Last day of July..

FIRST: I've been fiddling with dates and times, to try to get the posts back in order. So you might find peerless prose below you haven't seen, underneath p/p you HAVE. Happy untangling!

~~~~~~~~
Last day of July, and we are having a major excavation of all our belongings, aiming to post a big heavy bundle home, the first boxed set of accumulations since we departed our home shores..

I am somewhat better today, although once again it is a late start. But we've achieved a lot without leaving the room - eaten, coffee-ed, pilled, washed, laundered, folded, fossicked, sorted, packed and re-packed. Determined that THREE purrfumes can go home. I would almost sob, except it's not really going to take me very long to acquire more, is it. No, not even a question.

There is a good feeling, to see the huge piles of meds slowly reducing as we guzzle them down every day. And I like knowing that we can ditch all the cold weather stuff at Helsinki, that should leave LOTS more room for spontaneous souvenir sampling.

I do hope I can find a wi-fi Net cafe soon, so I can get these various bits onto the blog. I'll get all out of kilter and you won'ts know where I is at!

Today brought to you by Lotte Lenya singing Kurt Weill on the darling iPod, the previously unidentified purrfume (Gucci, by Gucci!), and a rising sense of excitement about the boat trip. Yippee! T and S goes coastal!

~~~~~~~~~~

Those dang Viking gods have been at again. We achieved great things and very sore feet today - major post office operations (look out for small parcels and postcards, my dear ones), money exchanging (and we found a place that doesn't charge a fee! - I now have a zillion Norwegian kroner but I don't really know what they're worth, M keeps changing his mind about the maths and I haven't bothered to check have I..), found a laundry, found (after a PROLONGED STOMP AROUND A LOTTA COBBLESTONES) one of the two liquor stores here, only to discover it had closed 10 mins earlier buggerbuggerbugger ... went past the wool shop for some knitting needles and wool but it had closed- this northern summer midnight sun fools us easily into thinking it's been 4pm for half the day, only to find the good Burghers of Bergen have the gall to close up shop at 7pm!. How slack is that... where was I??...

Oh yes, M was fading fast so he came back to the room for a bit of non-B time. I stopped at the 'Bazaar' dress shop [where I was investigating cruise-ship formal wear the other day] and managed to bend my Visa card most successfully. I am now kitted up for anything short of a royal visitation, in which case I shall retreat to my room and knit.

Returning to our room, thinking happily of Netting and having some coffee, I find M looking hot and cross.. he needs some time out and is planning a Net fix over the road, via the pub. But oh bloodybotheringshit he suddenly grabs his jaw, and out comes a crown from a back tooth. Baaaaaaad news. We take deep breaths (the better to swear, my dear); then I stomp up to reception while he has his nervous breakdown in private. Jarle, the very helpful young man at the desk, searches for a dentist which is still open. No luck, and no luck finding an after-hours clinic either. Eventually we agree that we'll front up at 8am tomorrow, when someone can ring around and make an appointment for us. I hope we can get in somewhere quickly, it will be very VERY anxious-making for M to go on a boat trip for 6 days with a busted tooth. And who wouldn't be? The chance of it suddenly getting very painful is a nasty risk.

HOWEVER one good thing that comes from this is that Jarle confirms that this hotel does have wireless internet, so when I've typed this last bit I can load up several days worth of peerless prose, and gets myself back into date order.

Today brought to you by ow-de-cobblethrobbers, coffee, and a strong longing for chocolate.

Temporary outage

We had a very crap day getting to Bergen - an early start, a VERY hot train - the conductor just laughed when a fellow passenger asked about airconditioning, saying 'these trains were built in the 1980s'. Thanks, mate.

The train couldn't go all the way to Oslo cos of work on the line, so we were all offloaded onto buses. This was actually a merciful move, cos the bus had aircon. LOVELY. AND it meant we could move away from two loud, boring, opinionated Amurricans who spent the 5 hours on the train patronising the passengers they were seated with, by knowing more about Wimbledon than anyone else.

At the VERY DANG hot Oslo railway station we had an hour before the next train. I downed a pint of water, a pint of full-strength Pilsener, a pint of lemonade, and a latte. The second train trip was 6 hours, but kind of felt not as long because the northern summer light doesn't fade until after 10pm. We arrived in Bergen at 11pm or so, and had to wait in a line of desperate smokers waiting for a taxi. Our hotel room was up 4 flights of stairs, SO...

... not long after, the asthma stressors listed above (mainly beer, smoke and climbing) hit and I had a violent attack. I'm now full of nice life-saving drugs and feeling much more stable, but of course it is worrying, especially for M who has to keep an eye out for wheezes, research ambulances etc, and generally take over everything including nursing duties until I feel a bit stronger. However the wonders of modern pharmacology are being wondrous, and apart from feeling a bit fragile I am doing well...well,,, a bit teary because we've only been on the road for 9 days. Fark.

Please send me some encouraging thoughts, words, oxygen-loaded crossed-fingers, and anything else you fancy in the way of a miracle cure. Proper touristing should start again tomorrow! When, tank de lawds, it should be cooler. By Saturday it should be only 18 degrees and I CAN'T WAIT.

Today brought to you by eau de latte, courage mon vieux, and a goodly dose of 'Ange ou Demon' cos that is what roid-based mood swings do to the princess. And here are some Norwegian keyboard symbols: å¨^øƤ§¨¨. I have no idea what they mean of course!

Gnashwailgrrrrr...

TRAVEL.

People do it for fun I'm told.

Anticipating the break?  Yes.  Being at the destination, yes I can see that.  Having the change of scene, enjoying the local treats and being far away from ordinary life concerns, yep.  Having new untried shoppies to investigate and many nice shiny things to play with?  Also yep.

But speak not to me of the airline company and its oxymoronic 'Customer Service'.  Well, we WERE serviced, but it was more of a surprise-from-behind-via-large-horse variety.  I kid you not.

Dear readers, there is a HYOOG difference between 'connecting flights' and 'connecting baggage'.  Trust me on this.  'Flights' means yes you can indeed get off one plane, wander to another departure lounge, and get on another.  Possibly even ending up where you want to be, with your luggage coming out of that weird black hole and going twirlies on the carousel.  'Baggage' means something different entirely.  It means that you can book connecting flights, but if, according to a highly semantic technicality, you have made two separate bookings, or sectors as I now know they are called, your bags will come out of the plane at the connecting airport, where you have to retrieve them and then check back in.  And even though you are promised by a supurrvisor purrson on pain of losing his job (tell someone who cares) that there really IS time to do this in half an hour, this is a LIE.  

What happens is that you retrieve bags, run sweating to the desk with your priority check-in ticket waving from your teeth, see your bags disappear up the treadmill thing, only to have the check-in purrson say 'oh dear the flight's closed'.  Things get farcical after this.

WE are not allowed on the flight.  The friends travelling with us are at the gate, holding up the plane for us, oh noble dear ones, saying 'no no they're on the way, we were promised they'd have time' etc etc, until they were told 'well now YOU have to get on the plane or stay behind'.  Meantime our bags have very efficiently made it onto the plane, thanks to the wonders of baggage handlers.  We otoh are stuck wrangling a customer service purrson who (eventually) has to grovel to us for not checking us in via correct procedure - if she had, the bags would have stayed with us.  She was so mortified when I burst into tears saying 'but my meds are in my bags!' she even said 'Come and stay at my place'.  

V#rg#n REFUSED ALL RESPONSIBILITY for this check-in/luggage shambles, the official word being 'if you check in thru our website it's your responsibility to check these things'.  WHAT???  They set up their check-in system full of bells and advertising whistles encouraging you to make web bookings, oh yes, it's fun, funky, cheaper and foolproof.  BullSHIT.  There is this absolutely fatal flaw in the system, which I might add I wasn't able to avoid even though I also chose to PAY THEM EXTRA by ringing a Customer Service Call Centre (I can think of some other words starting with C I'd like to use here) to ensure all the bookings were streamlined.

The message I get is that it's all my fault for changing my bookings when my travel dates changed.  This world-wide company can't manage streamlining bookings when travel dates change?  Isn't that somewhat equivalent to missing the toilet when you sit down to piddle?

Grrrrrrrr... we were forced to stay the night in a deeply, deeply ordinary and nasty motel, dining on cheapo versions of Lean n Queasy and a small bar of chocolate I happened to have in my bag.  M was so upset he fanged off in a taxi to get booze to help us thru the night. [He was a bit nervous to get a taxi driver in traditional Muslim head-dress, but fortunately no problem.]  We barely slept, I mean, up again at 4.45am to catch two more planes to Canberra, the alternative being to hang around in Brisbane with no motel and no nothing until 3pm.  Not to mention spending large portions of the night composing letters of complaint to Richard the man.

We be grumpy.