Chocolate, Watches, and Mindy's Notfall

From late June, 2008:

After the hustle and bustle of Italy's most touristed cities, we headed for the hills. Our destination was Grindelwald, Switzerland, famous for high peaks and back story dark super wizards.

Unbelievably, we were able to purchase a ticket at the Termini and took an overnight train back North. We shared a Ladies Compartment, where we met two girls from Hong Kong, and two girls from Finland. Mindy and I embarrassed ourselves by trying to learn Chinese, and everyone became slack-jawed as we talked about college. The Finnish gals were mystified by how everyone in the US can afford to front 40k per year to go to college (Surprise, we can't!), and Mindy and I felt personally insulted by the fact that in Finland, college is free. Always.

In Grindelwald, we lived the free lovin, diplomacy toutin Swiss way. We ate chocolate! We tobaggoned! We listened to two Koreans dudes complain about how boring Norway is! What a watch wearin, goat herdin, great Swiss time it was.


Until Bort.

Bort is a "town" just up the "hill" from Grindelwald. To translate, Bort is a cluster of four or five buildings (really) on the side of one of the lower mountains above Grindelwald. The easiest way to get there is by cable car (the cable car station makes up one of the five buildings in town). We rode the cable car up, and decided to hike the nearby Flower Trail. "It won't be bad," we thought. "Look! The brochure says 'good for elderly hikers'!" Two and half hours of nearly vertical climbing later, we decided the brochure actually meant "elderly Swiss hikers who grew up in the mountains and eat towns like Bort for breakfast".

One of the strangest things we found in Europe is that no matter how remote the trail, someone has built a small restaurant somewhere along the path. The Bortanese Flower Trail was no exception, and after two cheese sandwiches and a few botched translations, we were on our celebratory way back down.

Until Mindy fell. It was not a dramatic fall. She did not tumble down the mountain side, or fall screaming over a cliff. It was a simple trip and stumble that went something like this:

Mindy: "I hear cows!"
Katie: "Oh, cows."
Mindy: [falls] "Oof! My ankle!"
Katie: [thinks: OMG SHE'S BROKEN HER LEG AND WE ARE ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS I'M GOING TO HAVE TO FASHION A CARRY OUT OF TWO WATER BOTTLES AND A PURSE OMG] "Are you okay?"
Mindy: [holds ankle] "Um...yes."



Eventually Mindy got up and hiked very slowly down because she is a champ. The next morning Mindy's ankle was roughly the size of Mindy's head, so we boarded a train and hopped off in Bern, were we went to the tourist office to get directions to the hospital.

They directed us to an outpatient emergency room, which much to our hilarious delight was called "City Notfall". The nurses were nice and gave Mindy polio crutches despite turning down our insurance.

After our thrilling 2 hours in Bern, we headed to Geneva. Mindy received somewhat horrified looks from passers-by, and I checked out the Fete de Musique, which was reason enough to visit Switzerland. We also stopped by the UN, where we found a peacock with a broken leg that had been hit by Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France. Really. At the Red Cross Museum, we ran into the girls from Hong Kong that shared our Ladies Compartment. What a small, unexpected world. We also saw the Olympic Museum in nearby Lausanne, which then had lots of information on Beijing. I'm going to guess that the museum is now filled almost entirely with pictures of Michael Phelps.

And so it was that on June 25th, 2008, we boarded a plane bound for New Jersey. Ladened down with memories, worldly knowledge, and Mindy's 40 franc crutches, we declared our transatlantic mission a success.

Weaving through Venice and Popeing in Rome

From late June, 2008:

From Austria we headed to Venice, for which I can say one thing without a doubt: it's really weird. I mean that in the most positive of fashions.

For example, it's very difficult to get directions in Venice, because after several hundred years of floating on sea garbage, people still aren't really sure where everything is. If you want to hit tourist areas like Piazza San Marco and the Rialto, there are some signs to lead the way. For every other destination, a Venetian will give you directions that sound something like this:

Venetian: [orients themselves in their mental "map"] "You go that way. You see it." [waves in general direction]

The end. This is largely because there are a thousands of tiny streets, many of which would be too small to even be considered an alley in New York City. So you just weave in the general direction of what you want to see and there's maybe a 50% chance that you will find it. All that weirdness, and I didn't even mention the canals. That said, St. Mark's and the Doge's Palace were beautiful, and we got to enjoy the single most personalize ghost tour ever - because we were the only ones on it.


Mindy and I stayed on Lido, one of the islands outside of Venice, and also visited Murano, an island filled entirely with glass makers and angry waiters who hate when Americans share a pizza pie. This meant we rode on a LOT of boats EVERYDAY. We did not, however, ride on a gondola, because the prices border on extortion. Gondola or not, we found ways to entertain ourselves.


From Venice we took the train to Rome, where we sat with an extremely tense woman who spent the whole time fiercely creating a powerpoint about the post office. This should have been a warning to us: Rome was full of angry, tense people, who perhaps were made that way by their very confusing postal service.

But what is important is that we saw the Pope. Apparently, he's a man about town (in the Vatican at least), and gives a blessing every Wednesday in St. Peter's Square. As a lapsed Catholic and a former Catholic schoolgirl, we felt it was our duty to idly sit on some cobblestones and watch the devoted cheer for Pope Diddy like preteens at a Jonas Brothers concert. And sit we did. The Pope speaks at least seven languages and delivered the blessing in all of them. Despite six other options, the call and response at the end was in Latin - so we were all given cue cards. Really!

Other Roman highlights include seeing the Pantheon, which was very round, and the house of Augustus, first emperor of Rome, which was very old. Amazingly, Casa di Augustus still boasts the original paint job.


We also saw the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, the Fountain de Trevi, and even had time left over to take in a flick. One particular day it was so bloody hot that even bold tourists like ourselves couldn't stand the heat. We went into a movie theater to sit in the air conditioning and saw the only movie available in English: The Incredible Hulk.

Finally, a word about the Rome Termini (train station): it's horrifying. Finding a train out of Rome was made nearly impossible by the unhelpful Termini staff who were plainly frustrated with all these idiots trying to ride their trains. I saw several break downs, two yelling matches, and dozens of people literally begging to be helped. And this was just to try and get in line.

Suffice to say Italy was great in unexpected ways. Just leave the trains to the Italians.

Germany, Austria and oh, the Sound of Music

From slightly mid-June, 2008:

After visiting the Danes and the relatives, we headed south on a train and two more boats, eventually landing us in Siegen, Germany. My friend Kalina, who is a physics genius, was working for a university there over the summer, figuring out a way to use magnets to create super computers. But she took some time off from aiding our eventual species-wide submission to robots to show us around Siegen. We saw another castle, watched the absolute madness that is Europe during a soccer game, and hung with two Turkish guys, one Bulgarian and a handful of Americans at a bar called Bar Celona. Perhaps if you are working to be an ex-pat, university life is the way to go.


We bid Siegen auf wiedersehen and headed to Grassau, Bavaria to met another almost relative. Margrit is the cousin of my dad's ex-wife. Our relationship is thus: I am related to my half-brothers, they are related to their mom, Uthe, Uthe is related to Magrit. Another way to say this is "we got nothin". But regardless, Margrit welcomed us into her home, watched soccer with us and showed us a castle (I'm beginning to detect a theme), and facilitated our trip to Munich.

Munich was rainy and fascinating. In a plaza outside the former royal palace, we found a woman holding up a sign that said "Free Tour". Joining was inevitable. We learned about the guy who started Oktoberfest*, the subtle monuments to Nazi resistors, and the Munich Beer Hall push. We also saw the Toy Museum which was weird, the Glockenspiel which was full of gawking tourists, and the nearly invisible "monuments" to the White Rose. If your ever in Munich, go see them.


Then it was back on the road headed for Salzburg, Austria. That is a beautiful city. Yes, it looks just like the Sound of Music, which was largely influenced by the fact that we took the Original Sound of Music tour, where we saw the (movie) Von Trapp house, the glass gazebo, the wedding church, etc. If your ever in Salzburg, shell out for the tour. The small child inside you and your flamboyant tour guide will thank you. In Salzburg we also saw Mozart's house, which was yellow and swarming with people, and rode the "funicular" to the fortress that overlooks Salzburg (also available for viewing in The Sound of Music). But nothing puts the FUN funicular like gigantic Austrian preztels.


*Incidentally, the former King of Bavaria and I share a similar dream: to host an event as fun, silly and full of light-hearted debauchery as a wedding reception, only without pain of the actual the wedding. The difference between us to date is that he actually accomplished it.

Adventures in the Great, Very White North

Summer started out as any great summer should: with Mindy and I nearly missing our flight to Switzerland because Newark airport couldn't be bothered to make boarding calls. But nonetheless, we prevailed and soon after (9 hours and many complimentary episodes of House later) landed in Geneva Switzerland, where we when to the grocery store and promptly left the country.

We took an overnight train to Copenhagen, where we shared a cabin with a nice guy from Syria and a pair of complete sketchballs from Germany. Out of the kindness of his heart, the conductor moved us to what he called "The Ladies Compartment" (gigity gigity), where we met the world's most stereotypical German woman (think Augustus Gloop in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory), her 2 zany, stereotypical German kids, a nice lady from Denmark, and her gigantic cello. And we all shared a tiny sleeping compartment. Ah, to be young and cheap.

We got to Copenhagen, wandered around to various hostels begging to be taken in from the cold, dark night (it was 9am). Ended up staying at the DanHostel, where we met a woman from Taiwan. She asked us if we'd heard of Taiwan, and then showed us her magic spoon which plugged into the wall and could boil a small pot of water in 5 minutes.

During the 3 days in the city, we went on a castle tour which included the castle that serves as the setting to Hamlet. From that castle, you can see Sweden...which has cannons pointed at it. Apparently the Danish are still a bit leery after an attack from across the water several hundred years ago. We also went to the Glyptotek, which actually isn't a crazy European rave, but an art museum (that's free on Sundays!), and Tivoli, the greatest small-scale amusement park ever. Think of the giant swings at a carnival, then raise them up several hundred feet so that your wild, spinning ride involves looking out over an entire city. Mindy summed it up nicely: "We can figure out the whole bus schedule from up here!"

We also saw Christiania which the guidebooks recommended and I don't.


After Denmark, we hit the high seas and took a (gigantic, utterly fabulous) boat to Norway, home country of my people (or at least the people of my grandmother). We stayed with my great aunt Unni and her boyfriend Jan in Oslo, and enjoyed the comfort of staying in one of the most expensive cities in the world for free. We went hiking the first day we were there at a local park. We were told it'd be an easy hike, no need to bring water. 6 miles and one piece of cake later, we found out that it was 90 degrees in the shade and passed out.

Other things we did in Norway included riding on a lot of boats around the Oslofjord, seeing an 11th century nunnery (which has seen better days), climbing the Holmenkollen, and eating prawns. My time there taught me that I will never be a ski jumper, and that prawns aren't worth the work.


From the top of Holmenkollen, my last thought as a ski-jumper: "OH GOD OH GOD NO NO NO NO NO!!!!"

Now, re: the title. I might not have noticed this, had my uncle not pointed it out. My uncle Lars and my grandma are the only relatives State-side that actually have Scandinavian blood, and it shows. That said, I still didn't understand what my blond-haired, blue-eyed, very tall uncle meant when he said "Norway doesn't look like a viking ship anymore."

What he was referring to was immigration. Even though Grandma Solvieg crossed the pond and preserved her Aryan supermodel making genes, Norway itself has supposedly mixed it up as people have immigrated in droves, presumably looking for some Norwegian version of the American dream. From what I understand, a lot of people are coming from Pakistan. My relatives laid out the Norwegian immigration debate pretty plainly - and it's the same one we have here. "Immigrants are lazy and they fed off productive citizens!" "But immigrants are here and they are an important part of our society, so we need to provide jobs and welcome them!" I'm not sure what we can take from this experience, other then some people are going to be (unnecessarily) awful to immigrants everywhere.

That said, let me be clear: at least Oslo and Copenhagen still look A LOT like that metaphoric viking ship, except now instead of great horned helmets, everyone has health care.

But everyone still eats prawns.