I'll mention this one time, and then I'll keep it separate from this blog.
I think a lot about the issues of the day, like politics, war, crashing economies, raging unemployment, climate change, all that sort of stuff. I rarely discuss those issues with people, though, because things tend to get ugly pretty quickly. People have strong feelings on many of these issues and think that anyone who disagrees with them is evil or stupid or both.
The happy "Woods in Switzerland" blog doesn't really seem like the proper forum in which to introduce heavy political discussions. For the sake of my own sanity, I've decided to start keeping what I'll call a political journal. (Sorry, Chels--it won't have any pictures.) It won't be particularly organized or thorough; it'll be more of just a forum for me to think out loud. I'll keep it as a blog, but I'm not worried about whether anyone ever actually reads it. My approach is that I'm keeping a journal that other people can check out from time to time if they're really bored.
It has a couple of introductory entries but nothing substantive yet on the issues. It's at http://ethanwoodisright.blogspot.com. The topic of my first real post, which I'm still working on, is illegal immigration and Nazis. (I thought I'd start out with a bang.) It'll probably be up tomorrow.
Friday, July 30, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Ethan's movie reviews
Inception (saw in theater): See it. You can argue about whether it was a great movie or not, but you can't argue that it was boring.
Salt (saw in theater): Don't bother.
The Bounty Hunter (saw on plane): Yuck. I should have spent the time reading the airplane's emergency landing instructions.
Date Night (saw on plane): A good enough way to kill ninety minutes of a nine-hour plane ride.
Salt (saw in theater): Don't bother.
The Bounty Hunter (saw on plane): Yuck. I should have spent the time reading the airplane's emergency landing instructions.
Date Night (saw on plane): A good enough way to kill ninety minutes of a nine-hour plane ride.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Off to Minnesota
I'm sitting at the airport in Zurich waiting for my flights to Minnesota. The itinerary for the next four weeks: Twin Cities, Provo, Bear Lake, Provo, Denver, Provo, Switzerland. It'll be a crazy month.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
To the mountains
Derek and Mary roll their eyes now whenever I say this, but I really am going to make it to Lugano one of these days. I had good intentions of going yesterday, but again, I looked at the forecast. Ninety degrees in Lugano, 65 degrees up on Mt. Titlis (yes, it's an unfortunate name for English speakers, but it's completely innocuous in German), so the mountain won. I went up to 10,000 feet and played in the snow.
I'll have to take the kids there in the fall. There are glaciers all over the place. You can actually tube or sled in the snow up there, and there's an ice cave carved out under the glacier. It was really touristy, which always kind of ruins the experience (even though I'm still sort of a tourist myself), but the kids would love it. There will be pictures when my camera and laptop are reunited in two and a half weeks.
On a completely unrelated note, it's kind of fun to watch the Tour de France in real time over here. I don't follow it as much as I used to, but I still pay attention. And I've noticed that the French roads don't look nearly as weird to me now. Roads all over Europe are pretty similar. The markings, signs, roundabouts, and other features of the French roads are the same things I see driving around Switzerland.
I'll have to take the kids there in the fall. There are glaciers all over the place. You can actually tube or sled in the snow up there, and there's an ice cave carved out under the glacier. It was really touristy, which always kind of ruins the experience (even though I'm still sort of a tourist myself), but the kids would love it. There will be pictures when my camera and laptop are reunited in two and a half weeks.
On a completely unrelated note, it's kind of fun to watch the Tour de France in real time over here. I don't follow it as much as I used to, but I still pay attention. And I've noticed that the French roads don't look nearly as weird to me now. Roads all over Europe are pretty similar. The markings, signs, roundabouts, and other features of the French roads are the same things I see driving around Switzerland.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Too hot
We're having the hottest stretch of weather I've seen since we moved to Switzerland. It was 92 degrees yesterday. Keep in mind that I don't have air conditioning and that I live on the top floor. All part of the cultural experience, right?
To escape the heat yesterday, I fled to St. Moritz, a resort town in the Alps in the eastern part of the country. It was about fifteen degrees cooler there. As usual, the train ride through the Alps to get there and back was most of the fun, at least until late afternoon. The trains don't have air conditioning, and once I came down from the mountains, and the sun was beating down on the train, it was plenty hot on the train. I had to break down and buy a bottled water on the train for $4.50 because I had run out. Other than that, the train is nice because it relieves you of the stress of driving there yourself, but it doesn't come with all of the hassle of air travel. It's kind of the best of both worlds.
The scenery was up to the usual amazing standards, which waterfalls, tall mountain peaks, cool bridges over deep gorges, all that kind of stuff.
St. Moritz advertises that they have sun something like 330 days out of the year, which is nice but had an interesting side effect: for the first time ever in Switzerland, I saw brown grass and sprinklers. I guess the obvious downside of having a lot of sun is that you don't get much rain. It was weird to see that.
To escape the heat yesterday, I fled to St. Moritz, a resort town in the Alps in the eastern part of the country. It was about fifteen degrees cooler there. As usual, the train ride through the Alps to get there and back was most of the fun, at least until late afternoon. The trains don't have air conditioning, and once I came down from the mountains, and the sun was beating down on the train, it was plenty hot on the train. I had to break down and buy a bottled water on the train for $4.50 because I had run out. Other than that, the train is nice because it relieves you of the stress of driving there yourself, but it doesn't come with all of the hassle of air travel. It's kind of the best of both worlds.
The scenery was up to the usual amazing standards, which waterfalls, tall mountain peaks, cool bridges over deep gorges, all that kind of stuff.
St. Moritz advertises that they have sun something like 330 days out of the year, which is nice but had an interesting side effect: for the first time ever in Switzerland, I saw brown grass and sprinklers. I guess the obvious downside of having a lot of sun is that you don't get much rain. It was weird to see that.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Here are the 24
It turns out that all 24 of my Norway observations are incredibly profound (no one should be shocked by that), so we're going to have a lightning round with all 24. Feel free to ignore. These are in the order in which I scribbled them down, not the order of importance.
1. The train from the Oslo airport to the Oslo central train station, which was right next to my hotel, travels at about a hundred miles per hour.
2. The blindfold/eye shade thingy that I brought along saved my life. I probably got twenty more hours of sleep with that thing than I would have otherwise had.
3. Yes, it was expensive. I'm generally opposed to bottled water as a waste of natural resources and money, but when you're stuck in an airport or on a plane or a train, it's sometimes necessary. I paid about $4 per bottle for water or soda. At one point, I saw a sale where I could get two bottles of Pepsi Max for $2.30 each. I grabbed them.
4. For the Norwegians, it's all about the ocean and the fish. That's the source of everything for them. (And, in recent years, the oil.)
5. Just as in Helsinki and Amsterdam, everyone spoke English, even way up north in Tromsø.
6. Those people must love hot dogs. Every convenience store and gas station had hot dogs for sale. You don't find that in Switzerland. (I never bought one; I didn't travel to Norway to eat hot dogs.) They all seemed to be wrapped in bacon or some bacon-like substance.
7. I saw more 7-11 stores in six days in Norway that I've seen in sixteen years in Minnesota. (Minnesota doesn't have 7-11.) They were everywhere.
8. A crowd of several thousand people was gathered in a giant outdoor theater in Oslo to cheer for Holland in the soccer World Cup. I guess the Europeans all support each other.
9. A couple of times, I was high enough in the mountains to touch snow.
10. I took a bus down the steepest road in Norway. The grade was about 20%.
11. I decided that heaven is eating a seafood dinner in a restaurant by the ocean on a small island in northern Norway.
12. Apparently, one of the most important pieces of information you can convey to a Norwegian shopper is the opening hours for your business. All businesses had signs that read something like: "COOP 8-19 (10-17)" in equally large print. Coop is the store name, and the numbers mean that it's open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. I haven't seen that in any other country.
13. I bought a couple of apples at a grocery store in Tromsø. Instead of handing my coins to the cashier, I was told to drop them into a slot in a machine. The machine counted my coins and gave me the change. Kinda cool.
14. I think I had my happiest moment when I found myself on a bus driving on an uneven road in the outskirts of a city on an obscure island somewhere in northern Norway, unsure of whether I was going to find the museum I was looking for but not really caring. That's when traveling is fun.
15. I started to feel bad for the mountains in northern Norway. Think about the Wasatch Front or the Swiss Alps: the mountains are spectacular, and millions of people see them every day. The mountains in northern Norway are equally spectacular, but they probably haven't been seen by a million people in the whole history of the world. It seems like a horrible waste of a good mountain. It's probably a sign that one's sanity is slipping when one starts to anthropomorphize mountains that don't really care where they are, but that's what I found myself doing.
16. Despite the high cost of living in Norway, I managed to live within my means. When I arrived in Oslo, I withdrew 3200 Norwegian kroner, the equivalent of about $495. My goal was to make that last. It had to cover museums, transportation, food, souvenirs, everything but hotel and air, which were prepaid. I realize that living on $80 a day probably isn't the stuff of legend, but I returned with 16.5 Norwegian kroner in my pocket, the equivalent of about $2.50.
17. The Norwegians are big on polar exploration. It was a Norwegian who first made it to the South Pole. Another Norwegian had a theory that the ice at the North Pole drifts along an ocean current. To prove his point, he built a ship that was designed to withstand being stuck in the ice. He and his crew of ten then sailed north until they hit the ice. (This was in the early 1900s.) They then stopped and waited to be frozen in. Sure enough, they were. They drifted along with the ice current for three years until they popped out on the other side, then they sailed back home. They all lived through it.
18. Norwegians are very nice and aren't nearly as arrogant as some other European countries, but they're very defensive and resentful of the world's attitude toward their practices of seal and whale hunting. They see it as part of their cultural heritage. At least they no longer hunt baby seals.
19. Ever since they gave up the Viking thing about a thousand years ago and quit raping and killing anyone they could find, Norway's fate has largely been in the hands of others. They were ruled by Denmark for a long time, and then they were basically given away to Sweden. In the early 1900s, they politely asked the Swedes for their independence, and it was granted. (No Revolutionary War for the Norwegians.) Then Norway was occupied by Germany during the Second World War despite their proclamation of neutrality. Because of their oil, though, Norway now has the highest standard of living in the world by some measures.
Okay, I didn't hit 24 items. As I was going through the list, I decided that some of them would go better with pictures when I get around to doing some real blogs about the trip.
I highly recommend Norway. It was a lot of fun. For the next time when my family leaves me alone in Switzerland for a month, I've got my sights on Greenland and/or Iceland. Now that would be fun.
1. The train from the Oslo airport to the Oslo central train station, which was right next to my hotel, travels at about a hundred miles per hour.
2. The blindfold/eye shade thingy that I brought along saved my life. I probably got twenty more hours of sleep with that thing than I would have otherwise had.
3. Yes, it was expensive. I'm generally opposed to bottled water as a waste of natural resources and money, but when you're stuck in an airport or on a plane or a train, it's sometimes necessary. I paid about $4 per bottle for water or soda. At one point, I saw a sale where I could get two bottles of Pepsi Max for $2.30 each. I grabbed them.
4. For the Norwegians, it's all about the ocean and the fish. That's the source of everything for them. (And, in recent years, the oil.)
5. Just as in Helsinki and Amsterdam, everyone spoke English, even way up north in Tromsø.
6. Those people must love hot dogs. Every convenience store and gas station had hot dogs for sale. You don't find that in Switzerland. (I never bought one; I didn't travel to Norway to eat hot dogs.) They all seemed to be wrapped in bacon or some bacon-like substance.
7. I saw more 7-11 stores in six days in Norway that I've seen in sixteen years in Minnesota. (Minnesota doesn't have 7-11.) They were everywhere.
8. A crowd of several thousand people was gathered in a giant outdoor theater in Oslo to cheer for Holland in the soccer World Cup. I guess the Europeans all support each other.
9. A couple of times, I was high enough in the mountains to touch snow.
10. I took a bus down the steepest road in Norway. The grade was about 20%.
11. I decided that heaven is eating a seafood dinner in a restaurant by the ocean on a small island in northern Norway.
12. Apparently, one of the most important pieces of information you can convey to a Norwegian shopper is the opening hours for your business. All businesses had signs that read something like: "COOP 8-19 (10-17)" in equally large print. Coop is the store name, and the numbers mean that it's open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. I haven't seen that in any other country.
13. I bought a couple of apples at a grocery store in Tromsø. Instead of handing my coins to the cashier, I was told to drop them into a slot in a machine. The machine counted my coins and gave me the change. Kinda cool.
14. I think I had my happiest moment when I found myself on a bus driving on an uneven road in the outskirts of a city on an obscure island somewhere in northern Norway, unsure of whether I was going to find the museum I was looking for but not really caring. That's when traveling is fun.
15. I started to feel bad for the mountains in northern Norway. Think about the Wasatch Front or the Swiss Alps: the mountains are spectacular, and millions of people see them every day. The mountains in northern Norway are equally spectacular, but they probably haven't been seen by a million people in the whole history of the world. It seems like a horrible waste of a good mountain. It's probably a sign that one's sanity is slipping when one starts to anthropomorphize mountains that don't really care where they are, but that's what I found myself doing.
16. Despite the high cost of living in Norway, I managed to live within my means. When I arrived in Oslo, I withdrew 3200 Norwegian kroner, the equivalent of about $495. My goal was to make that last. It had to cover museums, transportation, food, souvenirs, everything but hotel and air, which were prepaid. I realize that living on $80 a day probably isn't the stuff of legend, but I returned with 16.5 Norwegian kroner in my pocket, the equivalent of about $2.50.
17. The Norwegians are big on polar exploration. It was a Norwegian who first made it to the South Pole. Another Norwegian had a theory that the ice at the North Pole drifts along an ocean current. To prove his point, he built a ship that was designed to withstand being stuck in the ice. He and his crew of ten then sailed north until they hit the ice. (This was in the early 1900s.) They then stopped and waited to be frozen in. Sure enough, they were. They drifted along with the ice current for three years until they popped out on the other side, then they sailed back home. They all lived through it.
18. Norwegians are very nice and aren't nearly as arrogant as some other European countries, but they're very defensive and resentful of the world's attitude toward their practices of seal and whale hunting. They see it as part of their cultural heritage. At least they no longer hunt baby seals.
19. Ever since they gave up the Viking thing about a thousand years ago and quit raping and killing anyone they could find, Norway's fate has largely been in the hands of others. They were ruled by Denmark for a long time, and then they were basically given away to Sweden. In the early 1900s, they politely asked the Swedes for their independence, and it was granted. (No Revolutionary War for the Norwegians.) Then Norway was occupied by Germany during the Second World War despite their proclamation of neutrality. Because of their oil, though, Norway now has the highest standard of living in the world by some measures.
Okay, I didn't hit 24 items. As I was going through the list, I decided that some of them would go better with pictures when I get around to doing some real blogs about the trip.
I highly recommend Norway. It was a lot of fun. For the next time when my family leaves me alone in Switzerland for a month, I've got my sights on Greenland and/or Iceland. Now that would be fun.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
It's dark! It's wonderful!!
Back home now. It's midnight and the sky is actually dark, which I haven't seen for six days now. It never got really dark at night in Oslo, and of course, up north, I finally had to talk myself into going to bed at midnight while I was staring out my window at the clear blue sky. That whole midnight sun thing kind of freaked me out. I want it to be dark at night.
Again, I loved Norway. There'll be lots to say and lots of pictures to show in a future blog sometime. During my travels, I was keeping a list of subjects to address in my blog, and the list ended up with 24 items. No one wants to read that. I'll have to winnow it down a bit when I get the chance to write it up.
Again, I loved Norway. There'll be lots to say and lots of pictures to show in a future blog sometime. During my travels, I was keeping a list of subjects to address in my blog, and the list ended up with 24 items. No one wants to read that. I'll have to winnow it down a bit when I get the chance to write it up.
Monday, July 5, 2010
From the North Pole
Well, I'm online for the first time since last Wednesday. I used the hotel computer to check in for my flights home tomorrow, and I just couldn't resist hopping on. Anyway, there'll be lots more to come, but I'll just say that Norway has been fantastic. I could live here. The whole seeing the sun at midnight is really weird, though. I don't know if I could get used to that.
More later . . . .
More later . . . .
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