"Nor-way! That's great! We've landed on the moon!"

Alesund, Norway

Now I'm no genius, but I knew Norway was gonna be cold when I looked down from our plane on the flight from Oslo to Alesund. And full of islands. Beautiful islands. And very hospitable people.



Our friends gave up their whole place for us to live in for 2 weeks and their daughter is a toddler with the most personality in the world. Micah's freshly roasted coffee was very memorable. (They've started a coffee roasting a business now).



From their living room you can see the mountains which we climbed up. Very scenic. The town centre had an old part with nice stone buildings. We ate lots of bread and cheese. Our friends were incredibly generous. We went to cruise the fjords one day. They had annoying recorded guide tapes playing in 4 different languages which went on constantly, but even that blaring distraction could not diminish the beauty surrounding us.



Moldejazz

Onto the one of the world's oldest and most respected jazz festival in Molde, a few hours by car and ferry away. most impressive were the Rashied Ali Qintet, and the Wayne Shorter Quartet (featuring Brian Blade on drums).. most of it went over my small head :) but I appreciated the grace and friendship displayed by threse awesome muso's. Inspiring. Elvis Costello and his band was also pretty cool (as was Steely Dan, eventhough we didn't know any of the words, unlike the Norwegian fans!!). Not allowed to take photos at many of these concerts, so check out the view instead hey? We had some very blessed sunny days there. We all stayed with one of their family friends on an island where the Nazi tried to build a landing strip many years ago.. scary indeed.

Bergen-Oslo

Bidding farewell to our friends in Alesund, we boarded the first plane of the day to Bergen for the train ride. Inspite of our tiredness, one of the world's most gorgeous train rides lived up to expectation. Bergen had some interesting old wooden buildings, and Oslo had lots of green statues. Churches, palace, local strawberries and smoked salmon, +hotdogs.. what else could you want, really? They were about to fade into the background as we approached Stockholm, Sweden.