Koselig

There are many small things I like about living in Norway. One is the fact that on many evenings, a very eager and nerdy group of people gather to swing dance outside at the wharf where my ferry lands:

I've been working a few evenings over the past few weeks as we make the transition to juggling two full time teaching jobs in our family, so I've been seeing them quite a bit. It never fails to make me feel very happy to see these folks tearing up the boards outside. There's some cool retro style going on too. Some are really talented, others not as much, but all are enthusiastic and joyous.

FOer - ferdigstilte objekter

I wore my Bulgarian Pleated Skirt to work for the first time today. This has to be one of my all time favorite projects. Here's a snapshot from my office:

Loved wearing it, and even though it got dripping wet in the torrential downpour we had today, the fact that it is wool meant that it remained totally wearable, and dried quickly. I'm just so stinkin' pleased with it, and (even) really like the way it looks on me.

I haven't really said much about the small travel knitting project I've been working on in between stints of slogging through the Still Light tunic. It's Nessie from Danish knitter Julia Zahle's blog, Aalerusen. I used one skein of Kauni Effektgarn, and am relatively pleased with the result:

I worked on this on the Peer Gynt pilgrimage and on the trip to Helsinki. It was dead easy (just garter stitch and tons of short rows), and fairly striking in its tendril like form. I think mine looks like a sea slug.

While in Finland I bought 8 skeins of this yarn so that I can make a Graystone tunic:

Turns out I kind of bombed on my yarn purchase. I went out of my way to go to the huge Lankamaailma  yarn store in a suburb of Helsinki, while right on the Esplanade (which I passed every day from my hotel to the conference) was a Finnish handicraft store that sold a similar, but much more aesthetically pleasing (and much more expensive!) yarn in a gorgeous array of colors. I kind of wish I hadn't gone there, as I definitely experienced buyers remorse. But now I know--live and learn. If I'm ever in Helsinki again I'm heading straight for the handicraft store to buy some Paksu pirkkalanka. And I do think the yarn I ended up with will work out well for what I have in mind.

Finland!

It has been extremely hectic around here. Both E and KE started school last Thursday, and then last weekend E came down with a nasty cold. I started school on Monday, so already our first week of having two of us working full time we were in a childcare crisis. It would have been okay except that I had committed to attending a conference in Helsinki Wed-Friday of this week, which left KE in the lurch. Luckily his new boss was very understanding, and he made it work despite me jetting off.

The conference was really interesting. I didn't know any of the other participants, and it had been 15 years since I was last in Finland, so at times it was a little disorienting, though mostly just interesting and enjoyable. It's great to be home though! I'll post more about it with pictures when my energy level is back up.

Valfart II

During the after-performance conversation, someone mentioned having driven past the "Her trefte Per Gynt Bøygen" (Per Gynt met the Bøyg here) memorial stone on their drive up to Venabu from the north east. I had read about the stone in Mørkhagen's book, and have been dying to see it, so I made a spontaneous decision to try to find it myself, despite not having a map of the area with me. In the morning I checked out the maps in the hotel reception to get a rough idea, but could find no concrete indication of where the stone lies.

I took off in a northeasterly direction across the Rondane mountains any way, and was richly rewarded with spectacular views and almost no other vehicles on the roads. It was so beautiful and desolate crossing the plateau, and then the drive down into what becomes Østerdalen was steep and windy and beautiful in its own way. I drove to Enden and then into Atanbrua, where I stopped at a store to get directions. Unfortunately none of the staff there had ever heard of the stone, and the woman I spoke with the most seemed a little offended that I would be asking about Peer Gynt, since he "belongs" over in Gudbrandsdalen. Apparently Knut Hamsun did some writing in Atnabru, and of course it's also where the painter Harald Sohlberg did his famous painting, Vinternatt i fjellene.

With no more guidance than that I decided to make my way northward toward Folldal, figuring that the stone had to be somewhere along that stretch of road. Again, it was a beautiful drive along Atnasjøen, a long, riverlike lake with a marsh area at the northern end. The first thing I came upon was the Sohlberg viewpoint, which was apparently where he did the painting. It was, predictably, spectacular:

 What I hadn't expected, though, was how cool the viewpoint structure itself was. It's a very modern but organic and sinewy design in concrete that snakes around the trees:

The architect is Karl-Viggo Hølmebakk. There's an article about it in Norwegian with more pictures here.

Encouraged by how cool this spot was, I forged on, still not knowing whethere the memorial stone was going to show up. After a few kilometers I pulled off into a roadside stop with a sign and map, but again there wasn't any information. About to give up and in need of a bathroom break, I thought I'd just go a couple more kilometers and see. Much to my delight, I came upon another supermodern rest stop with a very elegant set of bathrooms and big maps and information posters on the local trails:

I went to the bathroom, looked around but didn't find any info on the memorial stone. The area along the river looked really pretty though, so I decided to take a little walk along the river up to the bridge across to the trailhead. It was so much like parts of western Washington, along the Nooksack river of my childhood. The river bank combined sand and round stones, and the colors of the forest, water and sky all felt just right. When I got to the bridge I noticed a standing stone, but it didn't have an inscription, so I turned onto the bridge and walked across. It was pretty muddy on the other side (duh, it's a marsh), so I didn't do much more than turn around and walk back across. As I was walking across I noticed a really cool looking farm on the hill on the other side, so I walked past the standing stone to get a better angle for a picture:

I snapped this picture then turned back around to head back to the car, and what do you know, this cultural wonder appeared right in front of me:

 I can't explain  how elated I was to have finally located it, or how hilarious I find it. Think about it; it's a memorial sign erected to commemorate the (fictional) meeting between the (fictional) "historical" Per Gynt (the legendary figure upon whom Henrik Ibsen based his fictional Peer Gynt) and the (equally fictional) supernatural figure of the Bøyg. It's even funnier that the marker had apparently been moved here from another site that was presumed to be less authentic. Oh brother!

Unfortunately, the stone has taken some pretty bad damage, and is no longer totally legible. Bummer, as it really is one of the quirkiest and coolest things I've ever seen.

Valfart I

For years I have been meaning to attend an outdoor performance of Ibsen's Peer Gynt at Gålåvatnet. It's an annual event that has been going on for decades. This year I finally managed to get my act together; I went this week and it was such a fun trip. KE refused to go, since for him it would just be something related to my work (?!), so I decided to make a quick and dirty and super efficient trip out of it by myself. I found a package deal from Venabu "mountain hotel" that included a ticket, a room, meals, and a guided bus ride to and from the performance. What's more, for this particular performance the guide was going to be a guy called Sverre Mørkhagen, who has written a book about the "historical" person upon whom Ibsen based his character. I have quite a few bones to pick with Mørkhagen's book, so I was really curious to meet him.

It was a long drive up to Ringebu in Gudbrandsdalen, made longer by massive construction along the E6 and pouring rain all the way until about Lillehammer. I tried to take it easy and stop a few times, most notably in Espa, where they claim to sell the world's best buns:

Boller are of course a mainstay of the Norwegian diet, and probably one of the main reasons obesity is on the rise here.

I got to Ringebu well before check-in time so I decided to drive a little further to a town called Vinstra, which is the main center for the Per (not Peer) Gynt Festival. That was a disappointment, as there really wasn't anything going on other than the tourist office, which sells t-shirts, books, and gives out lots of brochures. This is apparently a very geographically diverse event, and you have to be at the right place at the right time to catch something; you can't just roll into town and dive into a festival atmosphere.

So naturally I figured it was time to head up to the hotel and maybe get in a little walk before the day's events started in earnest. Here's the hotel from the back. Notice the slate roof. Love those so much, and they're all over in Gudbrandsdalen.

The hotel is at about 930 meters above sea level, so it's right at the tree line, and in the middle of a spectacular high mountain plateau. There are dozens of cabins scattered around in a huge basin surrounded by peaks:

This is a pretty open area with a bunch of dirt roads and a lot of privately owned cabins, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that even here the characteristic trail markers maintained by the Norwegian Tourist Association were all over:

I've always loved these cheerful red T's smeared in thick paint on rocks along the way. They're pretty frequent, as bad weather can completely disorient a hiker in no time.

I walked for just an hour, then did some writing and knitting and took a little nap before dinner. I showed up at the dining hall five minutes before the doors were to open and was shocked to find fifty people standing outside waiting, including two women a mere 2 inches from the doors. They all appeared to be over 60, so I stuck out like a sore thumb in my youthfulness (!) and non-couple-ness.

The guided bus tour was an enormous disappointment. The guide did nothing but summarize the plot of Peer Gynt, as if all 55 people on that bus had never read the text before. He was late, said next to nothing about the stuff that's in his book that he's supposedly an expert on, and he droned on about the plot, forgetting the names of the characters, messing up quotations when he tried to produce them (from memory?), and in general gave a really unprofessional lecture. Not recommended!

Thankfully, the performance itself lived up to all the hype. My only criticism is that the sound system was almost unbearable at times --they had the sound cranked up and their was weird feedback between the actors' voices (which I could hear in the 8th row) and the speakers (which were at times deafening). Oh, and the fact that the actors playing Peer and Mor Aase screamed the entire first scene of act I, but then they all seem to do that. I would so love to see a Peer Gynt where the director attempted to do something innovative with the aggression in that scene. Could it, for example, be played quietly, with clenched teeth? Or anything, really, other than the screaming.

But all in all, I was totally won over by the charm of the peformance. The trolls and especially Den Grønnkledde were fantastic, and Solvejg's voice seemed to fill the entire mountains. So beautiful. I didn't take many pictures, but here are two:

This is, of course, the arrival of the trolls. And then here is Peer in an exchange with Anitra in act four:

 

The palm tree and cadillac and ukulele were hilariously incongruous in the beautiful mountain landscape.

Thankfully the tour guide stayed quiet for most of the ride back to the hotel. There was an hour-long conversation over a late night meal. By then I mostly just ignored what he said.

I'll post tomorrow about the return trip, which is some ways was even more exciting (to me) and fun (to me) than the trip up and the performance.