Day 143: Looking Back at Europe, and Forward to Asia

So, last night in Europe. Since I have a day left on my train pass I had considered taking the train to Lillehammer to check out the town and do some hiking, but it's a 2.5 ride each way and I decided that I didn't really want to spend 5 hours on a train with all the plane sitting coming up. Instead I walked around for the morning and spent the afternoon around the hostel, just sitting out in the grass and talking to people and playing a bit of frisbee golf on the course outside. Frisbee golf, for those of you not cool enough to be aware of it, is basically exactly what it sounds like. You have targets, and from a set starting position you need to get the frisbee into the target with as few throws as possible - just like golf. I didn't have my camera with me today, but here's a picture from yesterday to give you the idea.

Since my day was pretty uneventful, I'll instead talk about some more general things regarding my trip. In many ways, Europe, for me, was about history, while Asia will more be about culture. That's not to say Europe doesn't have interesting culture, or Asia interesting history, but European culture is a lot closer to North America, and Asian history isn't something I grew up studying and so it's less meaningful to me. After 4.5 months of travelling, here's what my TripAdvisor app on Facebook looks like:

It's a pretty good first pass, but there were a lot of things I couldn't fit in as well. Even among other backpackers travelling around Europe my trip gives me a bit of extra cred because of the length (and how little I'm carrying) but more than once people said it was a bit sad because I'd see everything and have nothing to come back for. Seriously?? First of all, most of the places I visited I'd happily return to, and I was mostly just seeing a city or two, leaving huge areas totally unexplored. My biggest regret is that I didn't get more hiking and nature in. There are just so many famous, important cities in Europe that I didn't want to miss, and it's a lot of extra effort to plan going to some remote area for hiking than to get to a major city and find accomodations there. I think Asia will be a lot better for this sort of thing, since I'm seeing fewer countries and spending more time in each I'll have more chance to get away to some nature - plus I'm doing a few tours that are specifically structured to get out away from the cities. Here is a list of some of the places I missed in Europe that I most want to come back for (seriously people, if somebody is going, let me know - I'll find a way to make it work!):
1) Southern Italy (Naples, Pompeii, Sicily)
2) Croatia (Dubrovnik, Split, Plitvice Lakes)
3) Slovenia (Ljuljana, Bled Lake)
4) Western Russia (Moscow, St. Petersburg)
5) Baltic / Eastern Europe (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine)
6) Southern France + Barcelona
7) Bosnia (Sarajevo)
8) Fjords of Western Norway
9) More Greek Islands (Crete, in particular)
10) Southern / Central Germany (Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, and some of the famous Bavarian castles)


I've had a few people ask about the status of my visas in Asia, and I'll explain the current situation a little. My hope was to get the visas in some country in Europe - but that was simply impossible. After dozens of emails to different consulates, embassies and 3rd party visa companies, my only choices seem to be going to Bangkok, going to Hong Kong or flying home to Canada. All of those options are headaches, since all my plane tickets were booked and cannot be cancelled or skipped, and both Hong Kong and Bangkok were after the countries I needed the visas for. I figured out a way to get to Hong Kong for 14 days before those countries for as little extra cost and hassle as possible, but obviously those 14 days have to come out of somewhere else, so unfortunately Taiwan has been mostly dropped. I still have to go to Taiwan (can't miss the flights I booked, remember) but now it's for 2 nights, and really only one full day instead of the original 10. The other days are coming from South Korea, but I'll still have 2 weeks there, so I'm not as upset about that.
Assuming the emails I've received are correct, and the paper work I do is correct, it takes up to 5 working days for each visa, although I might be able to accelerate that with an extra fee. It should be doable in 14 days, but obviously I'll feel a lot better once that entire episode is done with. I'm getting the China visa first, since that's the more important one for me. If something goes wrong and it takes longer, I'll have another chance to get the India one later on.

Day 142: Oslo

After doing some research I came to the conclusion that there wasn't really much specific things I cared about seeing in Oslo. That isn't to say that I wasn't interested in the city - there just weren't any specific sights I felt I had to see, so I had a lot of freedom to just explore. It helped that today was a beautiful day for once, so I was quite content spending the day walking around.

My hostel is on the north side of the city, so I started off by walking downtown and looking around a few of the shopping areas. I worked my way to the harbor and checked out the port. There is a lot of construction going on in the city and there were a lot of fancy new offices and apartments going up.

I wasn't specifically looking for street art, but some of the usuals - Alice Pasquini and C215 had been through recently, probably together since their stencils were always close to each other.

Another place worth mentioning is a toy store I came across, called Riktige Leker. I don't know if it was typical of Norweigan toy stores, but the front windows had massive displays of little figurines all in the same scale - sort of the modern day equivelant of army men I guess, only larger and much more detailed, and ranging from fairy princesses to fantasy warriors to normal animals to hybrid dinosaur men. The range was impressive, and if I had room to carry them I definitely would have bought a few - kid's toys or not. I just like toys that encourage imagination - and these ones looked really cool on top of that.

Then it was back up north past the castle and to the Vigeland Sculpture Park, which was one of the few things I felt I had to see. I'm not sure if anybody else has heard of it before, but it's reputation preceded it for me, and it's reputation is...well...that it's a bit strange. The park contains over 200 granite and bronze sculptures made by Gustav Vigeland, and all of the sculptures are of nude people. That in itself isn't terribly strange, since there are an awful lot of nude sculptures in Europe, but these sculptures get a bit weird. Easier to show than explain. Things start off simply, with sculptures of people standing there, or hugging, or a woman raising a baby.

But Gustav isn't content with just the peaceful bits of humanity. Some of the sculptures start to get more aggressive and and violent.

Now, I'm not an expert in interpreting sculpture, but at the very least I think it's safe to say that man is punting and flinging babies. And it gets weirder. The centerpiece of the garden is a monolith carved out of a single giant piece of granite, surrounded by smaller granite sculptures.

The monolith is a mass of entangled bodies, reaching up into the sky.

When the Museum of Archaeology in Athens lent a sculpture of Zeus to a museum in United States the public outcry at its nudity was so strong that the museum dressed it in clothes for the duration of its visit - for some reason I don't think they'd think too highly of this park.

I can't remember anything else too noteworthy so I'll stop there. Tomorrow is my last full day in Europe, and what I do for it depends on the weather. I'll try to squeeze a post in tomorrow with some information on what's to come next as well.