Sheep Guarding Llama

Today was a very busy work day for me.  Figures that we finally get back to the US and it ends up being super busy.  I am working from the kitchen at Dominica’s parents’ house which makes things really hard as there is a lot of noise, constant interruptions and the space is just not very comfortable.  But after the time in Spain, I am used to working at kitchen tables.

I am finally down to the very last scenario is Tropico 4 and took a run at it today.  But after playing right up to the very end of it, I ended up losing.  The final scenario is the hardest one but quite some margin.  I am going to have to try pretty hard on another run at it.

It turned into a very long day with me working through much of the night tonight on a four hour long conference call with the office.

For obvious reasons we slept in quite a bit this morning. We are all really exhausted. Once awake, our first order of business was to get the rental car returned to Enterprise as we had only rented it until early afternoon to keep the cost down. This meant that we had to drive to the far side of Utica to drop it off. I drove the car over and Dominica rode back with Francesca in our Acadia. Francesca and the kids had driven up from Texas to New York in our Acadia this time instead of coming back in her Sequoia.

We got the car dropped off and went right back to the house. Now that we are on the east coast my day starts around noon (although I did not start until one today) instead of late in the evening so I have a lot of adjusting to do. Now we have jet lag to deal with.

We got pizza for dinner and I just worked from the kitchen today. Dominica’s parents were at work today. Everyone is tired so we were busy just decompressing. The kids were super excited to see their cousins and were off playing with them and we barely saw them at all.

Today is our big travel day. An enormous, all day, travel day. Oslo, Norway to Frankfort, New York. We have not had a day like this since late March.

We were up the middle of the morning to get everyone ready to go. We needed to be packed, the apartment cleaned up and out by around one. Our flight is early afternoon but the landlord needs us out of the apartment so that he has time to clean (and hopefully to fix the toilet seat) before the next people move in a few hours after we leave. So that was setting our time table more than anything else. The flight itself was not all that early and we would have been able to relax a bit more if that was our only time constraint.

We had been planning on using the metro station to get ourselves to the downtown train station which would take us back to the airport. Once he came to get the keys and to check on the apartment, though, our landlord offered to pack us into his car and drive us to the train station! What a life saver that was. Lugging all of that luggage (hence why it is called that) around the city is difficult, slow and very painful. There is no way to do that well. It is hard enough doing that in an airport or train station, but doing it onto subways and around city streets is very nearly impossible. This really made a huge difference for us. We were in the train station way ahead of schedule and able to relax, take our time and we were not in pain like we would have been had we been walking all over.

From the downtown train station we took the express back up to the airport which is a very nice ride through the open Norwegian countryside which is just lovely. Luciana and I sat together watching the luggage while Dominica and Liesl sat today in the normal seats. I read the train’s magazine (they had an English version available this time unlike the other direction a few days ago) which was interesting and I learned a bit about the king’s guard in Oslo.

While on the train, which has digital displays which show weather, news and flight inforamation, we learned that our flight had been pushed back by forty five minutes. So our “extra time at the airport” had grown again to more than three hours. Not a big deal but it is going to be a long stop there.

Once at the airport we were free to take some time to look for food as we were there well ahead of our flight. We had a lot of time to kill and, like most European airports, they do not send you to your gate until it is effectively boarding time so you can’t go to the gate and just camp out there waiting for your flight.

Our first stop was Duty Free. Dominica wanted to stock up on Kinder Surprise and a few other things to take back to America. So the girls and I sat on the floor and relaxed for a bit while Dominica did some shopping. She was successful and from there we went looking for a place to eat.

Like in Oslo proper, there was no “Norwegian” food available in the airport. Even travel guides that I was reading were recommending American chain restaurants as “the places to eat” in Oslo. So we ended up going to O’Leary’s, a Irish-ish chain out of Boston. It took at least half of an hour, maybe longer, for us to even get a seat and once we did it was absolutely tiny. We did not really fit and there was no room at all for our bags. I feel like airports really have not figured out how to do these things, everything is too cramped and the servie is not well organized for people needing to catch flights.

Dominica and I both got the fish and chips which was very good. Service was very slow, which we though was fine as we had so much time to kill. After we ate Dominica and the girls made a bathroom run. I had considered getting dessert while they were gone but it ended up taking me from well before they left and the entire time that they were gone, about forty minutes in total, just to get the check! Forty minutes, for a check, in an airport? That’s crazy. If you don’t have hours to kill you can’t even remotely consider eating in the Oslo airport. That’s a problem And who would guess that it would take hours to get to eat in an airport chain restaurant? There is no reasonable way to guage that experience.

We got out of O’Leary’s and it was time to stand and watch the departure board for them to tell us that it was time to go to our gate. Your gate is not official until that point. So you stand and watch the board and once your gate is listed, you go for it briskly. We did this and it was a good thing that we were on top of things.

Between the waiting zone and our gate, which was gate 50, was border control. This is tough to figure out because gate 49 is before border control and there is no line to get there. So when we were sent to gate 50 we found ourselves in an immense line waiting for the border control to process everyone’s passports as they attempted to leave the country. This is relatively problematic given that you are not supposed to go through this point (or even know that you should go through this point) until they tell you to which gate you are to head. But this would not have been a big deal since we were sent to the gate about an hour before departure – except for one small detail, when they told us to “go to the gate” we had an hour before the delayed departure. Once we were in the hour long border control line they suddenly moved the departure time back to the original time, which meant we went from “head to the hour long gate line” instructions to “last call to board” in just a few minutes!

This created quite a bit of panic, as you can imagine, since everyone in the hour long line was trying to get to a flight that was already announcing that they were about to stop boarding and close the doors. They literally gave only about five minutes to go from the main terminal, through border control with a line that was an hour long when we got there and easily ninety minutes long for the people who were not as fast, and to find your gate and board your plane! It was insane.

Several of us managed to flag down airport officials and try to explain that the flight had been moved up to an impossible time after we were already “in the process” of getting to the gate, long after it was too late to speed up the process. It took a bit of convincing to get someone at the airport to do something about it but finally they sent a runner to the airlines to let them know that the entire passenger list was trying to get to the plane and had no way to do so. They also told border control who opened up additional booths to rush people through. It still took most of an hour and no one was sure that Norwegian Air was going to keep the doors open for us.

Thankfully we made it, as we believe everyone else did, but it was very stressful and completely unprofessional how it was handled. While the Oslo Airport is very clean and attractive it turned out to be run just horribly between the restaurant being too slow to really use, being able to be proactive and getting to your gate early, making changing to boarding after it is too late for people to change their plans, not communicating well, etc. Everything in the airport was handled very poorly. We were very unimpressed.

Once on the plane things went far better. Dominica sat on one side of the plane and the girls and I sat in the middle of the plane with a whole center aisle of three seats to ourselves. I sat in the middle with Luciana on my right and Liesl on my left. Luciana was pretty grumpy and complained until we were at the end of the runway. We were worried that it was going to be a long flight with her being unhappy the entire way but, true to form, the moment that the engines revved up she grabbed my arm, put her head on it and was fast asleep before we even made it to the end of the runway!

Luciana slept the entire flight, waking up only about twenty minutes before langing in New York. Liesl was awake pretty much the entire flight and busied herself watching shows, colouring or just playing. They both did just great and were no problem at all. Dominica napped a little and watched some shows. I did not sleep but did manage to make it through three movies including Horrible Bosses and Horrible Bosses 2, neither of which had I ever seen before. I also watched a really weird movie called The Watch which was okay. It passed the time and the flight went by very quickly. Before we really new it we were landing at JFK in Brooklyn.

Getting through customers was not too bad although the lines were pretty long. We got our luggage and got out of the airport. We discovered that we really missed Europe the moment that we were outside and dealing with the never ending mess that is JFK and many US airports. The air train was down to maintenance and all of the signage telling us how to get to the rental car areas was incorrect. The airport had people stationed to help you get on the right buses to get where you needed to go but none of them were labeled and they were all lounging about hanging out with each other as if they were off duty and not helping people to get to the right places and when they did help they were often wrong. We missed the first bus completely, never knowing that we were supposed to get on it as the bus and the signs were both mislabeled and the directing staff were busy talking about the love lives of other employees and acting like they were airport patrons instead of employees. When the second bus came and we had already lost half an hour of our night we were told to wait in one place because the bus would come to us. Of course, it did not and had we not ignore the guides and ran into traffic to get on the bus we would have been left behind again.

As it was the bus was full far beyond capacity. Dominica and the girls sat far in the back and I could not see them. I stood in the front, literally standing with my back to the front windsheld, holding onto some of the luggage as there was nowhere to set it down and watching the rest of the luggage from afar as best as I could. The whole situation was ridiculous. I could not put my arms down and had no where to stand and no safety at all.

At one of the stops some useless “can’t be bothered to do their job” guide, just like the other ones who hadn’t been working, kept telling people to cram onto the overfull bus, even when the bus driver kept telling them that they were over capacity and no one could come on, and the guide kept screaming at me to move back and not to stand in the front even though it was clear that there wasn’t the slightest place for me to go – not even enough space for me to take a step. The bus driver kept telling them that we were full and that I had nowhere to go. It was riduculous.

Finally the bus dropped us off at Federal Circle which, we were told, had the rental cars but nothing was really labeled and we were really just guessing at what to do. Luckily we found the shuttle bus for Enterprise after waiting on an unlabeled circle for a while. It was getting quite late and we were getting pretty worried that we were not going to be able to get to our rental car.

Once Enterprise got us, though, everything went smoothly. The shuttle driver was super friendly and helpful. He drove us right over and the staff met us outside, helped us with luggage, found a place to put it so that we were not pulling and carrying it all over while dealing with the rental. This was probably the best rental car experience that I have ever had. Everyone at Enterprise at JFK was super friendly and helpful. They really went out of their way to make it a simple and pleasant experience.

We ended up with a Chrysler 200 which was a really good choice. Big enough to fit everything and was comfortable to drive. I was pretty happy when I learned that that was the car that we were getting. We got it all loaded up, which was still extremely full but easier to deal with than things had been in our Corsa back in Spain, and we were off! Finally done with planes for several weeks (I will be flying out to California in about three weeks and then off to Panama in a month so the break is not a huge one.)

It feels strange to be back in the United States. Everything is in English, dollars and miles. And everyone drives so slowly. And the cars are so big and the roads so rough.

We were pretty tired for the long drive through Brooklyn, then Queens and up through Westchester Country and on to the New York State Thruway. It is anything but a trivial drive to go from JFK up to Dominica’s parents’ house. At least four or five hours which isn’t terrible except that we have been going all day and to our internal clocks it was many hours later than the local time would indicate. So it felt like we were driving all through the night after having had a very long day.

It was one or two in the morning when we pulled into Frankfort. We were completely exhausted and ready to go straight to bed. Francesca and the Grice kids had arrived early in the day so were all unpacked, set up and long asleep. We have the little upstairs bedroom with the three little beds in it (two twin beds and one kid’s bed that is even smaller than a twin.) Dominica took her usual bed to herself. Liesl got the kid’s bed since she has been sleeping with me the last several days. Luciana and I took the other twin bed. We were all off to sleep as quickly as could be.

Our first cycle of our European adventure is now over and we are back in America for a little over a month. We will be all over New York, Texas and California whie we are here. We will be back “on the road” on July 25^th when we head down to Panama.

Today is our last full day in Norway. We got a total of five full days here, from Tuesday morning to Sunday morning. Tomorrow we have to get up and get moving immediately to get to the airport and fly back to New York. We are not looking forward to that which adds some stress to today, but at least we have all of today to do nothing but see the city. It is unfortunate that I have to routinely work very late at night, going into the wee hours of the morning, because it makes the next day so hard to do anything. It is nearly impossible to get up early and get moving because I am so exhausted if we do that.

Our plan today was to get up and get to the metro station and take the subway to the bus station and from there catch a bus or a ferry going to the island of museums (I do not know its name but there is an obvious and well known island in Oslo that is full of the most famous museums.) It took a while for me to get up, get moving, get the girls ready and get to the metro station. By the time that we were there it was getting late and we were worried about being able to get to the museums before they closed.

It took a bit to figure out how to get tickets for the subway since, like much of Europe, they simply do not accept American credit or debit cards in the machines here. They also do not take cash, only change! Why caries enough change to do this I have no idea. Very impractical. Dominica went into a shop in the subway station and asked if they could make change from a five hundred Kroner note so that she could buy subway tickets. They told her that they could not make change but they could sell her the tickets. So that turned out to be easier than expected.

Using the subway itself was pretty easy. We are staying on the eastern end of the main downtown subway lines which, like in Dallas, all converge for several stations through the heart of the city so for about five stops (four in Dallas) you can take any line to get to any of the five and only once the subway leaves downtown do the different lines diverge to head off in their respective directions.

We took the subway to the City Hall stop which was right in the heart of the city and on the waterfront. Once there, all of our directions that we had been following that explained how to get transportation to the island of museums fell apart. The bus that we needed was on the list to come here but the schedule showed it never actually coming. So our window to make it to the island was rapidly closing.

After spending a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to figure out what to do we gave up on the station and set out walking down towards where other transport links, like the tram, bus station and ferries, were located. By this point we were pretty sure that we had missed the museums and I was convinced that we needed to just bail on that idea and slow down and just relax and see the city itself. We can do the museums and other sights some other trip to Oslo. We don’t want to burn all of our time and energy trying to get to a museum that we will likely miss and even if we don’t, will get almost no time at. We’ve done one museum in town already and while the girls like museums we don’t want to wear them out on them either.

We walked down to the port and never found a clear way to get to where we had been wanting to go. The public transport links are just very confusing and dealing with things in Norwegian is not something that we are good at.

There were huge crowds down at the port. It seems that everyone in Oslo comes out on a beautiful day like this and just walk all over. (We would learn from our land lord later that this weekend was a near record for this time of year and was the equivalent to high summer weather and was nearly peak sun and temperatures for Oslo so the city was all heading to beaches and trying to get in outside activity as it was pushing towards seventy degrees which is a rarity anywhere in Norway.) There was a lot of live music at the port and we stopped for a minute to listen to an awesome Dixieland Jazz Band there. I tried to get Liesl to give them money but she is too shy and I had to do it.

The one thing that we absolutely had to do was to ride a ferry around the harbour. The ferry, as long as we were taking a local one, was included in our metro passes for the day, as were buses and trams, which makes things easy. We hunted around for ferry options and found one that went to several of the main island in the harbour but would not take too long. A long ferry is a concern for Dominica as she gets seasick so easily. The waters here are not nearly as bad as in the Straights of Gibraltar, which is good, but the ferries are much smaller and slower, which is not good. So we were taking our chances.

The ferry that we picked was a good one. It started off going right in front of the famous Akershus Castle, which sits right on the water and is the residence of the royal family. That was awesome to get to see. There is a model of that castle in Walt Disney World that we have been to several times as they have the best of the princess dinners there and an awesome Norwegian menu.

From there the ferry took us from island to island so we got lots of great views of Oslo itself and got to see what the extended parts of the city were like. It was a very nice day and perfect for doing this. The girls were pretty restless after not too long, though. So everyone was quite ready to get off of the boat and walk around once it returned to port.

Our next goal was to find some lunch. We ended up walking all over the downtown area trying to find something semi-local. We had been told by locals that no one eats Norwegian in Norway except on holidays, at home, with family. So Norwegian restaurants just do not exist. We spent at least an hour trying to find reasonable food options and just could not. Everything was an Irish pub, American bar and grill (Hard Rock Cafe, TGI Fridays, Burger King, etc.) or similar. Everything was a chain from the US, even the Irish pubs were from Boston, not Ireland. We walked and walked trying to find anything that would not be embarassing to eat at but failed.

We did find some nice parks to walk through and the girls spent a little time climbing some monuments which they love to do. The parks were all very busy. At one point we walked through Oslo’s Musikfest and I got a great picture of Liesl posing by the concert area and someone in the concert crowd took a picture of me taking a picture of her.

From there we tried going to a toy store that Dominica had seen and the girls were excited to check out but, sadly, they were closed by the time that we got there. We were pretty bummed because we had been hoping to take the girls there for a few hours and had been saving it as a motivation for them. It also meant that we walked quite far in a direction that we really did not want to go.

We finally gave up and settled on TGI Fridays for our late lunch or early dinner meal. Not what we wanted at all but we were running out of options. They at least had a clear set of vegetarian options that looked decent and we knew that the food would be good. It was probably the right choice and, if you really think about it, this is a major part of the Oslo experience – the locals eat at TGI Fridays, so if we were to find something “more authentic”, it really would not be. The restaurant was quite busy and all locals.

We had a nice meal, quite expensive, and it turns out that our waitress was a student at the University of Rochester! So we had a lot to talk about. Talk about a small world!

After we ate our last big thing for the day was to go to see the world famous statue garden in Oslo. This is the park shown in every travelogue of Oslo, probably the biggest and most important thing to see in the entire city. It is a large municipal mall filled with hundreds of enormous statues. The artist that did the work dedicated his life to this one park. It is effectively his entire body of work all in this one place.

We were able to get there by taking the tram from the harbour area which turned out to be quite easy. It was a good distance away but riding the tram was swift and included in our existing tickets so we were very happy.

Dominica had guessed that this city park would have a playground and did it ever. It is probably the biggest playground that we have ever seen. Epic would be the only way to describe it. There was so much for the girls to do, they never even got a chance to scratch the surface. They did slides and all manner of climbing things. But they seemed to most enjoy an extensive sandbox installation with kid sized “stops” to play in and some cool sand machinery that would hoist sand up in buckets and let them empty it into a shoot and have it come down below. It was all very neat and they loved playing there.

Luciana was really into playing “bakery” and she would make sand cakes and then take them into the “shop” to sell them from the sales window. It was adorable.

We probably spent an hour on the playground before taking the girls to see the statue garden which was really impressive. It was a long walk and it climbed up a hill. Sadly, at this point, the sun was getting low which made things hard to see and both girls were getting really exhausted. Luciana demanded to ride in her stroller the whole time and Liesl walked what she could but by the time we were done I had to carry her much of the way which was wearing me out very quickly.

That was as much as we could handle for the day. We are done. We walked back through the mall and to the tram stop and were on our way back to the harbour front. By this point it was eight or possibly nine in the evening. Time to get back and get ready for bed and tomorrow’s travels.

Getting back was not too bad. We were back to the apartment well before ten and there was really nothing more to do than to pack and get everyone off to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a painfully long day and absolutely no fun. Today was good, we got to see a bit of the city and are much better prepared for touring it the next time that we are here, which could easily be later this year. We wish that we could have seen a lot more of it and really which that we could have done the “Norway in a Nutshell” tour but seeing how we all felt today, I am quite glad that we did not attempt that. None of us was really up for it and spening over a thousand dollars to wear ourselves out for the day would not have been good.

Next time that we come to Oslo for a flight transfer I think that we will shoot for less time during the week. Being in Oslo just for me to work from the apartment is overly expensive and it is too cumbersome to try to do anything so better to remain in a lower cost location and only spend weekend time here, I think.

No more things to see and do. Our fun time in Europe is over for this trip. Off to America first thing tomorrow morning.

We have, thus far, blown off all of our potential sightseeing time this week just from being so tired and the realities of travel and work. It was just unrealistic for us to try to get out and do anything in Oslo between being exhausted from getting to Norway and needing to be able to handle getting ourselves back to New York coming up on Sunday. So this week was a loss as far as seeing Norway in any real way. But we are pretty sure that we will be coming through here on a regular basis so we are not too concerned about that and we got a change to get to know the local neighbourhood a little bit. Not the touristy kind of stuff but at least we have some nice exposure to this little corner of things which, in many ways, is the better thing to see anyway.

But today, knowing that we have very little chance to do much of anything in Oslo, we made a real effort to get up early and get out and see some stuff with the girls. From the maps we could tell that we are just a tiny bit south of one of the city’s famous parks and, most importantly, the park that contains the Edvard Munch Museum which Dominica has been wanting to see. It has been many years since our last attempt at taking the girls to an art museum, the last one was in Colmar, France in May, 2012. The girls are a lot older now and we are pretty sure that they will both appreciate the art a lot more now. So that was our chosen destination for the day.

We had a quick breakfast at the house and then walked north to the park. On our way through the park the girls discovered a small playground. They have not had a playground to use since we left Spain so we gave them a few minutes to burn off some energy and told them that if they were good that we would stop back at the playground on the way back from the museum. We knew that they needed some time to play now, before the museum, or they would just be too squirmy to handle it.

The playground was small but we were the only people there. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, perfect for being out and about in Norway. The sun is practically endless here. It doesn’t set until after eleven at night and it is up around three. It’s mind boggling and there are weeks to go until we hit the longest days of the year. And we are not “that far north.” I can’t even imagine what it must be like in the more northern Norwegian cities!

This playground was primarily a little pirate ship to play on for imaginative play and a long slide build into a slope of the ground that was long but slow. It was all really designed for younger kids. Liesl was a bit old for it but she is so good at imaginative play that she was perfectly happy and both girls liked the long slide. So they had fun and we had a nice little place to sit in the park.

The Munch Museum was not far away at all. It was a tiny walk to get there. The museum is really not very large and is quite focused. Very nice, however, and well done. There is a cafe there and there was a fair number of people at the museum. Certainly quite busy.

We totally lucked out and completely by chance the Munch Museum was hosting a large collection of paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam with the majority of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings on display! This was pretty amazing since we did not know that this was the case, had not planned on this in any way and Van Gogh is not just Dominica’s favourite painter but also the one that the girls know best. Liesl and Luciana are both already familiar with a large number of Van Gogh’s works partially from home schooling and partially because of the large exposure to them from watching Doctor Who.

The presentation at the museum was to show Van Gogh and Munch side by side in what we are pretty sure was some graduate student’s comparative thesis. The museum did a good job of presenting the similarities, differences, relationships and walking us through the parallel lives of the two artists who lived at the same time, went to the same places, have so much in common in their works and never met one another.

We started by going to the film that is shown as an introduction by the museum. But this was not very gripping for the girls and Luciana was not prepared to sit through that so we only got to watch about half of it. Thankfully the real paintings and being able to walk around worked and both girls did really well.

The museum had little sticker strips and maps for the girls. The stickers each had a small portion of a painting on them and you had to walk around and try to figure out which painting the portion was from and then put that sticker into the map to show that you had found it. It was just an activity, there was no prize or anything, but it was effective at engaging the girls. Both of them were able to find some things on their own and none of it was really easy. So they were pretty busy with that.

The Van Gogh works were really impressive and we had a great time getting to see them. Dominica could not contain herself the entire time; she was so excited to be getting to see these paintings in person. What we discovered, though, is that the Munch works are not very good. In fact, none of them were particularly impressive and it is really surprising that anyone goes to see his paintings. Unlike Van Gogh’s which were well lit and obviously very masterful and intentional, the Munch works were kept less lit, presumably to make it more difficult to really determine just how sloppy they were, and they really looked like when successful were not intentional – like a child who paints many, many paintings and eventually gets one or two that are passable but never appear to have a command of the medium and are not truly expressing anything.

The most disappointing “painting” of all was “The Scream”, Munch’s most famous work. It turns out that when shown in books, prints or on television that it is heavily retouched. The original is kept very much in the shadows and appears to be a sloppy crayon drawing, nothing like what you see of it elsewhere. It really looks like something that an elementary school kid drew, with crayon, in art class to be displayed at the elementary school art show. It’s a very good work for a fifth grader, but even by high school it would not be something that you would be especially proud of. We were quite shocked by how staggeringly bad Munch’s works were, not just as a corpus of work but famous pieces individually too. Picasso, by contrast, did a tremendous amount of work and there are plenty of pieces that anyone would likely hate but he has so many that show incredibly mastery that there is no question that what he was painting was intentional and he was in control of the finished product. Munch, I feel, was just playing at being an artist and somehow got lucky. Very much the Emperor’s New Clothes. No one wants to say how little he was a viable artist, but everyone must be thinking it.

The museum was a great experience, even through Munch’s works turned out to be so poor, but with Van Gogh there it was a museum trip of a lifetime and we are so glad that we did it. It was quite small so probably only took about an hour to complete. Once we were done we hit the gift shop and got a few small items for the girls like a Munch colouring book, a multi-colour pen, etc.

On the walk back to the apartment we went to the park and let the girls play for a while. We did not have a lot of time because I needed to get back to the apartment to get to work but we were able to let them play and it was a nice afternoon.

On the walk back to the apartment we went through the local subway station so we knew where it was and how to get there for tomorrow when we plan to actually get out and see Oslo since it is Saturday and I do not have to work. We don’t travel again until Sunday so tomorrow is a completely free day for us. We also found a bar just up the street from the apartment that had a NY Mets sign in the window. Very odd. The Norwegian obsession with all things American is disturbing. Why anyone living in Oslo would have the slightest concern for the performance of the New York Mets is beyond me.

Back to the apartment and I worked all afternoon and evening. Since it is Friday I did not have to work quite so late into the night. Looking forward to tomorrow and getting to see the city a bit.

As every night here in Oslo, Liesl and I got the small room and shared the slightly larger bed there. Dominica and Luciana took the large room with the smaller, separate beds.