The Fjords: "What fresh hell?!"

November 1, 2012:

We said an early morning goodbye to Daniel. It was still dark when we made it to the train station. Danielle was thrilled to find the best coffee she's had so far in Europe.

The sun came up during the train ride and then we got on a bus (with panoramic views!). I noticed the boys behind us getting onto the bus sounded French, but had been speaking English for so many consecutive days already that I couldn't be sure they were French.

Once on the ferry, I noticed that they kept sort of eyeing us. We, however, were casually eyeing the views of the Nærøyfjord:

And obviously taking lots of photos:

A Japanese man even came up and asked to take with us as if we were part of the tourist attraction (I guess I am maybe sort-of Norwegian....) Eventually, the two French guys got up the courage to ask us to take a couple of photos of them. When they asked me, I had a bit of difficulty with their camera. I am not much of a photo taker. My family bought me a very fancy functional digital camera when I was 14 years old before my trip to France. It was a hundred dollars (back in 2004). We paid for durability. I know this because this is the camera I still use. They handed me a fancy thingamajigger.... a camera or a phone or something. It was touch screen. I tried three times to take a picture just by touching the screen like they told me before I realized I had to take off my glove. Enfin, trop compliqué. I had to say "OK, the gloves are coming off!" in order to seem less completely useless with technology. I don't have too much trouble with computers, but I am no good with touch screen things. Danielle will attest to this.

Anyway, they decided to strike up a conversation and told us that they had been creeping my bag tag when we got on the bus. They were confused that we were from Lyon, but that we didn't speak any French. We explained that we just hadn't spoken any French for about a week. They too, it turned out live in the Lyon area: Maxime is from Lyon and Alexandre is from Grenoble; it's a small world though because they are originally from Chalon-sur-Saône, the closest city to my host village when I did an exchange in 2004!

When we arrived in Flåm, they invited us to eat lunch with them and since all of the restaurants appeared to be closed or crammed with the other tourists, we opted to have a picnic. We went to the grocery store and bought sandwich food, and Heineken (which was our first mistake). We had a lovely lunch in the train station, until they announced that the Bergen-Oslo train had broken down. What fresh hell?! Our second mistake, was apparently not speaking to them in time to find out that we had to take an earlier train than was scheduled on our itinerary if we wanted to do the famous Flåm railway. I went to speak to them 15 minutes before this train left and they spent the whole time arguing with some other travelers, so the train was gone before I had an opportunity to speak with them. As a result, we were told that we would have to take a bus from Flåm to Oslo for six hours.

To say the least, we were not happy. Our new friends from Lyon left on a different bus to get back to Bergen, and we waited for our bus to arrive. We vowed never to drink Heineken prior to an important travel-related event again, since it had been involved in our missed flight catastrophe on our way to Barcelona. I was mad. I told Danielle that if I could make my own magnet for Flåm, it would be the word Flåm with a giant X through it. This made me feel slightly better. This whole situation reminded me of the film Leap Year (2010), where Amy Adams gets angry that she paid to go to Cork in a tiny boat and ends up in Dingle instead because of the enormous storm. I told Danielle that we had better turn out to meet the loves of our lives on this bus trip. I pointed the only other tourists still waiting for a bus, an elderly couple (who were clearly American), and told her to take her pick. We died laughing and felt much better in spite of our situation. (I hope this isn't one of those had-to-be-there things, and even though I suspect that it is, I thought I'd share).

We got on the bus, took the back two seats, and were the most obnoxious passengers taking ridiculous photos, laughing loudly and having a picnic with the left-over lunch meat and crackers. I even took off my boots to air out my feet a little.

We caught glimpses of the gorgeous views we had been promised on the train trip in between black tunnels but soon night had fallen and we both passed out. When we got near to Oslo, we almost missed the train that would take us into the city because the bus driver didn't announce anything. All of the English passengers had no idea what was going on and we got onto the train just as the doors were closing.

We walked to our hostel in the rain, checked in and proceded immediately to bed as it was already past midnight. Our linens cost us 50 Norwegian Crowns and it turned out someone had stolen my pillow again! Not to mention, whoever was sleeping above me snored all night. Oh the joys of being a student traveller! Please note: I actually love it. The cruise in the morning had been so beautiful and it had been really good fun to meet some Lyonnais and to practice our French. I used a towel as my pillow, had an excellent sleep and got over the whole thing.