well, what to do for fun? we saw the national museum. the postal museum. the modern art museum. The modern art museum basically just takes anything new and important or interesting, so we saw original Tom of Finland sketches. I know if you think of finland, you think of Tom.

The national museum was alo very nice. we got a tip about the head when we were in russia. "go to turkey" they said, "but stop in finland on the way and take in some museums." was it a clue? i didn't know. but there in the national museum was a carving of the head of john the baptist. just the head, it never belonged to a larger statue. if you hold it over your head while praying, it cures headaches, according to the poorly translated note below it. is this a clue or just a very strange sense of humor?

i saw an organ concert. christi seems to have picked something up in russia (no not stuff with lenin on it, more like something from unpasturized ice cream), but she's getting over it very quickly. We're taking a train to a town called turku tommorrow and then an overnight ferry to stockholm where we do not yet have hostel reservations or else i would tell you about them.

Why you should not write in your journal too late at ight: you might write poetry:

We're seen the Nobel museum, which is quite nice- we're not smart enough to get one (well, except for writing. shouldn't this lovely journal win something? we'll run spell check later) and uhh..-christi

There are a lot old biuildings around here. the internet cafe we're in dates from the 17th century. it's kind of weird being in a 300 year old server room. Uh what she said. our hostel is half on a boat, half on land. we're on the land part, but one of the standard postcards has a picture of our hostel on it. the boat part is a sail boat, a really big one and it has a cerfew since they raise the gang plank at night.
the nobel museum had this dry cleaner-like conveyor belt system which had the names and pictures of past winners on it. it was actually a very strange museums, but it least it didn't have any 18th century paintings of men in wigs. we've seen many of those. we saw an icon of st. john the baptist in the swedish national museum, but he was intact. we also saw 100 years of chair designs. i kid you not. and the the coffee pot room. help! and many other facinating things, but no opera so far, i want to go but christi wants to wait till germany.
--celeste

Uh yeah, have you driven a fjord lately? i keep thinking of the opening credits of monty python's quest for the holy grail and telling christi that my sister got bitten by a moose once. she ran into some guys explaining that they'd gone to sweden because of the swedish chefs on the muppet show, but still she finds endless monty python references amusing. she's definietly the girl for me. if anyone rembers the name of the guy in the hitchikers guide who designed the fjords, send us email so i have new joke material. (christi lied we have 8 minutes of net time, but it's still not much). Yeah, in lfam you can hike along the highway, see some really old stuff a few too many kilometers from the train station or make fjord jokes. we saw a 16th century farm. it had sheep. they looked a lot younger than you'd expect. still baaaing at us and everything.
the cool thing you can do in flam, which we didn't know about until too late, is to rent a bike at the top and ride the bike trail down the the near sea level valley (from 3k feet...i'm not metric yet) and then catch the train back up. that would have been super cool. not that i'm complaining. this is darn near the prettiest place i've ever been, except for a sculpture park in oslo. it's a pretty country. bucolic. (gre word, there).
-- celeste

Travel is of course a learning experience. I now know the word for sale in every scandinavian language. finnish = rea. swedish = ale. norweigan = slag and danish = sal... or esle the e fell of the sign i saw this morning. I also learned some other useful swedish words: hey = hi. tek = thanks. glass = ice cream. frukost = breakfast. appelsin = orange. As you can see, I'm well on my way to fluency. I also saw the word "slut" plastered across the faces of people performing in musicals and over descriptions of available dresses at a clothing store and many other places, so it can be said the swedes are a judgemental people.... oh... christi says it means sold out...

We only spent a day and a half in Oslo, because we knew nothing about it (we went to a museum in sweden that talked about the history of waste disposal in bergen and sewage treatment in the middle ages, so we're not ignorant of that. also, do NOT go to the medival history museum in stockholm. don't say we didn't warn you). This was a mistake because Oslo is very very beautiful. We spent a while in the Munch museum and saw more than 50 version of the scream. It was a sort of a theme in munch's work. He gave it various titles. "Dispair" "agony" "anxiousness" "angst". Then he got famous and went to therapy and started using brighter colors. just think, if prozac had existed, there would have been no scream, or atleast, fewer versions. the most famous one is painted on cardboard, which i think might be a sign of low self esteem or something. it'a like doing all your drawings on scratch paper cuz you don't want to waste the good paper.
We also went to a sculpture park, which I can't remeber the name of but Christi probably knows. She says it's Frogparken. At least that's the tram stop. This guy spent 30 years doing a series of sculptures depicting the cycle of life. The result is amazing. There are only a couple hundred statues there, including a huge monolith of writhing bodies and a tremendous fountain being held up by six sculpted men. He's got sort of a masculinist outlook, but his ideas and execution are amazing. There are men women and babies everwhere. Everybody's naked. And they are laughing, crying, hugging, fighting, being enraged, being calm. One of the statues is of a toddler throwing a tantrum and it's dead-on. In another some guy is had enough of it and is kicking the legion of babies closing in on him. It's very strange (metaphor is everywhere) but very very cool. we took about 50 rolls of film, so images may be forthcoming.

Now we're in Denmark. We rode an all night bus to get here. It was free with our rail pass. Beware of things that are free.
We saw about 500 sights yesturday, none of which I can remeber because I was sleepwalking, so we might have to go see tham all again and spend an extra day here. Our hostel had six people in two bunk beds in a room smaller than christi's parents bathroom. Heck, it was smaller than their closet. Maybe the size of our bathroom. Anyway, six people, tiny room, no ventilation.... I was thinking it was bad that I had not gone to a sauna in Finland because they're very proud of their saunas and they've got a lot of them (the whole country could go at the same time and there'd be surplus space in them), but i mourn that no longer cuz i slept in one. well, i'm sure the finns have much nicer spaces for that (and bigger too) and you know, sleep is kind of a strong word. So we have a much nicer room now. you could fit 20 of those bunk beds in it, but there's no nobody there but us two! but why they have all those empty bunk beds is mysterious. just kidding.

I bought pants in Norway. If there's one thing Norweigans know, it's pants. Anyway, I told Tiffany that I would not mail home dirty laundry to her, even if decided I would rather have another pair of pants that zipped off at the knee instead of jeans and shorts. well, um.... be looking for a package...
and I bought a digeridu in copenhagen. It's a little known fact that the aboriginies stole the idea from here. so little known in fact, that it might not be true at all. We were walking back from the Museum of Interior Decorating (you know, some danish words look like german, so i think i know them and then we end up at the museum of interior decorating which sadly is a true story) when we passed an antique shop, which, around here, is like saying we passed a street sign there are so darn many of them. But I looked in the window and saw the Icon for the Beheading of John the Baptist! We went at once into the shop and asked the proprietor if he had the First, Second or Third Finding of the Precious Head of St John the Baptist. And he had one of the entire life of dear old John, including the beheading and the first and second finding, but not the third I guess because enough is enough already. It looked very old and was beautiful, about 1.5 ft square. I was ready to devise a way to attach it to my backpack. We asked the price. about 1000 US Dollars. And it gave no clue to our quest, which one day may be named the fourth finding of his head, should we succeed in locating it. But what would it be doing in Denmark anyway? Notheless, we are scouring antique shops in case it's there someplace. The icon we saw is still in that antique shop, so if anyone is wodnering what to get me for my birthday or something... or you know, it might look great in your chapel or living room.

-- celeste

We're headed to Berlin on August 2nd. We are not traveling overnight.
-- christi