hullo copenhagen!: norway: my last unconquered scandinavian terri-tory (hurhur)

well, not quite.

because scandinavia still encompasses greenland, iceland and the faroe islands. but interestingly, if you consider the flags flown by the SAS planes, it only features the danish, swedish and norwegian flags.

anyway, back from a weekend in norway, mainly oslo and bergen. didnt have any expectations for olso, and thankfully so. now i know why jess's friend peiwen, who was there on exchange one semester, was dying to get out of the city. i was there for one day, and i wanted to run far far away from olso already. no offence to norwegians staying there, but olso is one heck of a boring place. its drab, colourless, mournful and depressing. it didnt feel one bit like a scandinavian city. perhaps our hostel was situated at the relatively suburban (read: immigrant district) part of the city, (and even then the hostel was expensive!), but olso lacks the fairytale-ness of denmark, and the minimalist glass-panelled architecture of stockholm. plus, its expensive! i can go on and on about the cost of things in olso, but the money has already been spent, so what can i do right. also, when we arrived, the sky was overcast, and everyone this part of the world knows how pivotal weather is to making a city more beautiful and lifting everyone's moods.

so you can imagine. grey sky, expensive things, sad looking buildings... depressing stuff.

but thank God, the sky cleared and we did manage to catch oslo basking in the sun for the later part of the day when we headed to the harbour and the fort (akerhus festing) to look at the olso fjords, which are, for the uninitated:

"... very long inlets from the sea with high steeply sloped walled sides. A fjord (or fiord) is a landform created during a period of glaciation. -taken from Wikipedia"

this pic does not o justice to the bad weather.

and not as rosh once thought, very hot norwegian men, when i told her i was going to see the fjords. btw rosh, norwegian people are NOT HOT. not at all. the danes are waaay better looking.

and the only other highlight of the olso part, was that we found this rather hip eatery district near our hostel, called gronlakker, which was agreed by all was the saving grace of olso. lined with chic and quaint cafes, lounges, bars, restaurants, its quite a happening place. we had burgers in a cafe memphis, superb stuff.

right, so gronlakker is the place to hang out in whenever you have the tough luck to find yourself in olso. then you can console yourself that olso isnt really all that boring. although, you have been forwarned that cafes close at 6pm. even on fridays.

now to the core of this trip and Why I Spent So Much Money.
the trip up to bergen was made up of a 12hour journey that lasted from 8am to 8pm, using a combination of train, boat and bus transportation. friends from smu who went last year recommended it because its just awesome and majestic to see the craggy cliffs and plunging waterfalls. and they saw it in spring, which means that all was green. but this time, we went in the last throes of winter, so i must say we did get a better deal, even though it was cold.

at 8.11am we took a 4hr train ride from olso to myrdal. compared to the flatlands of denmark, norway is undulating, so we were treated to lots of hills and water. something like this:

but as the train climbed higher into the mountains (we were crossing a mountain range), the weather got colder, the water icer, the trees whiter and hence:

and then:

at least you still can see some definition in the land in this photo. at one point of the journey i got quite freaked out because snow was falling quite heavily and the land on both sides of the window was covered in white. you couldnt see nothing. it was like someone plasted many pieces of A4 paper.

but the weather got better as we took the 2 train, the flam railway. it was 45mins of spectacular spectacular scenery. it has been voted the most scenic railway in europe, and most scenic it was. (will post more on flickr)

nice right? it was so lovely to just see the scenery transform and evolve in 45 minutes. after the arrival in flam, we hopped onto the fjord cruise that brought even more gasps and picture-snapping. such was the beauty of God's creation :)

if the pictures make you gasp, as i hope they are, imagine the speechlessness i felt. it just too awesome for words.

anyhow, we made it to bergen where we had to fend of pesky, noisy, prepubescent kids (a backpacker's number one nightmare) and contend with rain a good part of the time. it rains 275 days a year in bergen apparently. but we also found a relatively cheap-by-norwegian-standards chinese place, where sam and ade finally discovered what the mysterious chop suey was, an extremely superfantastic cafe which superduper cafe mocha (delishdelishdelish) and also had good weather when we headed to the bergen hill. all in all, bergen's a quaint place, its not little, its norway's 2nd largest city, also has the typical UNESCO world heritage site label (which quaint city isnt!) and nice to walk around when weather permits. otherwise just bring a huge brolly and rainpants.