Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the premiere edition of my newest travel blog intended to document my adventures and adjustments into Norwegian society. For those that are not up to date, I am an American of Japanese ancestory who has recently moved from the San Francisco bay area to Trondheim, Norway to marry my dearest life companion, Ingrid. I guess I shall write more about this back story later for those that may be interested.
Today, in my inaugural post, I wanted to mostly write about my journey to Norway and my impressions here on my return (second viewing of Norway and the city Trondheim).
I had this sense of dread when I purchased my ticket on United Airlines last month. United once known in the US as the"big" air carrier along with American has in recent fallen on hard times. With the downturn in the economy and internal re-structuring, one heard these horror stories about the austerity measures imposed mostly on passengers. Baggage fees. No more blankets or pillows. No meals, unless you pay for food. No entertainment, unless you pay for it. No magazines. No seat reclining. No toilet use, unless you pay for it.
I am relieved (in more ways than one) to report that most of these are not true. You do get to recline your seat and listen to 8 channels of tinny, crappy music on the headsets. I picked channel 4, "classical" and listened to 6 hours of classical warhorses and transcripted arrangements of the type that people who really did not like classical music would listen to just to fall asleep. How many different ways can they play Pachelbel's Canon?
And BTW, we were permitted the use of the restroom free of charge still. But, that largely did not matter to me because I spent the majority of the United Airlines flight absolutely parched and severely de-hydrated. Mistake one (my fault) was that I neglected to refill my water bottles post-security. Secondly, since my flight took off at 7:24am and I must be at the airport 2 hours early for international flights, I had started my day about noon the previous day. So I was exhausted. Consequently, I was just dead asleep once the plane took off and I missed the first beverage service entirely. By the time I awoke, the cart was 20 rows down the plane with an impatient mob waiting to go use the restroom beyond the beverage cart, so I decided it was not worth the trouble to go down and beg for the drink that I was entitled to. Instead, I mostly slept, faintly hearing Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers crooning "Cool, Clear Water" and dreaming of crossing the great salt flats of Utah.
My major source of dread was really about my first layover/transfer at Newark; New Jersey. I know that just entering the greater NYC airspace meant a 30% chance of delays, which as expected occurred. Due to weather in New Jersey, our flight was delayed an hour and a half to relieve the congestion. What this meant for those of us whose final destination was not "Joisey" that we would likely miss our connecting flights to Europe or wherever, and be stuck in a hotel in the Garden State overnight. Oy.
Luckily, our gallant pilot seemed to have a good service sense, and ignoring the instructions not to stack went ahead and found a flight plan which got us to Newark only about 15 minutes late, making up over an hour of delay. He even asked the passengers who were not trying to catch an immediate connection to remain seated so that those of us who did had an inkling of a chance to make our planes.
It just so happened that this little old lady who was seated behind me was also traveling to Stockholm (the next leg of my journey). So from the moment the captain turned off the seatbelt sign, we became compadres in this limping three-legged race, dragging our hand baggage across the United terminal onto a train to another terminal..... begging our way through the priority security line..... and then a quarter mile final sprint to the waiting SAS flight. At one point, the lady's baggage handle twisted and her rolly-bag fell.... and from a dramatic scene right out of a war movie, she says, "Go on! Go on without me! YOU can still make it!" I am happy to say that we both made it with just a minute to spare.
Now, compared to the "steerage" like conditions aboard the United Airlines flight, Scandinavian Airways is the polar opposite. Hot towels, ample beverages, fantastic FREE meals, snacks in between, blankets, pillows, just exemplary service too. My first big surprise was as I searched for my seat and 200 angry Scandinavians were giving me the staredown for being so inconsiderate as to delay their flight was that.... 28a, 29a, 30a.... ack!!! there was no 31a!! (swell.... i thought) Instead there was a big restroom where the seat should have been. Beyond the restroom was this rather large void where an emergency exit was, and on the tailward end of this void, was my seat! a pair of seats really. But it was like a throne with all the leg room that I could want and compared to the UAL flight that I had been on, it seemed like First Class. Oh man, it was posh! Great food, easy access to restrooms, luxuriant leg room. I started by slamming down 4 cans of Coke.
Do you know how you get that sense when you are around people not of your kind? It's not just the language, but the mannerisms, the eating habits, the clothing, and the haircuts. For one thing, this group of people traveling to Sweden appeared to be from some kind of old time rock'n'roll reunion tour. There was a dude that looked like Sammy Hagar, and another lady that looked like just like Bjorn Ulvaeus from ABBA if he was a woman. A bunch of big rocker teXens with long hair that looked like roadies. Looking at them another way, they sort of reminded me of a viking crew, sitting down at their benches to row their long ship.
I don't know if it had to do with the new equipment used by SAS, an Airbus 330, or perhaps technology had changed, but I don't recall flying at 39,000 feet before. It seemed extremely high. The exterior air temperature was an unimagineable -73F also. I was immediately reminded of Chuck Yeager and his test flights in the early days of the space programme. And thinking of Burt Rutan and his X Prize and what people will be paying Richard Branson for the privelege of reaching the edges of space, I felt like I was about halfway there already.
I noticed on the little GPS map that my plane flew somewhere between Trondheim and Bergen en route to Stockholm. It felt like I was backtracking to get to my final destination, which I was.
Listening to all the conversations and in-flight announcements in Swedish during the flight, I think that I have grasped an important concept in Swedish communication. One is to fill the lungs at the beginning of a sentence or paragraph... and even as you run out of air.... you sort of gasp or .... sigh... out the last part of your sentence, no matter how important it is. "Please fasten your seatbelts, put all seats and tray tables to their fully upright positions, turn off all electronic devices, please gather any materials that you may have brought with you, and (instead of taking a deep breath)....... fill out the customs form completely or you will be detained and tortured (as one final soft sigh). " I just noticed they did this over and over.
For those that love a good airport, count Stockholm's Arlanda as one of the best. It is a beautiful Scandinavian design airport with the building as much a work of art as anything else in the cavernous building. First of all, Arlanda is like a big shopping mall.... or... more aptly... like a big Ikea. Nice little shoppes and cafes line this boulevard of warm wood and exposed grey metal beams. The lines are clean.... cool... bespeaking efficiency. There is so much that they did right at this airport. The security and passport controls are efficient and friendly. The terminals are ingeniously double-decker so that large amounts of people can move, wait, or queue up without interfering or even seeing each other. The terminal was impressively a kilometer long with this wonderful hardwood floor. Even the air vents on the floor were made of wood (instead of a metal grate that one might expect elsewhere), and everything and anything that did not have to be solid was made of glass! counters, rails, partitions, the purgatory-like "smoking" room. The smoking area... hehe... was this little glass spheroid with an ash tray stand in the center of it. It clearly shows what the Swedes thought of smoking.
As much as I enjoyed Arlanda Airport and the shopping there, I must say, I thought that the food offered in Sweden was..... dreadful. I tried my best to keep an open mind and went from restaurant to restaurant, but nothing seemed appealing to me. Shrimp salad... bagel with tomato and egg.... smoked salmon (which I like!) served with tomatoes, cucumbers, and melon slices... ??? I will look into this further and maybe I hit them on a bad day, but what they had did not seem to be food to me.
Others seemed to be enjoying it though. Like I noticed a table of Germans who were enjoying a round of beers at 8:30 in the morning. There were some kids that were enjoying some pancakes. I noticed that there was all this really cool modern Swedish furniture in the center that was weirdly shaped and low to the floor, surrounded by "normal" tables and chairs. I semi-reclined in one of these Swedish chairs to enjoy my orange juice(s), but I was the only one sitting there. Everyone else was seated in the regular chairs.
When I finally boarded my plane to Trondheim, I was rested and calm. I felt like I was going back to something familliar. All the way along I had encountered mishaps but it seemed to work itself out anyway. Like for example, when I landed, my baggage did not come out of the baggage carousel. It was apparently lost But no sooner than I had gone to report it at "arrival service" my bag appeared on another flight (from Oslo) so no net harm done. I stepped onto the final bus to town, and I was home.
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