Day 2 and 3 – Copenhagen to Oslo

Day 2 – Thursday, August 30 – Copenhagen and Boarding the Emerald Princess

It's been two busy days since I blogged last, so trying to catch up now. As I write this it is 10:00 PM on Friday and I am sitting on the balcony off our stateroom with a glass of cabernet and a full moon illuminating the Baltic Sea as we make our way from Oslo to Aarhus, Denmark. What could be better? OK, it could be a little warmer, but not complaining. Unfortunately, as I was told, the internet on board is very slow, yet very expensive (40 cents per minute). So it is likely that my blog will be mostly text this time, and the pictures will have to catch up with the text after I get home.

Wednesday morning in Copenhagen we arose, somewhat reluctantly at 8:30, had an outrageously expensive breakfast at the hotel (wait, I said I wouldn't whine, didn't I?) and headed off on foot to the center of the city, hoping to get in a walking tour with a pretend Hans Christian Anderson that I had read about in Rick Steve's Scandinavian Guide book. But we got there about 10:35 and he had already left with his group.

Hans Christian Anderson (not!)

I said, “No problem, we can just do the self-guided walking tour from the book, so we set off for the Town Hall, where the self-guided tour begins. As we approached the square, I saw him, dressed in a purple top hat and tails, leading a group into the town hall. “C'mon, Karen!” I said, “We can catch him!” So we double timed (well, maybe one-and-a-half timed) it into the hall and joined his tour.

He is a delightful fellow, an American named Richard Karpay who now lives in Copenhagen and has been doing this for many years; He mixes historical tales about the city and Denmark in general as he points out famous landmarks on the walk. The Danes are quite different from Americans, and even different from most European cultures. Some examples:

• Bicycles are the most common means of transportation.
• Danes not only love their queen, they love the government! (There is no Tea Party here!)
• They are quite happy with their life, and the pursuit of money is less important than a good life with a good job. There is much less salary differentiation between top management and the lowest laborer than in the US, minimum wage $17.
• Unemployment is well under 4% and to be unemployed more than six months is rare.
• They are taxed at about 50% of their income, and a hidden sales tax of 25% means that they forfeit about 60% of their income to the government. And they don't mind!
• In exchange they get: free medical care, a retirement pension, free schooling at all levels through Ph.D., six weeks paid vacation, maternity leave for both husband and wife, excellent cultural environment.
• Although 80+ percent claim to be Lutheran, about 2% attend church. It is a humanistic society in which religion plays little part.
• No one is permitted to have a weapon, including police, and crime is almost non-existent except for petty theft.
• Women have totally equal rights and earn the same pay as men. Women make up nearly 40 per cent of the parliament.
• The only fly in the ointment is immigration, especially from the middle east. New immigrants are slow to adopt Danish ways, and Islamic traditions are anathema to women's rights, for example. Once open, immigration is now tightening up dramatically.

So we learned more about the Danes in two hours than most Americans know about them in a lifetime. But now it's time to check out and board our ship!

The Emerald Princess is a huge ship, carrying 3,000 passengers. The check-in process was amazingly swift! I have not been on Princess before, but I remember from past cruises experiencing exasperatingly long lines to check in and board the ship. In this instance, we were in our room ten minutes after we got out of the taxi! Our stateroom is the size of a small hotel room, but that is great compared to most cruise cabins. And the balcony is delightful!

Karen on our balcony - leaving port of Copenhagen

After the obligatory life jacket exercise, we settled in and looked forward to our first dinner. The food was fantastic, the service was good, but we were seated at a table for four and the other couple apparently had switched tables to be with friends. I requested a move to be seated with some other folks, and that will take place tomorrow (Saturday). For me, getting to know other people is a part of the experience.

Day 3 – Friday, August 31 – Oslo

Breakfast in our room – delightful! The ship is docked in Oslo now and we explored a bit of the city on our own, especially the Town Hall, an absolutely beautiful building only completed in 1950. Murals on every wall tell the stories of Norway's history and culture. If you have ever watched the presentation of the Nobel Peace Prize, it took place in the main hall of the building, a cavernous room. (The other Nobel prizes for physics, etc. are presented in Stockholm, by the way. Nobel was Swedish, but at the time of his life, Norway and Sweden were one country.

The history of Norway is interesting. For a good part of their history, they were a part of Denmark. At one point in the 17^th century King Christian, after rebuilding Oslo after a terrible fire that destroyed the entire city, renamed the city Christiania, after himself, of course. The name Oslo was only restored in 1925. Norway got independence from Denmark in the 19^th century, only to then become a part of Sweden. In 1905 it finally got its permanent independence upon an amicable separation of Norway and Sweden. But it had to suffer through Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945. Once they had their independence, they did not have a royal family, so they imported a prince from Denmark to be their king, and his descendants have formed the Norwegian royal family since, well loved by the Norwegian people.

In the afternoon we went on a bus excursion to see three of the most famous sites in Oslo. Our first stop was the Viking Ship Museum, where several viking ships have been partially restored. They are magnificent vessels, but hard to imagine them crossing the Atlantic, but they certainly did, settling in Iceland, Greenland, and briefly in Vinland (Newfoundland). A couple of my favorite beliefs about Vikings turn out to be inaccurate myths. First, they did not wear helmets with horns! Second, they by and large did not rape and pillage, but were primarily traders. I'll never read Hagar the Horrible the same again.

Viking Ship - I guess the Viking (Karen) should have been in the picture.

The most fascinating part of our trip so far was our next stop at Vigeland Park. Gustav Vigeland was a sculptor who convinced the Oslo city council to pay all his working and living expenses to create a park with hundreds of his statues, almost all of which are studies of the human form in life situations. Children were often part of the statues, usually in playful and loving scenes with their parents. None of the statues have clothes, as Vigeland said, “If I clothe them, I fix them at a particular point in time – I want these statues to be timeless.“ It is an amazing park over which he had total control, including the landscaping.

Our final stop was at their ski jump. For me this was mostly a big yawn. It is an impressive engineering achievement, but would not have been on my list. But the Norwegians are extremely proud of it, built for the 2011 world ski jump championships. Skiing is to Norwegians like baseball is to Americans. The jump is high on a hill overlooking Oslo and the Oslofjord, a beautiful view. I wondered if this is the hill where the Norwegian Lutheran pastor was inspired to write the words to “How Great Thou Art,” but never got a chance to find out.

What a beautiful setting Oslo is. It is at the end of a 50 mile or so fjord, with green forests and colorful houses. Leaving port was a glorious experience, as the sun set over the hills as we made our way along the fjord to the Baltic. Next stop, Aarhus.