Groningen Hotels
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Let the adventures begin!!
Entry 11 of 29 | show all | print this entry |
Hello everyone!
Greetings from Groningen, Netherlands! Yep, that's right-- Christy Olsen has now made her first step onto the soil on continental Europe. :o) I am currently sitting in the cozy guest room above the garage at Jessica's aunt's house, writing to all of you as my dear Nat and Jess are sleeping soundly. It's nice to be in my own little place for a while-- just me, the computer, and my iPod. It's been a cultural adventure since leaving our Hamar, and honestly a bit overwhelming. I shall attempt to clearly and concisely document the past 52 hours in this blog post, but we'll see how far it goes.
About Thursday night...
Okay, my time in Norway has taught me a very valuable lesson about surviving in life: flexibility. Things don't go as planned, so learning how to adjust and adapt is a key to maintaining your sanity and the sanity of those around you. The reason for mentioning this is that we definitely had to make some changes to our travel itinerary, and the only way that we made it here to the Netherlands is by being flexible and open to crazy ideas! This weekend marks not only the halfway mark for our program (!!), but the commencement of our mid-semester break. Nat, Jess, and I have been planning this trip for a couple of weeks now, making plane tickets and hostel reservations. We found these great plane tickets from Oslo to Frankfurt, Germany, for the grand total of $30 USD per person, and figured that we could easily make the 9:25am flight. However, it became apparent to us on Wednesday that even if we took the earliest train from Hamar at 4:46am on Friday morning, we would not reach the Oslo Torp airport (which is conveiently located in Sandefjord, at least an hour and a half south of Oslo) in time. With no busses available and no friends to drive us, we realized that the only way to make this flight was to take the last train out of Hamar on Thursday night, spending the night in Sandefjord and going to the airport as soon as it opened on Friday morning. Not exactly an ideal situation, eh?
All in all, staying awake all night and walking around Sandefjord in the rain until 6am really was actually pretty fun. Sandefjord is a beautiful little town with a very impressive pedestrian street network, and right on the waters of the Sandefjordfjord (yep, two fjords). I was able to take some great night shots of the architecture, some interesting statues, and some pretty boats in the harbor. Around 5am, we were getting pretty cold and tired and hungry, and I've never been more thankful for my raincoat (for those of you who gave me graduation money a few years ago, thank you for keeping me dry in Norway as well as at home!) and the warmth of Nat and Jess to cozy up to. :o)
Wilkommen til Deutschland!
We could have taken a flight from Oslo Gardermoen (about 45 minutes from Hamar) to Amsterdam quite easily, but we wanted to make things a bit more exciting and complicated for us, so we flew into the Frankfurt Hahn airport. Like the Oslo Torp airport, the Frankfurt Hahn is located nowhere close to the city center of Frankfurt. Now I knew that Norway and Germany were going to be different, but I wasn't quite prepared for how different! The moment we stepped into the airport, we were assaulted with German souveniers, a multitude of cafes, and dirt. Yes, dirt. The clean lines of Scandinavian design and tidiness of virtually every building in Norway was replaced by dirty walls, decrepit buildings and an exponential increase in graffiti. I fell asleep on the 1.5 hour bus ride from the airport to the train station, but in the first few minutes of the ride I was able to notice the plain architecture and lack of color in the towns. Honestly, we were in Germany for only a few hours, so I'm not really qualified to make any true judgments. However, I was really sad by my first impressions of the country. After three years of enthusiastically studying German in high school, I created this idea of Germany in my mind with high expectations, just like I had for Norway. Norway exceeded my expectations; Germany failed to meet them. And as I watched the German towns and countryside pass by my train window, all I could think about was how devestating the Nazi era, World War II, and the years following the war were to this place, to these people, to the spirit of this nation. I learned later that the area didn't really recover after they were almost completely destroyed by the war, even though it happened over sixty years ago. It was humbling, to say the least.
Meeting Aunt Addy
After switching trains a couple of times, we finally arrived in the first location for our trip: Groningen, Netherlands. A bit unexpected perhaps, but we are here because Jessica's aunt Addy Johnson! Addy is one cool woman: after growing up in the little town of Oak Harbor, WA, this woman earned her PhD in psychology from Purdue, eventually divorced three times, and moved to the Netherlands to teach at the university here in Groningen. She's written several articles and books, featured many times in magazines and in the news, and pretty much a highly intelligent and well-respected individual. It's interesting how European she is in terms of clothing, house decor, foods to prepare, her attitude, especially when you consider her roots! A very interesting woman, and a fascinating look at the Europeanization of an American.
Today, Addy and her partner Edmund took the three of us on a tour of the countryside, stopping first in a beautiful little Dutch town, which is set up like Williamsburg but less commercialized. The Dutch countryside is really quite lovely and fascinating, especially considering that if all the pumps stopped working, over a third of the country would be underwater in two days. The Dutch have reclaimed the land from the sea bit by bit over the centuries, and it is really something to see. Now after being here, it is no mystery to me why the Dutch settled in northern Washington and made tulip farms there! The houses and architecture style is very different from Norway, with its thatched roofs and stucco design. There are still lots of windmills here, except they are used to pump oil and natural gas in addition to pumping water. I tried to take lots of pictures of it today, so I attempt to post them on my Flickr site as soon as I can so you can see the differences!
After that brief stop in the Dutch town, we continued on into Germany to the charming little town of OIdenburg. It has some great art museums, a palace (but not Neuschwanstein-quality), and other various points of cultural interests. I could bore you with what we did today, but I'd rather not. The biggest challenge for me in Germany is the language barrier. Here I am with three years of German under my belt, and only now do I realize how much it has completely escaped me. I had to think really hard how to even say "danke" to someone. To think that I used to read the news in German four years ago! Just more incentive for me to keep using my Norwegian.
So this is really a terrible blog post. I am going to end it now, and I will aim for a better one when I can. Tomorrow we are going to Amsterdam (hooray!), so I will hopefully get some good rest so I can focus on writing a better one later. The Netherlands is quite a beautiful place, and I am so lucky to get to be here right now! Hope all is well with each and every one of you, and I would love to hear from you if you get the chance!
Lots of love from the Netherlands,
Christy :o)
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