When I was in Spain, back in 1992, I wrote everything I was seeing down in a notebook and composed long, musing, lyrical posts at night, in an attempt to synthesize all the images (fireflies in the sky above the Alhambra, for example, or puddles drying on the cobbles of the Moorish quarter) and smells (the lemon-and-bleach freshness of laundry drying in the courtyard outside my guest house window) and sensations (the brutal chill of the shower I took in the sunlit bathroom—cold water only, as I couldn’t afford warm). I wonder now how many of my memories of Spain exist solely because I wrote them down.
As I sat on the train from Bergen to Oslo, I thought about trying to set down some of what I was seeing. I didn’t. And now that I want to craft a long, musing, lyrical post about the journey, a mere few days later, I’m casting about looking for a way to start. And failing.
So I think I’ll just upload some photos and hope they speak (mostly) for themselves.
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This is what the beginning of Bergen-Oslo looked like.
There are no photos of the fjords we saw mere moments after the train set off, because we saw them only intermittently, thanks to a series of tunnels. Understandable tunnels—without them it would probably have taken hours and hours longer than it did to get around the mountains. (And it did take hours.)
Once up and out of the fjords, we found ourselves in Troll Country, made all the more mysterious by the blurring of the rain on the train windows…
People apparently live among the trolls...
After much lonely chugging through this barrenness, we found trees once more. The mystery, though, did not abate.
Photo taken using the wrong setting.
Photo taken using the right setting.
And then more trees.
And green. And sheep!
Yes, there are sheep in this photo.
We were supposed to change trains in Hallsberg—except that our first train was late, and there was no Hallsberg (at least not according to Peter’s various GPS-having devices). We ended up in Stockholm, where train #2 had been cancelled—at which point we got on a bus that took us to a different railway station, at which point we got on train #2. By the time train #3 became involved, just after midnight. I had no desire to take any more photos.
Here, though, is about all we saw of Stockholm.
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It’s now 11 p.m. in Uppsala, and we’re setting the alarm for far too early. We’ll be home tomorrow. Home, where my new job awaits, and a new class of creative writing students—and a daughter who’ll be turning 13 any minute.
Happy Thanksgiving.
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