Norway in a Nutshell

I hate it when my students begin their papers with dictionary definitions: "according to Webster's Dictionary, love is...," but that's exactly where I'm headed. According to some random online dictionary, a fjord is "a long, narrow arm of the sea bordered by steep cliffs: usually formed by glacial erosion." I'm giving you that definition because until recently, I wasn't entirely sure what a fjord was. Thanks to a tour called Norway in a Nutshell, though, I found out.

We set out early by train, got on a bus, transferred to a boat, got back on a train, caught another train, and then finished things off with a final bus. In the midst of all of that transportation, we saw some stunningly beautiful scenery: waterfalls that poured down high cliffs and looked like gleaming silver ribbons; white water rivers that churned and whirled and leapt out of their banks; placid lakes flanked by tall cliffs, and, at the highest elevations, lots and lots of snow. The scenery was so lovely and so abundant that it was overwhelming. At some point, the "that's gorgeous" part of your brain just shuts down, and all of those waterfalls and craggy cliffs stop registering for a while. My students use the word "awesome" all the time to describe things that aren't literally awesome. The fjords are. Here's an assortment of photos from my nutshell extravaganza.









































































Norway--maybe all of Scandinavia--is troll territory. You find them in every single souvenir shop. On one of the last trains of the tour, I heard a Norwegian man and his young son explain to a Chinese woman who spoke broken English that they had spent the day troll hunting. The Chinese woman was fascinated, and she had clearly never heard the word troll. the man explained that trolls lived deep in the forest and were very hard to find--that you were lucky to even get a quick glimpse of one of these hairy, knob-nosed creatures. He was being very serious, obviously trying to preserve the idea that trolls are real for his young son, but the Chinese woman was clearly believing everything he said, too. She was fascinated and looked a little horrified as she asked her very serious questions. I have to say, the whole exchange was pretty entertaining for this eavesdropping tourist.






The last leg of our Norway in a Nutshell tour was a bus that we boarded someplace about an hour outside of Oslo. We'd been touring for about eleven hours by that point, and we were exhausted and cranky. We got on the bus and drove for maybe two minutes when the people at the front started calling out to the driver in Norwegian. He'd left the luggage port wide open, so he had to stop to close it. We drove about two blocks on, and the driver started to say a few words about the area over the PA system while he was simultaneously trying to turn the corner. That's when it happened. He hit a guy on a motorcycle. We were in the back of the bus, so we couldn't really see what happened. All I know is that the driver got off the bus for a bit, then came back on to say that we'd be delayed because the police and an ambulance were coming. I was able to get a glimpse of the injured man, and he was definitely hurt, but not in a way that seemed horribly serious (for as much as the untrained naked eye can determine such a thing, that is). That was a relief to me. We didn't have to wait for long, and before we knew it, we were moving again--and moving really fast, too. Not long after we got started again, the driver braked really hard and fast, and we could see another motorcyclist turning the corner ahead of us. He'd clearly almost hit him, too. I find that I think a lot in newspaper headlines in moments that frighten me. Here's what I was thinking then: "Drunken Norway in a Nutshell Bus Driver Kills Tourists in Crash." Happily, I lived to tell.

We got to Oslo ahead of schedule--probably because the crazy driver was speeding. Before we started the tour, my friend Dwight had referred to it as the Norway with a Nut-Job tour, and the last leg lived up to that name. The scenery was breathtaking, and whether we wanted it or not, there was even a little drama thrown in for effect.

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