andrew_jorgensen | Entries tagged with baltic/norway 2006

I suppose this could be a placeholder for a much more interesting entry involving the arctic tern or perhaps Iorek Byrnison, but I am in Svalbard, and this may be the Northernmost LJ post I'll ever make. I though that was worth noting. (I may have left the h out of that last word.)

Current Location: Longyearbyen, Svalbard

One of the most pleasant aspects of the Baltic Sea cruise was the chance it gave me to read; I've managed to hold to my resolution regarding Proust. In fact, I've progressed down Swann's Way with so much more alacrity than I expected that I've been dropping into various Norwegian bookstores (all of which well-stocked with English-language novels, in which might lie my problem, considering) looking for In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. I've only found one English copy of any volume of In Search Of Lost Time, and that was the redundant Swann's Way, moreover in the icky unhip Moncrieff translation, though I did see the whole set in Norwegian. And while sometimes while reading variously informative signs I get the impression that Norwegian is just English not even badly spelled but only badly typed, with the occasional manual typewriter strike-through on the o's, I don't think I'll get the full flavor of the Proustian language reading it in a language I only comprehend through bull-headedness and an inflated ego.

But while English-readers in Norway don't seem to be driving up the demand for Proust, I cannot say they are without taste. If popularity can be calculated by the sheer footage of shelf space, then two of the most popular authors in Norway are Paul Auster (ex-husband of Swann's Way translator Lydia Davis, apophenetically) and Haruki Murakami. Apparently there is a Norwegian appetite for existential, pulpish, experimental novels. Hoping to pass off synchronicity as miscomprehension, I bought Norwegian Wood.

Current Location: Tromso, Norway

Trondheim: the city that stumbles seedily about in a distressed leather jacket and run-down black jeans while crooking its track-marked elbow around its hot Asian girlfriend. Yes, there may not yet be an evening but there is amazing Thai food up here at 63° North; we were so impressed by the existence of crisp, fresh vegetables that we've been to the Bangkok Palace twice in two nights. We've actually been off the boat, and surrounded by free wifi, for four nights, spending two in Bergen before coming up here; my apologies for not updating sooner. I must say that I've been a bit daunted in trying to sum up a two-week, eight-country cruise in a pithy and witty manner. Cruises obviate even the just barely half-potted bullshit sociopsychological observations I like to pass off as travelogue. By the time you've figured out how to jaywalk, you have to get back on the boat. You don't even get a chance to see a city by night -- well, that's not much of an issue here this time of year. I think there might have been something resembling dusk somewhere between Gdansk and Copenhagen.

I tried to avoid most of the ship-organized shore excursions -- I hate the idea of bringing my own crowd with me -- and the most special moments on the Baltic certainly came during those times we had escaped the throngs. Canoeing along the Royal Canal, alone but for the ducks and the trees of Djurgärden, in the middle of downtown Stockholm. Crossing through the Green Gate onto the sun-dappled Długi Targ before anyone before a few Polish commuters. I also tried to extend my stay in each country as often as possible through at least a meal. The chef on the boat was undistinguished anyway. I was happy to sample the local cuisine of several little nations, if the cuisine can be considered local when I demur from visiting any restaurant that isn't specifically garlic-themed.

I don't really expect to find much garlic, or Thai, or broadband internet when I arrive in Svalbard tomorrow, so after checking in before my flight out in the morning I probably won't be able to update with whatever half-baked fantasia of insight to which I might aspire.

Current Location: Trondheim, Norway

One of the few reasons I was glad to leave Finland was the language. I have no facility with foreign languages, but I like to muddle through sometimes as best I can. I'm usually pretty successful finding cognates and deciphering at least the warning signs in the Western branches of the Indo-European language tree. But Finnish is Finno-Ugric and features mostly umlauted vowels; my immediate response on encountering a word in Finnish is to try to solve the anagram. So I've been grateful to reach Russia, where I may not be able to understand the language but where just reading the alphabet feels like a major victory. I can become inordinately proud of myself just for sounding out a word. I missed phonics in first grade (as I could already read) and I suppose I'm trying to make up for it now.

Of course, I can reach that reward all the more quickly when the source text is "Макдоналдс" rather than a long placard on the culture of the ancient Scythians. Yes, I was a little lost in the bowels of the Hermitage Museum this morning, trying to find my way towards more recent cultures. I wasn't quite certain whether I wanted to be touring the world-famous art museum, the Hermitage, or touring the Czar's Winter Palace; one is of course juxtaposed on top of the other but I'm not sure I was able to give either my full attention. We kept circling through the galleries, making sudden jumps in era and subject, striving desperately to see everything and sometimes feeling that we hadn't seen anything. Museum fatigue set in rapidly and we went to a couple of churches: the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in the Fortress and the Church on Spilled Blood. The Cathedral is a reminder of why they shouldn't have held the Baroque era outside of France and Italy; it's a travesty in lavender and chartreuse. I was expecting similar garishness from the Church, as the outside is a turn-of-the-century nationalistic sentimentalization of stereotypical Russian style. But instead the art nouveau interior was soaring and gorgeous, alive with golden and indigo tesserae. It was as though the Byzantine cathdrals of Ravenna had been reimagined by Alfons Mucha. What it lacked in subtlety it acquired in sublimity.

Tomorrow we transfer onto the boat, and I expect that I will finally be weaned from the broadband connection on this trip, so updates may become spare.

St. Petersburg: the city that totters along atop its three-inch fuck-me heels. Yes, the former Leningrad dolls itself up in miniskirts and shortshorts and decolletage and thus goes into the category of places I'd like to visit without my mother. Though I suspect it's tough on men here: I walked in front of two women practicing English break-up lines. "Don't put your trip on me," one would lightly accentedly say. "Don't put your trip on me," repeated the other. Then after some staccato Russian, "Drama." "Drama." "Crisis-drama." "Crisis-drama." More Russian. "I don't need this crisis-drama," the first declared. "Good-bye."

Speaking of abject humiliation,

nzraya is somewhere in this city for another few hours, and it's looking like we're not going to get to rendezvous after all. I suppose I could make an effort to track her down, but as if I need that crisis-drama!

Current Location: St. Petersburg, Russia

This sojourn through Finland has been terrifyingly self-relevatory. I've had to question some of my basic assumptions and break down my very sense of self. Apparently, I'm just not as blond as I once thought. Or, at least, in the right light you can see my eyebrows, which is more than I can say for many of the people here.

Today was a short and fatigued spin through the center of Helsinki, buying cherries at the fishless fish market, visiting the plain interior of a Lutheran church and the exuberance of an Orthodox Cathedral, and then climbing a hill to crawl into a church carved from its own bedrock. Hot chocolate in the middle of the boulevard as they set up the bandstand across the green. The Andean pan flutists I had run into before in front of Rouen Cathedral and in Copenhagen's Rådhuspladsen and all across Europe and once, memorably, overheard playing in Covent Garden while on the phone with

rahael, have put on Sioux-style headdresses and leggings and are now marketting themselves as "The Mohicans." They're still playing panpipes, authentic as they are, but I didn't stick around long enough to hear if "I'd Rather Be A Hammer Than A Nail" was still the mainstay of their repetoire.

Tomorrow brings us to Petrograd, where I hope it gets darker.

Current Location: Helsinki, Finland

The Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland, have many uses for their reindeer. One of the primary uses seems to be denial, or at least it seemed that way yesterday as we stopped on the outskirts of Inari for a visit to the home of a Sami schoolteacher. The noonday sun -- much like the midnight sun but still not going anywhere can't you tell I'm losing my mind from the sun the sun the sun -- had the temperature up to a lot closer to sweltering than I had expected, but she was dressed in a heavy calf-length dress made from reindeer wool; she quickly escorted us out of the open air into a canvas tepee so we could sit around a crackling fire, listen to her explain which portions of the reindeer become which handicraft, and sweat. To be fair, this was an attempt to avoid the mosquitos, gnats, horseflies, other-nasty-winged flies and flying, bug-sized piranha that infest the Lappish air, lapping up my blood. Our hostess said that she much preferred the winter, especially when it would reach 40 below, and I suspect the insects have something to do with this.

In the afternoon, we met another resident of the area who preferred the winter, but she was raising sled dogs, so I suppose it's to be expected of her. She had one Siberian Husky, but the bulk of her team were cross-bred from Alaskan Huskies and greyhounds. For the speed, one supposes; they are capable of reaching as high as 45 k.p.h. with a sled in tow.

The people I have met in Finland have seemed very nice, but I was a little disturbed to see, hanging in the window of one apartment building in Ivalo, a flag with a white cross on a blue background, starbursts at each point of the cross, and the Confederate flag. At 68° N I don't think this is an expression of regional pride. The population of Ivalo is so white as to be translucent, and my impression is that the immigrants there are all Russian, so I'm a little on edge. They do have a surprisingly large number of tourists from Thailand, though.

Today was spent indolently tramping around Urho Kekkonen National Park and then driving down to Rovaniemi, which has an absolutely beautiful riverside. It seemed as though every twenty feet another pair of young lovers had deposited their bicycles so they could sit, and talk, and watch the river, and forge dreams together, or somesuch.

Current Location: Rovaniemi, Finland

It is 1:45 in the morning in Ivalo, Finland, 300 km north of the Arctic Circle and ten days past the solstice; I've lost track of the sun as the northern horizon is obscured by trees and clouds but I've grown to accept that it's just never going to get dark. The south of Finland was shockingly green. We flew in over lightly undulating fields a brilliant shade of green. Not jade, or emerald, or malachite; the best analogy from my experience would be pond scum. Not the most appealing of associations but perhaps I'm talking about the expensive pond scum you buy from Tricker's for your ornamental pond. The land is largely flat -- we had to get a hundred klicks north of Rovaniemi before seeing anything like a hill -- and the borders of the lakes are more fractally arbitrary than a permanently rounded edge. I suspect that much of what we overflew was spongey. Bright green, full of lakes, infested with biting insects: I think I now understand why the Finns liked Minnesota so much. Up here there's a little more orange mixed into the green, a little more heathery. And the flora feels like the Sierra Nevadas without being all that far above sea level.

My attitude changed from "Oooh, Lapland! I sure do hope we see some reindeer" to "Get out of the god-damned road, you god-damned speedbumps" in about thirty minutes. They're everywhere. Down near Rovaniemi they're tagged and molting, but up here where it's on the whole chillier, they're less motley, and seem to be roaming free in herds of eight to fourteen. I have yet to see any dead along the side of the road, but I suspect that's due to some stereotypical fastidiousness I have just invented from whole air and imputed to the Finns without cause than to any shyness on the part of the reindeer.

Current Location: Ivalo, Finland

I am not someone who likes to prepare for vacations well in advance. If I can get the dryer to chime fifteen minutes before I need to catch the cab, I'm happy. However, after sleeping for forty-five minutes on the red-eye back from San Francisco, then on the day before departure spending all day moving furniture and all night working on a strenuous gathering recounting, even the bestly mislaid plans gang aglay. I have managed to realize, since I left Cleveland, that I've also left my waterproof socks (needed in Svalbard), my Scopolamine patches (likewise) and the charger for my electric toothbrush. I also managed to lose track of two separate copies of Pride & Prejudice right between Jane's letters revealing Wickham's absconscion with Lydia. And that aforementioned dryer? Its thermostat broke last night and my soggy clothes were just spinning around. Luckily, I didn't particularly need any of them right away, and Simply Books at Cleveland Hopkins is well-stocked with Austen. And apparently people could brush their teeth before Sonicare entered the market; I believe they used valets. But the misapprehension that most reveals my fatigue must be the incident of the fruit.

As some in Tahoe may have surmised, I'm eating a lot of fresh fruit these days, and I can't now imagine getting on a long-haul flight without my own snacks. So I ran over to the grocery store while hoping for some divine laundry miracle and picked up three apples and a like number of oranges. I tucked my favorite water bottle into the grocery bag and carried it along with me when I went to hail the cab. Well, while in line for the security check, I realized that I didn't have that bag -- and I really, really like that water bottle (Dannon 1 liter; $1.49 when containing actual water). So I turned around, bucking the tide on a very security-conscious day, and rushed downstairs to the cabstand, figuring that my driver was waiting to make a pick-up there. I talked with the dispatcher, who allowed me to look over the line; he wasn't there. She suggested calling the company, and a driver made the same suggestion, but, really: produce.

So I head back through security, today a ten-minute process, and stalk out to my gate, which is all the way at the end of Concourse C. Adjacent to the gate is an outlet for Phoenix Coffee, one of our local Starbucks/Caribou competitors. I'm in desperate need for a hot choco/vanilla now, and, lo! not to mention behold!, they sold fruit for 99 cents apiece. I bought two apples, two oranges and a banana.

I no sooner set my purchases down at my gate when I hear a page, "Will the party leaving the bag of fruit in the Ace Taxi please collect his item at the information center?" Well, I weigh my options, but it was really nice of the driver to bring my fruit in, and it is my favorite water bottle, so I trek all the way down the concourse, asking the security guard if someone could bring me the fruit -- negative, sir -- and leaving the secure area to pick up my fruit. Then ten minutes back through security, fifteen to the end of the concourse, and they're boarding my plane.

And my eleven pieces of fruit won't fit comfortably under the seat in front of me.

Current Location: Frankfort International Airport, Frankfort, Germany

I'm out the door for the huge freaking trip through the Baltic sea and up the Norwegian coast. My connectivity will be spotty for the next five weeks (!) though if I can find WiFi broadband in the middle of the Libyan desert, Talinn ought to have no secrets from me. Still, I expect that there might soon be a few posts that contain (the one true marker of LJ quality) mentions of me; I would appreciate it if people would make some small effort to ensure that I do not miss those.

I suppose I'm not going to write that substantial update I'd been planning before I leave for Tahoe. Oh, well, I had something planned about nostalgia. Speaking of which, I wonder if Jane Austen wasn't the correct high-toned author to whom to turn in my current mood of happy self-recrimination. And since I'm looking for dense doorstops to carry on the great Northern Europe expedition, the question arises: which translation of Proust should I favor? I'll get to ask

atpotch that in person, won't I, in just twelve or so hours. And other people, of course, some of who might even have opinions on the subject.

And speaking of the great Northern Europe expedition, if you would like a postcard from the top of the world, or at least 79° North Latitude, send your address to dherblay at livejournal.com!