburg in the dark, as I arrived quite late and left very early, but
the area around the train-station is one of the seedier places I have seen in my life
Oslo In The Snow
I and my girlfriend went to Oslo this last weekend. Going from the second biggest city in Norway to the biggest city may not seem like it would be that different, but in a country as sparsely populated as Norway, this was something of a big-city vacation for us.
We were mostly going to visit a friend of my girlfriend, who had moved to Oslo many years ago.
Her parents still living in Bergen, she had visited us a few times, and this would be the first time we reciprocated.
We met up in the city center, then proceeded to walk around to see the sights for much of the day, stopping in stores along the way.
While Oslo was not much colder than Bergen, it was much more covered in snow. In Bergen you usually get snow, then rain, then ice, then snow, and so on, so it is more slippery than wintry here at this time of year.
Much of the distance we covered was along this river. At the point pictured here, much of a waterfall had been frozen completely over, with the water making a new river in and under this new ice-“landscape”.
It was hard to capture just how cool this looked on camera, but if it does not come across, I am pretty sure that you could safely walk over that ridge. Not a risk I would be willing to take, but still.
At the end of the walk we stopped at a food hall, where I ate a delicious chicken-leg burger, before we later met up with our friend again, at her apartment, where she had cooked some wonderful summer rolls.
I really over-ate that day.
All in all it was a great little mini-vacation, and I really needed that after not traveling anywhere last year.
It made my participation in The Time Travel Blogathon slightly harder, since that took place at the same time, but it all worked out quite well.
Looking forward to our next trip already, wherever it may be!
Time Travel Stories
I love time travel in fiction.
That is one of the main reasons why I love Doctor Who.
I love how this storytelling device can put ideologies from vastly different cultures, separated by decades or centuries, up against each other. By doing this, we can compare them, and find strengths and weaknesses in both. It can also just lead to funny jokes, or cool imagery, like a medieval knight riding on a velociraptor and wielding a laser sword.
The Day I Thought My Actions Had Killed Me and My Sister
In the summer of 2008, after I, my mother and my sister had been in London for a week, going on The London Eye and visiting The British Museum, we traveled to the small seaside town of Eastbourne to relax away from all the hustle of big city tourist attractions for a few days before returning to Norway.
We relaxed, went to the cinema, I ate boar-steak at a restaurant, we watched the season finale to series 4 of Doctor Who in the hotel lobby and, crucially, tried to go swimming.
The wind was pretty bad that day, but it as sunny and warm. Due to living so close to the beach we had been wanting to go for a swim for some time, but now this desire was overwhelming to the point where no mere wind could ever deter us.
Our mother wanted to relax and read in the hotel room that day, and she mistakenly thought that her eighteen year old son would be able to keep himself and his sister safe for an hour by themselves.
I seem to remember that someone had even put up “
Do not swim!” warning-flags by the beach
My Trip To The British Museum, A Decade Ago
I am continuing to curate my own Facebook photos, and this time I have found some cool images from the time I visited The British Museum in 2008.
This is from the same trip to London as I mentioned in my previous post. I had taken a lot of pictures there, but most of them were very blurry, so the curation-process went rather quickly.
If you have not been, and ever get the chance, The British Museum is absolutely worth a visit.
There are plenty of interesting statues, murals, archeological curiosities and other old junk from all over the world, and timescale.
Sure, a lot of these pieces were stolen from their rightful owners during colonial times, but you can’t knock the convenience of having all these interesting things in a single location.
I am however of the opinion that if the countries that originally owned this stuff wants them back, the museum should just hand it out.
After all, it’s not like everybody wants their old stuff back. The museum would be left with plenty, I’m sure.
There is this sort of macabre sense of doing something wrong when gazing down on the mummies and skeletons of long dead people.
But it is only matter, the persons they once were have long since passed. No chance that they will take offence.
Here is the full album, with a few more pictures, if you want to see the full set.
//s.imgur.com/min/embed.js
I now sign off, with this goofy lion:
“Rawr?”
The London Eye – A Cure for Vertigo?
After a long break from curating my own Facebook photos, the previous one being photos from a glacier hike, I am now continuing.
This time the subject will be a vacation I had with my mother and sister in London in the summer of 2008, nearly ten years ago, and in this post I want to focus on an experience I had in the giant ferris wheel The London Eye.
I have always been afraid of heights. I think it has something to do with “The Call of the Void” – the thought of how easily I could destroy myself, or get destroyed by a loose railing or something banal like that.
So I was quite surprised by how little this fear effected me at the top of The London Eye.
I think it has something to do with how slowly the wheel moves. The snail-speed may have been the cause of the horribly long que we had to wait in to get on, but I think it may have moved so slow that it was impossible not to slowly get used to the altitude.
The amazing view may also have distracted me some – but when I was on top of The Empire State Building many years later I was scared shitless, and the view there is great aswell.