Geezers @ Sea: Train Edition

The geezers are no longer at sea...we are on dry land, well not-so-dry land--in Oslo. We took the train to Oslo yesterday. Seems like this neck of the world gets 300 days of rain a year. So it's very late winter/beginning of spring with lots of water and a few sprouts of green trying ever so hard to see the sunshine.

That's an old stone church in Bergen, and you can clearly see some greenery and the rain. In fact, the camera does not know what to focus on...the raindrops or the leaves, so it kind of does a poor job of both (or you can think of it as an impressionist photo--I prefer the latter.)

We got on the train in Bergen,

which is on the coast and took the Glacier Express over the mountains and thru the woods to Oslo. Along the way we saw rainy landscapes;

snowy landscapes;

and spring landscapes.

..we could not see the glaciers as they were lost in the clouds. I'm guessing they are difficult to see most of the time. Our guide therefore showed us some pictures of the glaciers. We passed by homes and cabins (maybe summer cabins) and farms. The folks here are tidy...maybe not as tidy as Swiss farmers, but it's hard to beat the Swiss at anything that has precision involved in it.

We went thru a few villages that had tiny train stations and we stopped for 3 or 4 minutes, then we went on our way again.

In the end, we climbed to about 3800 feet. We never went faster than 80 mph as we made steady progress to Oslo, 7 hours away from Bergen. It's fun to check things like speed and elevation with the apps that I have on my phone. In fact, I followed the whole trip via the map app, so I could see where we were at any given time...something I cannot do as a driver.

Aside from my apps, I knew we were getting closer to Oslo when the train stations got bigger and more folks got off the train. There was a "streaming" notice in our car that said in Norwegian and then English that we would be arriving at X in 5 or 6 minutes. Again, not a Swiss train, as it would have said they were arriving in 5.5 minutes, exactly. No problem...we got there in the allotted time. 

This train station was getting a face lift, and it was a far cry from the old Hanseatic Red buildings from way back when. Oslo is modern, edgy BIG CITY, filled with people from all over the world. All of them are trying to make out Norwegian signs which look like a combination of German and old English that can be roughly "parsed" out, when you have a chance to read them slowly. Given that, I cannot understand the language when it is spoken. 

Last night we discovered that it's going to be hard to feed me here. I'm on a low-sodium diet and the home of salt cod does not know how to cook without salt. I figured out something for dinner last night that was less than adequate, but this morning I asked "omelet" man, to scramble 2 eggs without salt. They were yummy. Don't worry...I won't starve...I'll just have to look harder for food than I usually do. It's one of the hazards of travel. In Jordan and Russia, I've had chefs come out to the dining room and tell me they could not feed me--but they usually had rice. Norway does not seem to have rice on the menu. The cruise ships always do a fantastic job with my loso diet yet there are problems when I'm on the land. 

We fly home tomorrow...see you all soon.

PS: Happy Birthday Dad, Dom and Joe!