Norway Cruise

This is really just a supplemental Molli blog to accompany my huge ongoing rant over on the website.

There were, once again, a godawful lot of pictures taken, and I’m trying to limit myself to those that are especially interesting. The dozen photos looking back at Copenhagen as we pulled out of port Sunday afternoon are a good example of what’s not interesting.

So let’s start things off in the cabin. This is what it looked like a few moments after we checked in:

The couch Trine’s sitting on folded out into a nice bed. There’s another bed across from the couch, and two more higher up. So I guess it was basically a cabin for four. It was certainly roomy enough for us. Molli slept in the “basket” of her pram on the floor of the cabin (the pram frame and wheels were locked up each night at the service desk for safety). The strange irony of our cabin was that the bathroom was actually bigger than our bathroom at home… that is, the shower was distinct from the toilet and sink area. What luxury! I realize that might be very impressive to most of you, but it was a great joy for us.

Trine had made reservations at one of the ship’s gourmet restaurants for Sunday evening, just an hour or so after our departure. We took the very early seating because we didn’t think we’d feel right eating a meal on one deck while Molli slept unguarded on another. Molli was tired and fidgety from the outset, so Trine gave her a stalk of celery to nosh on.

The nice thing about the celery is that it came from a bloody mary we’d had before dinner. The celery had a soothing effect on Molli—you can see her dropping off into a drunken stupor here:

(Yes, yes, for God’s sake, of course I’m kidding. It really was a bloody mary celery stalk, but the girl didn’t get drunk or anything.)

Molli got crazy cranky as we ate, so we had a lovely meal served by tuxedo-clad staff and shared a nice bottle of wine without sitting together until the very end, when we were finally able to stop taking turns walking our hysterical daughter and she passed out in the pram—way over at the maitre-d’s station, far away from us. (We did have our monitor along, though.) By the end of the meal we were completely wiped out. We were all three down in the cabin and asleep by about nine o’clock.

And this is what we woke up to:

Norwegian fjords gliding by us, ghostly beautiful in the chilly morning fog.

The thing is, though, as beautiful as they are, the hundred pictures I have look pretty much alike. Many of you have seen coastal Maine on a foggy winter morning. This part of Norway wasn’t much different. (The fabulous fjords, in which whole mountainsides plunge into the water beside you, are on the west coast of Norway.)

We deboarded in Oslo at about 9:30. Our misadventures are pretty well chronicled on the Almanac, but I invested that account with a certain amount of hyperbole. Bad as Oslo was, it wasn’t that bad. And Molli enjoyed it just fine.

…I really wasn’t exaggerating about the number of government buildings under renovation…

…or the stern appearance of “The Castle” (that’s all it was called on any map or guide: Slottet. “The Castle.” We assumed the royal family lived there.

I got a picture of Molli and me outside the closed Ibsen museum, which will make a nice companion piece to the shot of me and Molli outside H.C. Andersen’s closed museum in Odense from our trip to Skagen last summer. If I can get a shot of the two of us outside a closed Stravinsky museum, we’ll have the Scandinavian Closed Museums of Great Writers triptych. (I’ve got shots of us at Kierkegaard’s, Andersen’s, and Niels Bohr’s graves at Assistens, but that’s not the same.)

I editorialized in the picture of Ibsen’s statue on the Almanac. Here’s a better angle.

And here’s an artsy-fartsy shot of the Norwegian parliament, which was on the opposite end of the giant central square from The Castle. The Norwegian parliament is called the Storting, which very literally means “Big Thing.” (The Danish parliament, you may remember, is the Folketing, or “People’s Thing.”) The name of the streets around this central square is “Big Thing Street,” which is about the finest street name I’ve ever come across.

Oh… and the harbor was prettier than I let on in the Almanac.

Molli was tired when we got back to the ship, so we brought her down to the ship’s spa in her pram and we enjoyed a jacuzzi while she looked on from her perch in the pram.

The ship pulled out of Oslo at 5pm. We had a couple of beers and watched Oslo disappear behind us with great relief. Meanwhile, Molli took her first successive forward crawling movements right here on the floor (although in the photo she’s still in her pram):

You may wonder how I got that perspective, and why there’s a line running through the middle of the photo. It’s because I was standing about three feet away from Trine, shooting up into the mirrored ceiling. We hadn’t even noticed the mirror on the bar’s ceiling—Molli had.

That evening we had dinner in the big buffet dining room. Molli slept through the entire meal. The wine was better. The food was incredible. It was the most impressive seafood buffet I’ve ever seen. They had every kind of salmon, mackerel, and shrimp, two kinds of mussel, as well as crawdads and “maiden/virgin lobsters” (jomfruehummer). In the following picture you can see the “virgin lobster” with a shelled crawdad tail behind it for a sense of proportion. It was pretty tasty.

It was probably the best meal of the trip. Not only was Molli sleeping, not only was the wine great, not only was the food magnificent, but shit like this kept rolling by the window (we were seated at a window):

After dinner, though, we realized Molli had slept too long. We still had to give her one more meal before putting her down for the night, or she’d surely wake up in the middle of the night and wail for a meal. We decided to wake her up gently at about 7:30, feed her, let her digest for about half an hour, then take her down to the spa and give her a little swim to wipe her out. Then hopefully she’d be exhausted and ready for sleep as early as 9:30 or 10:00.

Our plan worked perfectly, and Molli slept straight through until 5am the next morning. So did we.

We had breakfast at the same table where we’d had dinner the night before.

By now, however, it was the coast of southern Sweden rather than the fjords of southern Norway rolling by the window, and the sun was rising over Sweden.

After Molli got fidgety in her high-chair we popped her into her pram, and she was as captivated by the morning sun as we were.

Not long after breakfast we pulled into Helsingborg, the Swedish city opposite the sound from Denmark’s Helsingor (Elsinore). I took the following two pictures from the same spot. The first is of the fortification in Helsingborg, Sweden; the second (taken at maximum zoom) is of Kronborg Slot (Hamlet’s castle) in Elsinore, Denmark.

Amazing to think how important this little stretch of water has been to northern European history: the two old castles staring eachother down tell the whole story.

The trip was pretty much over by then. Here’s a random shot of the lounge where we spent most of the last hour of the trip, for no apparent reason:

And here’s another shot of our cabin, easier to check out because there’s nothing in it.

Sic transit gloria Norway.