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August 2008
Well a bit later than usual but we only got back from Bergen on Saturday evening and Sunday was spent sorting out things from suitcases and piles of washing to get done plus the eldest C is off on Monday to see her friend down south. She is flying down as an unaccompanied minor so I daresay the wife will be fretting 25hrs a day!
Tesco opened just before we went away and by all accounts it was very well attended on the first day. I walked around it but to be honest couldn’t really see what all the fuss is about. All very bright, new and clean and quite a lot of choice but I still like the Co-op for what they stand for. It is not just about filling up your basket with requirements after all.
July has been a rather wet and gray month which is slightly boring. Aunty Lyn arrived from England via Edinburgh where she had to endure a rather long boring wait due to a Loganair flight going tec. Consequently she arrived at Sumburgh rather later than planned and we had a very very crisp roast duck for dinner! We managed to take her to Unst which she thoroughly enjoyed and the day before she left predictably was the best sunny day we had seen for a while. Sonny (Der Meister Brouwer in Unst!) told me the old saying for this was “nae rain in May makes nae hay in June” and it is right as there has not been much mowing going on in the fields. Hopefully the farmers will have a late splurge in September otherwise things could be grim in the winter months.
The usual events go on as usual in these months and as usual there is always an ample selection of things to do and see. I have been teaching a few ballet classes at the Islesburgh Centre, in Lerwick, which has a mirrored room which is very useful for teaching in so I may well continue to teach there as another benefit is that it is slightly more warm than the school where I was teaching. I am going to be starting Adult Beginners Ballet in September for twelve weeks which I am quite looking forward to.
I am finally getting a new car, well second hand, which is a Citroen Saxo 1L so that will be a bit more economical than my present one which although having served its purpose well has reached the end of its economical life. I may sell it for scrap we shall see.
Well as I mentioned we went to Norway and Sweden for twelve days. We flew to Bergen with Loganair and picked up the hire car. It was an automatic and it took us some time to work out how to get it turned on and the shift into drive. We had to ask someone in the end. Nice thing about the Scandinavian countries is that their English is impeccable and they are only too happy to speak English. In the Bergen fish market they actually spoke about seven or eight languages. They were also selling whale meat which I politely declined to try! Nuff said about that!
Driving from Bergen takes you through loads of tunnels, some only two or three hundred metres long to the biggy at Laerdal which is 24.5 kilometres long and has three rest sections in it with coloured lighting. Apparently the idea being that as your eyes start getting tired with squinting at the white lines suddenly you emerge into this huge area where you can stop! Blue, green and blue were the colours and it was really quite bizarre.
Lots of fjords, with some huge cruise ships on, and very picturesque. Frustrating as you would be lining your camera up for a nice scenic shot out of the car window and bang into another tunnel!! The tunnels petered out by the time we got to an area called Gol and then it was a long drive to Oslo where we stopped at our first youth hostel which was clean and adequate and a full breakfast was included. Cheese, meats including pickled herring and liver paste and jam. Master C was most impressed with the toaster at Bergen, where we stopped on the way back, because it had a little conveyor belt and according to him it toasted your bread perfectly!
At Oslo we arrived about ten in the evening and asked where we could get something to eat. “There is a pizzeria just down the road” so off we toodled and gasped at the menu prices. Our first introduction to just how expensive Norway is! A small pizza started at £16 up to about £30 for a large one and a beer, non alcoholic, was £3.50!! By the end of the trip we were immune to the prices and just paid. The quality of food and drink was extremely high I have to say which reflected the price.
We drove to Sweden the next day and that was a very long journey of about eight hours. The countryside was very different in contrast to rocky Norway in that there were miles of wheat fields and little lakes with camping places and we stopped somewhere for some lunch purchased from a Coop. It was extremely hot and everything looked a little brown! We met Mats at the railway station car park in Åkersberga and we followed him to the ferry (free!) which took us over to the island of Ljustero where after another short little drive we came to Tranvik where the Bergs’ summer house is. It was a beautiful spot and the house was built on top of rock, the whole archipelago is basically large round boulders formed by the last Ice Age and there are hundreds of big and little islands everywhere. The back of the house had a garden that stretched right down to the water where there was a little quay where Mats had his boats. We met Katia and her son Ian, who I last saw when he was 12! He had his two children with him, Simon and Selma, for the hols and they and the Cs got on very well.
We spent the next five days sailing, fishing and wife and the 3Cs swam a lot. I was quite happy just to sit in the very hot sun! Even young Miss C learnt to row a boat and handle the rudder of Mats’ sailing ship which he had on loan. The scenery reminded me very much of Arthur Ransome’s stories as well as all the activities. There were quite a few Hullabaloos in motor boats but they were quite well behaved unlike the ones in the book. We drove to Norrtalje, a charming little town to the north of Ljustero and we also travelled on the island’s ferry service to another island further north called Husaro which was lovely. Again it was extremely hot. Only the day before we left did it rain one morning but that was the extent of it.
On our departure we drove across Sweden to Hamar in Norway where after getting caught in a rain storm and taking the wrong direction twice we ended up at our friends. The only annoying thing about driving in Norway is that the speed limit is mostly 50 mph and you have to have the headlights on full beam all the time!!
We stayed two nights at Hamar with friends from London and their two children and saw a little piece of the town. We went to a lake and the Cs swam, again it was boiling hot sunshine. We visited the Vinmonopolet (the state owned and run off licence) and bought some boxes of wine which at £25 a box for 3 litres worked out slightly better than the bottle of wine I bought at Bergen airport for £32!! There must be a logic to these high prices for what is one of the most richest countries in the world.
We drove back to Bergen on Friday, through the longest tunnel again. We stopped for lunch in a little hamlet off the road where the special of the day was sour cream porridge and cured meats. We did not do the porridge but the Cs had pancakes with cream and jam and we had cured meats with potato salad, scrambled egg and as an afterthought for decoration watermelon!!! We stayed at another youth hostel at the top of Bergen but thick cloud and fog put paid to my plans to take a photo of the scenic view the next morning. We wandered around Bergen’s Ikea which satisfied my wife’s excuse for retail therapy and then walked around a bit of the waterfront which is where we saw the fish market, which I have to say was very very touristy. There were a lot of tourists there. It was a very pretty place with some lovely old buildings. Back to the airport, dropped the rental car back where a couple of Finns were experiencing the same problem getting the car to start, this one was manual so you had to push the clutch and brake down together to unlock the steering wheel!!
Lunch on the top deck with the £32.00 bottle of wine and the Shetland flight got in early so we left early! Got home by five, UK time, and spent the evening opening post and planning Sunday, cleaning, weeding, chickens cleaned, seeing neighbours etc. Life back to normal really!! We had a nice time and the best bit for me was making it to Sweden to Ljustero where most of my family has visited over the years. Scandinavia is a lovely place to go to.
Back to the daily grind then……
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December 2006
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