Day 1: Exit Scandinavia
Before setting out for the continent, I had a dental appointment in Oslo around noon. Emerging from the dentist in the usual state of uncertainty as to whether my jaw was still attached to my head, I foolishly thought, "Well, this is as bad as it's going to be for the next two weeks". At 2:30pm I got in the car and maneuvered the old wreck out of the city streets (the traffic machine in Oslo is the universe's only example of a perpetuum mobile) and onto the highway.
Not wishing to be confined to the realms of French Euro-pop and "Best of Bavarian Oompa", which is what I feared European radio stations would be playing, I had wisely made a wide selection of tapes to listen to. I cranked up the volume, and head banging ever so slightly to ZZ Top, I headed for Sweden.
After only an hour or so, I got my first nasty surprise. I hadn't been to these parts of Norway for years and had completely forgotten that there was a toll plaza on the highway. Since I was leaving the country anyway, I hadn't bothered to stack up on Norwegian currency, and found myself sadly penniless. I was given a payment form and sternly admonished to pay it within 3 days. It was not said aloud, but I gathered big burly men with Italian accents would show up on my door if I didn't.
Since I was going to be out of the country for 2 weeks, I decided to stop in Sarpsborg to find a post office and pay the damn bill. I had never driven a car in Sarpsborg and knew nothing about the outlay of the city. Sarpsborg is one of Norway's oldest cities. The area is rich in findings not only from Viking times but also from the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Stone Age. Sadly, urban planning didn't seem to have made much progress since then, and I soon found myself cursing and sweating, caught up in a tangle of one-way streets, annoying little squares that interrupted the flow of traffic, narrow, winding lanes and not least the local pedestrians, who all seemed blissfully unaware of the potential consequences of having a Subaru station wagon containing a rather rotund adult male bearing down on them at 50mph.
In my desperation, I broke the holy male code: I broke down and stopped at a gas station to ask for directions to the nearest post office. Judging from his looks & speech, the parents of the man behind the counter had probably been cousins, as had their parents before them. Forcing myself not to try and follow the lofty flight of his shifty eyes, I was able to concentrate on, and even occasionally understand his mumbling instructions. I set off in the general direction his feebly flaying arms had pointed to and soon found myself, to my great surprise, outside the post office building. Fortunately, the cosmic balance was immediately restored, as the office was closed for renovation and the front door contained a Byzantine instruction on how to get to the intermediate office. Surviving even this ordeal, I finally crossed the Swedish border with all bills paid and the tape player still blasting good old 80s rock.
After a few minutes inside Sweden, I discovered that the signal on my cell phone was gone. I had loaded the phone with almost $200 worth of prepaid cards, so that I could stay in touch with the folks at home, or call for road assistance, police, ambulance, pizza, etc if need be. The internet pages of my service provider, Telenor, had assured me I would have full signal coverage in all the countries I might possibly be going to on this trip. Well, here I was, not more than ten minutes inside Sweden, and my fancy cell phone was already reduced to a $350 vibrating, oversized calculator. I cursed Telenor. Loudly. Obscenely. I cursed its internet pages. I cursed its employees. I cursed the employee's ancestors, their family trees and their future grandchildren. The windows were steamy with my fuming hatred.
My raging anger soon went into that almost comfortable state of Righteous Consumer mind where you find yourself thinking about the immeasurable pleasure you're going to have upon returning to the offices of the Business That Wronged You and tear up your contract in front of their shocked eyes and tell them in no uncertain terms where they can stick their phone directories.
My concentration on hating the phone company was also distracted somewhat by a growing hunger, so I finally swung by a Swedish McDonalds restaurant to fill my poor stomach with a rightly earned dose of fat and sugar. This was the first in a long series of disappointing junk food experiences. The water in the restroom was ice cold and I had frost burns on my hands when I left. I hadn't bothered to buy any Swedish currency, and the bastards took my Norwegian money (I had gotten some at the post office in Sarpsborg) at an exchange rate of 1:1 (the Norwegian Krone was 25% more worth than the Swedish at the time). In addition, the burgers and the soda were even blander than in Norway.
As afternoon turned to evening and darkness slowly descended, I drove on southwards, down the Swedish west coast. The landscape here is flat and horribly boring. Until the mid 1600s, the landscape for many miles inside the present border was Norwegian. Looking at it now I couldn't help thinking the Swedes had shown a terribly poor taste in Norwegian landscape, grabbing this dull, gray stretch of soil. On the other hand, I suppose agricultural land was an asset back then, instead of the bottomless hole of subsidies it is nowadays. At the time, I thought it was just the wind but that sucking sound I heard was probably of taxpayers' money going down the drain.
After several hours, I had finally picked up the signal from a Swedish cell phone carrier. I was feeling vaguely ashamed about the curses I had cast over Telenor (too late, their share price has plummeted since) and yet still somewhat angry with them for ruining my wet dream of going postal in their complaints department.
All the way down the coast, I debated with myself over whether I should head for the ferries between the Swedish town of Helsingborg and the Danish town of Elsinore or push on all the way down to Malmø, where I could take the bridge over to Copenhagen. Not knowing the ferry schedules and not wanting to waste time driving around the harbor area of Helsingborg to find them, I opted for the bridge.
The bridge over the Kattegat strait is one of the engineering wonders of the world. It cost billions to build, took years to complete, it is huge and impressive and a wonder to behold, and it will, needless to say, never make money. It is an example of waste and political megalomania worthy of the finest Soviet bureaucrats. Bear in mind that at the time they started building it, Sweden had budget deficits and a national debt much bigger than the US, in relative terms.
Sadly, in addition to the oncoming darkness, the bridge was covered in fog so thick you could cut it with a knife and I never saw the bridge, nor the ocean. In fact, I had no idea where the bridge started and where it ended.
Somewhere in the fog and darkness, I crossed into Denmark. Now Denmark has always been one of my favorite countries, and I have nothing but fond memories of my visits there, going back to a trip to Copenhagen when I was something like 10-11 and managed to shoot a perfect 20 out of 20 score, killing little plastic bears at a laser gun booth at the famous Tivoli amusement park. I also had vague memories of obscenely tall sandwiches and friendly, smiling people. For many years I had a summer job as a guide at the local museum in Hønefoss, and an experience I shared with all the other guides there throughout the years, was that if we had Danish tourists visiting, we had to count on using about twice the normal amount of time on a tour, since we would always get into the most pleasant irrelevancies with them. No one can small talk like a Dane. No people, not even Americans, are as easy to engage in conversation, and they are usually pleasant, witty and intelligent in their discourse. Guiding Danes was always a two-way process and at the end of a tour, you'd often find yourself almost ready to pay THEM for a thoroughly enjoyable time. In short: I luv'em.
The Danes have a reputation (at least in Norway) for being calm and laidback. It was therefore with the greatest surprise I soon found myself in some strange, redneck version of a Formula 1 speeding race. I was making good speed, I thought. I was even going a little over the speed limit, in spite of the darkness and the ever-increasing fog. And yet they kept coming from behind, at insane speed, throwing their cars out in the oncoming lane two inches before they would have crashed into me, miraculously throwing the car back in the right lane again, two inches in front of me and two inches away from being smashed to pulp by the oncoming truck who is wildly honking his horn, flashing his lights and saying his last prayers. This happened again and again. No matter how fast I went, no matter how recklessly I ignored the darkness and the fog, they would perform their death-defying rituals. I could have understood this kind of behavior in Germans, but almost all the cars had Danish number plates.
In addition to this mad driving, a truly stunning proportion of the cars I met or was overtaken by had only one working light. Moreover, the ones that had two working lights usually had one light shining much stronger than the other, causing me to squint and curse. Thus it was that I arrived at the ferry terminal in Rødby a little before midnight with a splitting headache and a much shaken belief in the mental and moral accountability of the Danish people.
Not wishing to be confined to the realms of French Euro-pop and "Best of Bavarian Oompa", which is what I feared European radio stations would be playing, I had wisely made a wide selection of tapes to listen to. I cranked up the volume, and head banging ever so slightly to ZZ Top, I headed for Sweden.
After only an hour or so, I got my first nasty surprise. I hadn't been to these parts of Norway for years and had completely forgotten that there was a toll plaza on the highway. Since I was leaving the country anyway, I hadn't bothered to stack up on Norwegian currency, and found myself sadly penniless. I was given a payment form and sternly admonished to pay it within 3 days. It was not said aloud, but I gathered big burly men with Italian accents would show up on my door if I didn't.
Since I was going to be out of the country for 2 weeks, I decided to stop in Sarpsborg to find a post office and pay the damn bill. I had never driven a car in Sarpsborg and knew nothing about the outlay of the city. Sarpsborg is one of Norway's oldest cities. The area is rich in findings not only from Viking times but also from the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Stone Age. Sadly, urban planning didn't seem to have made much progress since then, and I soon found myself cursing and sweating, caught up in a tangle of one-way streets, annoying little squares that interrupted the flow of traffic, narrow, winding lanes and not least the local pedestrians, who all seemed blissfully unaware of the potential consequences of having a Subaru station wagon containing a rather rotund adult male bearing down on them at 50mph.
In my desperation, I broke the holy male code: I broke down and stopped at a gas station to ask for directions to the nearest post office. Judging from his looks & speech, the parents of the man behind the counter had probably been cousins, as had their parents before them. Forcing myself not to try and follow the lofty flight of his shifty eyes, I was able to concentrate on, and even occasionally understand his mumbling instructions. I set off in the general direction his feebly flaying arms had pointed to and soon found myself, to my great surprise, outside the post office building. Fortunately, the cosmic balance was immediately restored, as the office was closed for renovation and the front door contained a Byzantine instruction on how to get to the intermediate office. Surviving even this ordeal, I finally crossed the Swedish border with all bills paid and the tape player still blasting good old 80s rock.
After a few minutes inside Sweden, I discovered that the signal on my cell phone was gone. I had loaded the phone with almost $200 worth of prepaid cards, so that I could stay in touch with the folks at home, or call for road assistance, police, ambulance, pizza, etc if need be. The internet pages of my service provider, Telenor, had assured me I would have full signal coverage in all the countries I might possibly be going to on this trip. Well, here I was, not more than ten minutes inside Sweden, and my fancy cell phone was already reduced to a $350 vibrating, oversized calculator. I cursed Telenor. Loudly. Obscenely. I cursed its internet pages. I cursed its employees. I cursed the employee's ancestors, their family trees and their future grandchildren. The windows were steamy with my fuming hatred.
My raging anger soon went into that almost comfortable state of Righteous Consumer mind where you find yourself thinking about the immeasurable pleasure you're going to have upon returning to the offices of the Business That Wronged You and tear up your contract in front of their shocked eyes and tell them in no uncertain terms where they can stick their phone directories.
My concentration on hating the phone company was also distracted somewhat by a growing hunger, so I finally swung by a Swedish McDonalds restaurant to fill my poor stomach with a rightly earned dose of fat and sugar. This was the first in a long series of disappointing junk food experiences. The water in the restroom was ice cold and I had frost burns on my hands when I left. I hadn't bothered to buy any Swedish currency, and the bastards took my Norwegian money (I had gotten some at the post office in Sarpsborg) at an exchange rate of 1:1 (the Norwegian Krone was 25% more worth than the Swedish at the time). In addition, the burgers and the soda were even blander than in Norway.
As afternoon turned to evening and darkness slowly descended, I drove on southwards, down the Swedish west coast. The landscape here is flat and horribly boring. Until the mid 1600s, the landscape for many miles inside the present border was Norwegian. Looking at it now I couldn't help thinking the Swedes had shown a terribly poor taste in Norwegian landscape, grabbing this dull, gray stretch of soil. On the other hand, I suppose agricultural land was an asset back then, instead of the bottomless hole of subsidies it is nowadays. At the time, I thought it was just the wind but that sucking sound I heard was probably of taxpayers' money going down the drain.
After several hours, I had finally picked up the signal from a Swedish cell phone carrier. I was feeling vaguely ashamed about the curses I had cast over Telenor (too late, their share price has plummeted since) and yet still somewhat angry with them for ruining my wet dream of going postal in their complaints department.
All the way down the coast, I debated with myself over whether I should head for the ferries between the Swedish town of Helsingborg and the Danish town of Elsinore or push on all the way down to Malmø, where I could take the bridge over to Copenhagen. Not knowing the ferry schedules and not wanting to waste time driving around the harbor area of Helsingborg to find them, I opted for the bridge.
The bridge over the Kattegat strait is one of the engineering wonders of the world. It cost billions to build, took years to complete, it is huge and impressive and a wonder to behold, and it will, needless to say, never make money. It is an example of waste and political megalomania worthy of the finest Soviet bureaucrats. Bear in mind that at the time they started building it, Sweden had budget deficits and a national debt much bigger than the US, in relative terms.
Sadly, in addition to the oncoming darkness, the bridge was covered in fog so thick you could cut it with a knife and I never saw the bridge, nor the ocean. In fact, I had no idea where the bridge started and where it ended.
Somewhere in the fog and darkness, I crossed into Denmark. Now Denmark has always been one of my favorite countries, and I have nothing but fond memories of my visits there, going back to a trip to Copenhagen when I was something like 10-11 and managed to shoot a perfect 20 out of 20 score, killing little plastic bears at a laser gun booth at the famous Tivoli amusement park. I also had vague memories of obscenely tall sandwiches and friendly, smiling people. For many years I had a summer job as a guide at the local museum in Hønefoss, and an experience I shared with all the other guides there throughout the years, was that if we had Danish tourists visiting, we had to count on using about twice the normal amount of time on a tour, since we would always get into the most pleasant irrelevancies with them. No one can small talk like a Dane. No people, not even Americans, are as easy to engage in conversation, and they are usually pleasant, witty and intelligent in their discourse. Guiding Danes was always a two-way process and at the end of a tour, you'd often find yourself almost ready to pay THEM for a thoroughly enjoyable time. In short: I luv'em.
The Danes have a reputation (at least in Norway) for being calm and laidback. It was therefore with the greatest surprise I soon found myself in some strange, redneck version of a Formula 1 speeding race. I was making good speed, I thought. I was even going a little over the speed limit, in spite of the darkness and the ever-increasing fog. And yet they kept coming from behind, at insane speed, throwing their cars out in the oncoming lane two inches before they would have crashed into me, miraculously throwing the car back in the right lane again, two inches in front of me and two inches away from being smashed to pulp by the oncoming truck who is wildly honking his horn, flashing his lights and saying his last prayers. This happened again and again. No matter how fast I went, no matter how recklessly I ignored the darkness and the fog, they would perform their death-defying rituals. I could have understood this kind of behavior in Germans, but almost all the cars had Danish number plates.
In addition to this mad driving, a truly stunning proportion of the cars I met or was overtaken by had only one working light. Moreover, the ones that had two working lights usually had one light shining much stronger than the other, causing me to squint and curse. Thus it was that I arrived at the ferry terminal in Rødby a little before midnight with a splitting headache and a much shaken belief in the mental and moral accountability of the Danish people.
posted by Ghost of Goldwater at 9:32 PM
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