Geozenn's Blog

Happy new year!

climbingsister — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:57:32 +0000

Here’s a video of the fireworks taken from our sitting room window.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!

Looking back

geozenn — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 21:07:07 +0000

We haven’t updated the blog much recently. Things have been getting inthe way a bit lately: roof repairs, norwegian exams, christmas, skiing……

Most of you will get this in through an email but here is a link to a review of what 2011 was like for us.

I resolve to be more communicative in the new year, both personally and through this blog. Ha det godt!

Voss

climbingsister — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:20:59 +0000

We have just been to Voss for one of my birthday presents. It was great fun.

On the first day we went to a big gorge which was giant but very hard to see. There were big holes in the rock ( “made by boulders” as my mum later told me) and the water was very strong. Once we had seen the view we took another path up the hill next to it. We spotted a few mushrooms on the way but we didn’t think they were edible. On the way down a horse rider passed us on a fabulous black horse.

Back at the hostel mum was making tea,Sas was reading,dad was talking to mum and I was exploring the grounds. I played some basket ball and skimmed some stones in the lake.After tea Sas and I lay in hammocks and almost fell asleep they were so comfy, then we realised we had better go to bed.

On the second day we packed for bad weather. The weather forecast said it was supposed to be rainy that day. We got in the car with the bikes safely on the roof (we were planning to do some cycling) and drove off.It was misty.

When we got to the valley where the train we were taking was we took the bikes off the car and pushed them on the train. Soon the train was leaving the station, full of Chinese or Japanese people (clearly it was a big tourist attraction). Higher up the mist was gone and it was amazingly sunny. Sas and mum got off with their bikes halfway up so as not to attempt the hardest bit at the top. A little while afterwards the train stopped so we could see a ferocious water fall,so strong that the spray coming off it was like rain.

At the top we cycled down,not going very fast because it was so steep. I didn’t have to pedal at all I just braked. We bought some goats cheese at a farm on the way.

We met Sas and Mum back at the train station and together drove all the way home back to Bergen.

Norge i et nøtteskall

geozenn — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 18:43:32 +0000

In my previous post I mentioned our trip to Flåm. I have now posted some pictures here, mainly documenting the train journey up to Myrdal and the bike ride back down to Flåm. The latter involves a descent of nearly 1000m in 20km, with a significant part (ca. 400 m happening over 21 switchbacks in the first few km). Great fun for relatively little effort. Also included are some pictures of the amazing scenery that we travelled through around Stalheimen on the way to Flåm.

Weather obsessed

geozenn — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 18:13:02 +0000

It’s time to talk about the weather. We have had rather a lot of it recently and in a place like Bergen, one of the wettest cities in the world it is hard not to obsess about it. Before we moved people often asked how we were going to cope with all the rain, my answer was that it rains a lot but most of it comes in big downpours, with bright patches in between. This has definitely been true until the beginning of September, in fact july and august were actually very pleasant and since we moved to Laksevåg we have had many dinners out on the deck behind the house enjoying the evening sun!

Everything changed at the beginning of September (statistically the wettest month of the year) when it started raining and almost never stopped until about three days ago. I was still right about the big downpours, light rain doesn’t seem to happen much here, and on one day we they recorded 45 mm. Unfortunately there weren’t many bright patches in between. Over the whole month there was a total of 360 mm of rain , compare that to the annual average of 668 mm in Edinburgh and 804 in Amsterdam, and you realise that is has been very wet here!

So how do we cope? Surprisingly well so far. The summer has been fantastic and it’s nice to have that as our reference: “It can be amazing!”. We have also made a point of not letting it hold us back. We have invested in new raingear for all of us and despite the poor weather we have managed a nice hike in the local hills almost every weekend. This weekend the forecast was good and we went out to Voss and Flåm on the Sognefjord to do some cycling and recharge and prepare for the next wet patch. As I write this the rain has come on again, but…. we’re ready for it.

The graph below was “borrowed” of www.yr.no and summarizes last years weather and some long-term weather statistics for Bergen.

What’s this about plumpie

geozenn — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:15:34 +0000

Although very overgrown, the garden with our new house has already produced a lot of nice fruit for us. Starting with redcurrants and some gooseberries at the beginning of August, and piles and piles of plums over the past two weeks. So we have been busy making jam, compote and… best of all plum pie! You can ask Esther for the recipe.

Apart from a bit of pruning (very therapeutic), and planting a few herbs, we haven’t managed to do an awful lot of gardening yet. Hopefully we will find some time next spring so that we can start producing some of our own vegetables again.

Luckily there is a lot of foraging potential nearby. Obviously the woods are littered with blåbær and we have had the odd handfull of those. The best thing so far was though when we happened on some amazing mushrooms last Saturday evening. There are so many mushrooms in the woods at the moment, and most of us I wouldn’t know if they were edible, but these were unmistakable: Ceps!. We used to buy them at great expense on the market during our stay in France last year, and here we found them just next to the path, food for free. We had them on toast on Sunday morning.

Tour of our new house

geozenn — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:54:27 +0000

We’ve been living in our new house for about a month now and we’ve settled in great. The house is in very nicely decorated and needed almost nothin done before we started unpacking our stuff. For those who won’t be able to come and inspect the house any time soon the girls have made a video-tour which can be seen below. Please ignore the mess, spot the odd socks and work out who messed up Saskia’s bluetack. Plumpie for the first entry with three correct answers.

A dark moment for Norway

geozenn — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 20:26:26 +0000

From the outside Norway has the image of being a safe place to be, very open to foreigners and scoring very high in the happiness league tables. A lot of this has been confirmed since our arrival here. People have been amazingly friendly, helpfull and generous. Of course after living here for three months now we have had to modify some of our preconceptions a bit. It is clear that this country, like any other has it’s problems. We have personally witnessed the sad lives of the drug-addicts in the park opposite our appartment, all out in the open for everyone to see. Walking around in Bergen it is clear that a lot of people from across the world see Norway as a better place to live than their “own home-countries”. On the surface this doesn’t seem to cause any problems and in some sense the Norwegians seem to embrace the foreigners (the girl’s language school is a good example of this).

From what we had picked up in the media we were already aware of an undercurrent of bad feeling towards immigration and multiculturalism, but unfortunately this weekend we have witnessed the very dark side of Norwegian society. I’m personally not convinced this is a problem restricted to Norway. Unfortunately there are voices all over Europe (including the Netherlands and the UK) spouting similar ideas as those that motivated the terrible attacks here on Friday. Luckily, based on our personal contacts with the Norwegians we have a very positive impression of this society and we feel able to look at the future positively.

I have added a few links to a number of opinion pieces from the Guardian website. The first is an article by a Norwegian journalist presneting a balanced viewed of what happened here over the past few days, and another article about extremism in Europe in the context of which the current attack should be interpreted. Another article suggests that the internet provides a breeding ground for extremist ideas, partly because a lot of the exchange of ideas is very private and partly because the way information is available on the internet allows people to be very selective in the information people access on which they base there opinions. Food for thought…..

Whales in the harbour

geozenn — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:52:47 +0000

Here’s a little video of some whales that were spotted yesterday in the byfjorden just outside Bergen.

Athletics summer camp

geozenn — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 18:54:36 +0000

A few weeks ago Esther joined the local Athletics club who train on a beautifull track in a dip between the houses only a few minutes away from our new house. We were just in time to register for the summer camp in the first week of the holidays, hoping that the kids would be entertained and would have an opportunity to meet some of the local kids. They certainly seemed to have enjoyed themselves as you can see in these pictures.