המשפחה (Family)

Saturday, November 13, 2010 - Finally, after almost 9 months of constant travel and being thousands of miles away from either of our home continents, we returned to the US, and were bursting at the seams to see family and friends. 

1 week after returning, my parents, Ana, and I hoofed it to Dallas; partly to go to the office for the first time in a long time and also to meet my new boss, but primarily, to reconnect with our family on my mom's side of the family that lives in Dallas. I, however, left on Thursday by myself and stayed with my old roomies Greg and Mel, while Ana and my folks would come up on Saturday. This was partly to go to the office Friday, and, well, partly an excuse to hang with my old roomies.

An interesting thing happened before I left Houston; Thursday morning I felt a weight of anxiety fall on me like I haven't felt since I was in my previous nightmare relationship in Dallas.. In typical male fashion I ignored this for as long as I could until a moment of realization arrived, and a smile grew on my face. Where I used to ache with anxiety when I was with my ex-wife in Dallas, I was now aching with anxiety for drawing away from my wife to go to Dallas.

Family

I lived in Dallas for some 7 years and, though admittedly in a bad relationship then, never even thought to pick up the phone and call my family there, much less see any of them. But thankfully, a lot has changed since then. When I/we (my parents) found ourselves in Israel meeting my mom's family there for the first time, it struck us marvelous that we'd travelled all the way across the globe to meet this incredible family, yet at the same time ridiculous that we have relatives of this same family back in Dallas, only a couple hundred miles away from us, that we haven't seen in years. It was shortly after my parents returned from Israel to the states that they picked contact back up, and we planned this weekend specifically to see them again.

This weekend, my greatest joy was just sitting back and watching my mom fit into this family puzzle like a piece that had long been missing, where when it's fit back together, the whole makes better sense. We had an absolute blast; it was like watching a bunch of sisters that grew up together, which really isn't far from the truth here. The even stranger thing is, it's like there'd always been a missing piece in this family puzzle since from eternity, and Ana fits it. This I can't explain, I only write.

PS

Those of you that are Jewish and interested in your lineage, you ought to check out the below. The Stephen Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library digitized records of Jewish families from all around Europe and thousands of towns are now available to print via the internet. Our family in Dallas apparently found the tiny Polish town in this collection and bought the book for it, which is hundreds of pages. Now I just need to learn how to read it. But chances are if your lineage is Ashkenazi, you can find a lot of your family records here.

Jumbo Jet

Friday, November 5, 2010 - Ana asked me to make the arrangements for the last few stops in Scandanavia, which was an immediate mistake. I'd completed all of our bookings all the way through Stockholm, only lacking our last night there, which Ana only was hoping to be near the airport. I did much better than that. I found a hostel, with free wi-fi, within our budget, on a JUMBO JET.

These folks took a jumbo jet and rolled it off the airport grounds and into some nearby grass or something, then converted the main cabin into many rooms, converted the cockpit into a deluxe suite, the upper deck (first class) into a little movie theatre (with the original seats intact), and all the little airplane windows and overhead cabins in place.

Apparently the plane has only been sleeping people for a year or so now, but it was hilarious. I worked from the front of the plane all day while parents brought their little kids in just to see the thing and then leave. There was no flipping way I'd see a Jumbo Jet Hostel anywhere and not stay in it. A fantastic ending to our most recent leg of travels, indeed..

Stockholm

Saturday, October 30, 2010 - After Oslo we flew to Stockholm. We landed and I said to Ana, "I'm excited to see Stockholm." Ana replied, "I wanna go home." It gave me a good chuckle but it's true, while we aren't tired of travelling by any means, we are simply very excited to see family and friends. We spent almost 9 months outside of the states, which was far too long.

But, one last hoorah before the states. Beauty returned when we arrived; Stockholm is really this gigantic system of islands. In fact, it's an archipelago with supposedly over 24,000 islands! We rented an apartment on an island called Sodermalm, which is just 1 island south of the small Old City, which is beautiful. It's another fantastic old city to get lost in and squeeze through tiny alleys of cobblestone floors. Stockholm is also massive. It seems like it would be a cool place to live, mostly because you could probably not see all of it in an entire lifetime; you'd never be bored here..

Language

The people are still universally nice. If I hadn't mentioned it before, the Scandinavian languages are (I think) considered "North Germanic", but in my opinion, prettier than German.. One thing that strikes me as funny here is that Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish all have only 1 greeting word. So far, all countries have had different greetings (like "hi", "hey", "what's up", "how are you", "how's it going", "can I help you", etc).. In Denmark and Norway, regardless of where you are, you will be greeted with the same word 100% of the time: "HI!". And in Sweden, the universal greeting is "HEY!" How succinct, no?

Oslo

Thursday, October 28, 2010 - After visiting the northernmost point in our lives, we flew to Oslo which, quite frankly, was slightly boring in my opinion; at least comparatively speaking. It's a huge city, and also the home to Nobel Peace center.

Oslo wasn't completely void of excitement though! While travelling, I've always got my work laptop as well as a personal laptop, just for backup in case anything happens to the work one. Well, while in Montenegro, the monitor on my work laptop went kaput. All my efforts to fix it were in vain. So I went to the personal laptop as backup and have been working with it ever since. Well, while in Oslo, my backup laptop corrupted itself and refused to boot up anymore. Yay!

We contemplated which would be cheaper: buy plane tickets to fly back home and get a new laptop at the office, or just buy a new one here? Unsurprisingly, I opted for the latter. This would mark the first time in our nearly 2 years of travels that I had to finally charge something to my credit card.. Scandinavia, you have finally broken me.

Northern Lights



Sunday, October 24, 2010 - On Friday we travelled the furthest north either of us have ever been - Tromsø, at the very north of Norway. It's inside the Artic Circle, further north than Iceland, and further north than much of Russia and Canada. We went there really for the sole purpose of seeing yet another thing I've been dreaming of seeing since I was a kid - the Northern Lights.

The quick science behind this, if you don't already know, is when solar flares (explosions from our nuclear reactor, the sun) send charged particles at the earth. These particles react with the magnetosphere and emit visible light.

Our friend Kay, whom I met while at the Yeshiva in Jerusalem, coincidentally went there last year for the same reason, and she recommended an awesome guide that would take us 'chasing' the lights. Toda Kay!

Our guide, Kjetil Skogli (pronounced "Chetil"), is an award-winning photographer and has been featured in TV shows (including BBC). He's also a cool guy, and a fellow programmer of all things! Why did we hire him? His job is to drive us as far as we have to go in order to find the lights. Plus he had about a thousand gadgets in his car to keep him updated with weather reports and such. We figured if we were going to go all that way, we may as well do it right.

So we met him Saturday night at 6:30PM. It had been a complete cloud cover all day, and that night was no exception. But alas, we tried anyhow. We drove, and drove and drove - even all the way to the border of Finland. But it was simply snowing harder there. We drove until about 2:30AM and found nothing. Kjetil made us a deal though - meet him the next night and we'll try again.

Touchdown
Indeed we, as well as another family from the UK from the night before, showed up again to meet Kjetil Sunday night. He drove us out to a place that was beautiful all on its own.. A remote fjord on the Arctic Sea an hour or so away from town, no lights for miles, snow-covered huge mountains everywhere around and all lit up by the full moon. I shall now describe the experience, but descriptions, and even photos, can do it no justice to actually being there.

We pulled up to this beautiful area and saw a very faint, green cloud off in the distance. Apparently this was the beginning of the show.. About a half hour later, faint, green bands slowly began showing up, stretching from the eastern horizon to the west, and barely but slowly converging in the north, and then disappearing. Then, nothing.

For about 30 minutes.. Then some bands show up again, but this time more vivid, more flourescent, and more fake looking. This time however, one of them stops in front of us before it reaches the northern horizon, and begins to go absolutely nuts. Vertical bars, or columns, begin showing up inside this giant green band, and each contain brilliant, indescribable colors.. And then, each of these bars start moving around, as if they're alive. Then they start speeding up, some of them flashing all the way across the sky, some of them dancing with each other slowly - seriously, as if they were sentient beings.. The best way I can describe this part is, it looked like a party. And even weirder was that it looked like all this was happening no further than 50 feet away, as if we were the audience at a ballet, the green bands and beautiful bars the dancers, the sky the stage, and we, applauding a magnificent performance. This was the craziest thing I've seen in the night sky. It was so dramatic that it actually scared Ana. What an honor to actually have seen this in my life.

This continued for several minutes, lighting up the whole sky and illuminating the clouds; so bright that you could see the reflection of this in the water below. All I kept wondering was, can you possibly imagine what the ancients must have thought about this before more proper (scientific) understanding came to light?

Bergen (Norway)

Tuesday, October 19, 2010 - We hopped on a plane after Copenhagen (something we'll be doing for the duration of our travels in Scandinavia - flying, that is) and headed for Bergen, a ridiculously picturesque port town on the west coast of Norway. This town is everything I pictured Scandinavia to be: fjords everywhere, blistering cold, brightly colored wooden houses, mountains, and tons of blonde people.

We arrived to near-freezing temperature and rain, welcomed the next day with blue skies and warmer, pleasant temperature, and our last day to a torrential downpour of snow.

It still strikes me, especially with the weather they have here, how many buildings and houses are made of wood. The wharf area here in fact is completely made of wood - wood sidewalks, wood stores, wood buildings, etc. Walking through this truly felt like walking through a Western movie set in the 1800s. Walking a tiny bit outside the city center and to the residential area was perhaps the most beautiful of all. Everywhere are tiny streets to get lost in a world of little, unique, brightly colored (doll!) houses. With the fjords and mountains as your backdrop to all this, it's hard not to love.

Our hostel here was quite good as well. It's interesting, there are some hostels that simply seem to breed a spirit of friendship. Not all are like this; it's somewhat of a rare thing. But some, regardless of which guests come and go (and typically we stay longer than most people, so many come and go during our stays), seem to bring all the guests together somehow. This was one of them. Among the backpackers I got to know there was a Spanish programmer basically doing what I'm doing, but who has chosen to live in Bergen now; a local Norwegian who just moved back from Sweden; a quite funny Australian who saved up money at his law job, quit, and is now travelling for months before returning to find a new job; and 2 more Spaniards very interested in things American.

Our last day in Bergen we took a "tour" of the nearby Fjords, although it really just turned out to be a very expensive ferry that dropped us off in the middle of nowhere for about 3 hours. But the boat ride was beautiful.. The majority of the time it snowed, and it snowed hard. How many times in your life will you get to see it snow on the sea?!

København

Wednesday, Oktober 13, 2010 - Here we are in Copenhagen now. Here are some fun facts about Denmark: my !@#!@ it's !@#!#&! expensive here! Actually though, there are some very interesting things I've learned about this country. First, there are only a few handfulls of countries in the world that actually have an official State Religion. Many of the middle east countries do (Islam), Israel kind of does (Judaism), and the Scandanavian countries do (Protestant Christianity - Lutheran). I also noticed some interesting statistics about Denmark (that seem to extend to all the Scandanavian countries really):

1) Denmark has the highest level of income equality,

2) Rated last year as the 2nd most peaceful country in the world,

3) Rated last year as the 2nd least corrupt country in the world,

4) Has the 4th highest ratio of college-degree holders,

5) Has the world's highest minimum wage; and, one of my favorites,

6) According to Wikipedia - "International studies show that the population of Denmark is the happiest of any country in the world."

How could you not be happy, taking trains across water wherever you travel?

Copenhagen
Copenhagen was the only city in Denmark we visited, but we spent 5 (expensive) nights there. It was recently ranked as the 7th most expensive city in the world. To put it into perspective, a beer at a pub will cost you at least $12. A coffee, typically $7. The city itself was cool, although I think I may have built it up in my head a bit much. I'd read articles putting Copenhagen at the #1 coolest spot in Europe. It is indeed a cool European city, but I by no means found it even as a "must" necessarily.

One thing that was fascinating to me was that everybody spoke incredible English.. In fact, sometimes they had absolutely zero accent. In some cases, I feared some of them may speak better English than I. Is this supposed to happen in a foreign country? I don't think so!

I was also intrigued to go to Copenhagen just to visit the hometown of one of my favorite philosophers - Soren Kierkegaard - and the university he attended there. Near the university, we also found one of the coolest cafes I've ever been to.. The walls were lined with bookcases full of all kinds of old books, little rooms upstairs and downstairs with candelit tables and beautiful chairs, begging you to take a nap on them and peruse through a book of antiquity from the shelf next to you. Needless to say, we spent quite a bit of time there once we discovered it.

Christiania

Another interesting area was Christiania on the island of Christianshavn. It's an area smack in the middle of Copenhagen, but after a fire in the 1970s, basically some hippies took it over and created their own commune there, that now I actually think is legally separated from Copenhagen; if not in every respect, certainly in some. Walking out of the area is a little sign that reads "You are now entering the EU". It's very interesting, as I'm reading Plato's The Republic which in part deals with how a society ("State") begins. Rudimentarily from a few people who want food, then want a house, then want a coat. Plato then goes into what makes a State successful and what kills it (not surprisingly, Philosophy pervading the State, and a Philosopher/King is what is asserted to make it successful). Anyhow, as we walked through this area, which is truly different than the rest of Copenhagen, it was impossible not to see Plato's theories playing out, especially watching this society of 850 people evolving from its rudimentary form. It was undoubtedly a sketchy area. Drugs are legal. There are no real 'architects' there to speak of, so everything is homemade. It's a very interesting idea.. Can a commune survive peacefully? 30 years after its inception, it appears the answer here is No. There have been plenty of murders, violence, etc. here, and like I say, the place doesn't feel safe at all. It felt like there were no laws, except whatever seems right to you. Unfortunately they don't let you take pictures in the area!

Pub Experience

Finally, I got to catch my first real views of NFL football this year when we found an English Pub showing games. We met an American (James) and Canadian (Paul) there and hung out with them watching the games.. The 3 of us really felt like we were back in North America watching the games. James is a guy from Atlanta who lived in the Czech Republic with his wife until he was walking up the stairs in their apartment building one night, he slipped and tried to brace himself against the elevator doors, but the doors were open and he fell 7 stories, paralyzing him below the waist. A tragic story, but stimulating conversation talking with the 3 of them about travel, politics, and religion. Paul must be pretty loaded because he kept buying us beers, which I most certainly wouldn't have been able to afford more than 1.