A six-year-old veteran

Just a quick thought here that I forgot to mention earlier: I realized that my kids have become official veterans of international air travel. At one point when we were taking off from Atlanta and Lindsey was waiting to be able to play her handheld Nintento DS, she turned to me and asked, "Are we above ten thousand feet yet?" Those words sounded a little odd coming from the mouth of a girl who still says "wif" for "with."

Here we are

Whew! We're back. Our flight out of Atlanta was delayed by three hours, but Stace and Tanner got upgraded to business class, so things turned out fine. Tanner was in heaven. Lindsey and I had fun hanging out in the cattle pen we call "economy" (also known by its other name, "hell").

One little story that made me laugh at the differences between the Swiss and the Americans: After we got home yesterday, I went to the post office to pick up our mail, which had been on hold. In the U.S., they'll hold your mail for free, and they gather it up and hand it to you in a big pile whenever you get around to dropping by the post office to pick it up. (In Switzerland, of course, they charge you a fee to hold your mail.)

I had told them that I'd pick up the mail on the 20th, but since I had time, I figured I'd just swing by a day early and get it. Bad idea. I went up to the window with my forms, and the woman went to look for my mail. She came back a minute later and told me that I was a day early and that I'd have to come back the next day, the scheduled day, to pick up my mail. My first reaction was a flash of annoyance because I thought she was just being ultra-Swiss, but as I thought about it, I wondered if there was more to the story.

Sure enough, there was. I went to the window today to pick up my held mail, and it was all ready for me. It had been tied in a neat little bundle with two strings, horizontally and vertically. Each piece of mail had been stamped with a notation about the day I was coming back from vacation and the day I would be there to pick up my mail. So, to the credit of the Swiss, it wasn't that they were trying to arbitrarily enforce a rule (although they're certainly capable of that); it was just that they had a very orderly system for handling the mail and I needed to work within the system.

Life in a small town

Just a quick story about a funny small-town experience I had moments ago.

Several months ago, I called the Bear Lake Lodge in Garden City, Utah to make a reservation for Stace and me when we all go to Bear Lake. (We'll just let the kids sleep on the floor of the cabin. I'm too old and crotchety to sleep on the floor.) You have to realize that Garden City does not provide a potpourri of hotel choices. It's pretty much either the Bear Lake Lodge or your boat if you don't have a cabin to sleep in.

I've been meaning to call the Lodge to make sure that they still had me in their sophisticated reservation system, which, as far as I can tell, consists of a notebook hiding on a shelf somewhere. I didn't get around to calling them until today. My worst fears were validated when the woman on the phone (who couldn't have sounded more like a Utahn) said that she couldn't find me in the book. After a further search, though, she said she'd found my name but that someone else had "made a reservation over it." My reaction, predictably, was, "Huh?" She said that yes, my name had been written in the book but that someone had erased my name and put someone else's name in there.

Now, I'll swear on whatever stack of Bibles you want that I never called to cancel the reservation, so I'm not sure why another reservation got "made over" mine. The woman said that it probably came from having too many teenagers working there. A comforting thought, no? Anyway, she said that she'd check with her manager and see what they could do to straighten things out. I decided not to go ballistic at that point and to just let the process play itself out for a while.

Thankfully, she called me just a few minutes later to tell me that not only would we have a room, but that it would be an upgrade for the same price. At the Bear Lake Lodge, I think that "upgrade" might mean three separate beds instead of two separate beds, but I'll take it. I'll be sure to report back on what exactly an "upgrade" is at the Bear Lake Lodge.

Norway, day 2

I spent Friday right in Oslo, checking out museums and other sites. I started at Akershus Fortress, which was originally built around 1290, although the version that's there today has been reworked enough over the centuries that it probably doesn't look much like the original. The fortress served to protected the Norwegians against the Swedes or whomever else happened to be trying to occupy their country through the years. I was struck by the digital security keypad at the entrance to this centuries-old fortress. They could have saved a lot of trouble throughout history if they'd just installed a decent security system.

In the Second World War, the occupying Germans executed several Norwegians there, and then at the end of the war, the Norwegians executed several traitors there, including their most notorious traitor, Vidkun Quisling. He was a Norwegian who bargained to help the Nazis in exchange for a role as one of the leaders of Norway. The word "quisling" is now a synonym for "traitor" to the Norwegians.

Right next to the fortress was the Norwegian Resistance Museum. I'm sure that hundreds of books could be written about the efforts of the Norwegians to undermine the occupation, and the other occupied countries would have similar stories. It was a bit humbling to read about how brave and innovative they were. A lot of them were executed as a result of their efforts, but those who were successful made important contributions in turning back the Germans.

I spent the rest of the day at art museums, natural history museums, and such. I also took a guided tour of Oslo. I didn't take many pictures, but I did take a picture of this structure. I have no idea what's going on with this building, but it seemed worthy of a picture.

Here are a couple of other pictures from Oslo:

And finally, here's an illustration of how the Europeans like to keep things fun. The Oslo Opera House was across the street from my hotel, right along the waterfront. It's constructed in such a way that you can start from the sidewalk and walk all the way up to the roof. They then put a stage out on the water and have concerts during the summer.

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To quote one of my favorite sayings when I'm kicking around Europe, "You just don't see this kind of thing in Lakeville." I felt very hip. I mean, those of you who know me are already aware that I'm very hip, but I felt even more hip than usual.

Norway

At last, here are some Norway pics.

I flew there on a Wednesday night. The only direct flight from Zurich landed at about 10 p.m., so that's what I did. I got to the hotel around 11 p.m., and it was still twilight. I already talked about this a bit, but even just in Oslo, it never gets really dark at night in the summer. You couldn't do fireworks on the Fourth of July there.

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I spent three days in Oslo. I spent the first day walking around a peninsula, Bygdøy, which is across the harbor from Oslo. I visited five different museums. The first was an open air museum that showed examples of how life used to be in Norway.

The second was the Viking ship museum, which contained restored Viking ships. Pretty cool.

The other museums had to do with various Arctic and Antarctic explorations and such. The Norwegians did some pretty astonishing things in exploring both the North and South Poles. One guy had a theory that the ice at the North Pole drifts in such a way that if you got frozen into the ice in the polar ice cap on one side, you'd eventually pop out the other side. So he built a ship, the Fram, to do just that. They deliberately froze themselves in the ice and drifted along for three years. Sure enough, they popped out on the other side. They didn't quite reach the North Pole, but the trip was pretty astonishing. The ship took up the whole museum, so I could only get a picture of one part of the ship.

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That pretty much covers Day 1. I'll do more postings for the rest of the trip.

Pictures, at last

My camera and computer have finally been reunited. Before I get to pictures from Norway, I'll throw in a few pictures from "Jodlerfest" (pronounced "yodlerfest"), which is a local Swiss festival in the nearby town of Baar. The Swiss are always having little celebrations like this. It was fun to just walk around for a couple of hours and soak it up. In some ways, it's more interesting to see a real Swiss celebration that's not geared for tourists than it is to hit one of the touristy sites.

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Another blog

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.