Six hours later, we’ve done Berlin. The day started with a 5:00 AM breakfast, 6:30 train departure for a 2.5 hour ride to Berlin’s East station. Viking used to use buses, which took four hours each way. Roughly 650 passengers – 2/3 of the ship’s passengers – 20 busses full – made the trip.

This was a classical “panoramic” tour – ride by bus through city traffic, hop off the bus for a 15 minute photo op and away we go to the next stop.  And this is Prussia, not beer-swilling, laid-back Bavaria: “Vee vill be back on the bus in Exactly 15 minutes.” Shooting pictures through the window from a moving bus isn’t ideal either. Yes I know, I can hear many of you groaning, “Poor devils! Sounds horrible. That’s not for me.”

Yes . . . but. Berlin is a big sprawling city with long distances between important sites. Making things even more difficult, many of the important points of this, a history tour focusing on the Twentieth century, have disappeared. They have been replaced by the massive reconstruction projects that have rebuilt much of the city, especially East Berlin. Interestingly, the East has received more rebuilding than the West. Maybe that’s because there was more to reconstruct in the East. The East had not only the bomb damage incurred during WWII but it suffered even more as the Soviets tore down politically-offensive buildings and as conditions deteriorated under the communistic Democratic Republic of Germany.  Whatever the reason, our guide, a West Berliner, says the East looks much better than the West today.

For one who remembers when the Berlin Wall went up and when it came down it’s sobering to realize that the wall has as of this year been down longer than it was up. It was erected  in 1961 not by the Soviets but by the East Berlin Army who wanted to stop the brain drain from East to West. Later Stalin, miffed because he didn’t receive reparations after the war, cut off road access to West Berlin, leading to the Berlin airlift. We saw a few remaining sections of the wall maintained as remembrances, but there is far more Wall in foreign museums than exists in Berlin. The path followed by the wall is documented by two narrow bricks set in the road’s pavement.

Our guide used to visit relatives in the East once or twice a year.  It was a one-way door of course; West could visit Eest but not the opposite. Westerners could walk up and touch the wall. The area in front of the eastern side of the wall was a kill zone patrolled by armed guards on foot and in observation towers.

Part of our tour was a real German lunch – sausages, meat balls and slabs of pork served with potatoes, sauerkraut and beer. Oomph pa, am I stuffed, especially since I had to buy us ice cream cones this afternoon so I could get change to tip the guide and driver, never mind the German bread roll stuffed with mustard sauce, peanuts and wine they served on the train coming home. They may need to deploy the cargo sling to hoist me back on board.

Even though everything is thoroughly up to date in East Berlin, the pain of reunification remains. Our train to and from Berlin passed through large tracts of farm land – grain fields , I’d say – but no cute little farm houses like you see in all the magazines. Why? Because we traveled through the former GDR – East Germany – where the farms are today mostly large corporate farms rather than family farms as is the case in the old West Germany. Under Communism, land was handed over to the GDR and farms were run as collectives. During reunification the government went to great lengths to return land to the owners as of 1949. But many East Germans simply walked away or didn’t have the skills and experience to operate the farms.

At the time of reunification the government struggled to find a way to bring East living conditions to an acceptable level. Remember, Germany is a democratic welfare state. Even today the East has much lower income levels than the West, especially outside Berlin. Unemployment levels in the East run 15% or more. The rate is 1% in Berlin. West Berliners pay a reunification tax to fund economic redistribution – not a popular tax.

What does Berlin feel like? If Copenhagen felt like a big city, Berlin feels like a really big city. It sprawls. I forget the exact size but the guide compared Berlin in geographic area with under 4 million people to Mexico City with population 75 million.

Berlin is styled in some areas to resemble Paris, which maybe it does. But Berlin’s boulevards feel more constrained, maybe because car parking slots are intermixed with shade trees, somewhat altering the feel. It probably feels good to Berliners looking for places to park their Beemers. We’re told that Berlin is growing rapidly, being especially attractive to the young. It’s a liberal, open culture with lots of cultural and entertainment options. A large entrepreneurial start-up business climate has developed. Population is growing by 25,000 per year.

And so it wasn’t all that bad. The guide was good. He showed us all the important tourist destinations and gave us an understandable recounting of recent history. He related personal stories that helped bring it to life. Berlin is certainly the most culturally complex and historically interesting places we’ve visited on this trip and on many other trips. So yes, it wasn’t perfect, but on a hot (89 degree) day we covered a lot more ground and learned a lot more than we would have wandering around on our own, map in hand.

Tonight we’re off for Gdańsk, Poland. The good news: I wrote this on the train so maybe we can get to bed early tonight!

By the way, Judy has put together a short video of our trip in Norway. Here’s a link:

http://judyrick.zenfolio.com/viking_scandinavia_2018

I’ve always been a patron of the arts, including sculpture, and there is no more iconic image of a city than Copenhagen’s “The Little Mermaid” statue, inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tail. Imagine my delight in discovering the mermaid right in front of our ship today.

Imagine my surprise later on to discover a more, shall we say, diminutive and more reserved version a few hundred meters further down the quay. Based on the number of tourists crowded around, I surmise that this smaller one must be the original, probably more along the lines of what HCA was thinking at the time. I later learned that the more robust one is named Dolly.

Since our trip to the Viking Ship Museum didn’t leave until 12:45 we decided to take the shuttle bus to the downtown section of Copenhagen and do some exploring on our own. The bus dropped us off at a major intersection, a large vehicular circle with a statue of some guy on a horse. Unfortunately the whole circle has been dug up for betterment so we never identified the horseman.

We did manage, with the help of two maps, which we shared with Robin and Doris, two shipmates off on a similar adventure, to find a complex of three collocated parks, one including the Rosenborg Castle where they house the Danish Crown Jewels and other such stuff (we didn’t take the time to go in).

We then found our way down Bremerholm to the Round Tower. When astronomer Tycho Brahedied in 1601, King Charles IV built an observatory in his honor. We didn’t know about the staircase to the top (darn) but did poke our heads in to the church that is attached.

Next the Christiansborg Palace, the home of the Prime Minister, Parliament and the Supreme Court – it’s the only building to house all three branches of government in the world. Her Majesty Queen Margarethe II uses the Palace to perform her queenly duties. We didn’t go in but Robin and Doris did. We left them and headed back to the ship, passing the mermaids on the way. We arrived about an hour before our guided tour left, just enough time to hit the chow line up on Deck 7.

So we saw a lot of Copenhagen on foot – more than the guided tours cover. But we didn’t get any of the details – which king built what, what’s inside the buildings, etc. Most of the information I provided above I got from google. So why not do the free tour and get the straight skivvy from a guide?  Maybe we should have but what we did get is a feel for Copenhagen. It’s a bustling major city with lots of construction, lots of traffic, lots of shopping, lots of tourists and zillions of bicycles, all of which are driven with little concern for doddering old folk tourists with cameras slung around their necks. This isn’t a medieval city that’s grown up into a big city (even though it is). It just feels like a big, vibrant city. And besides, it’s fun to navigate on your own and to blaze a trail through uncharted wilderness (the maps weren’t all that good).

After lunch it’s on the bus for a 45 minute drive to Roskilde Cathedral. The first church built on this site was by King Harold Bluetooth (yes, the communications standard invented by Danes, who named it after the king) around 985. The present brick church was built in the 1170s. No wood in this baby, and hence no fires to speak of in 900 years. Unlike the Norskies the Danes use stone and brick, not wood and hence have suffered far fewer fires. Do it right the first time, I always say.

The interesting thing about this Cathedral (one of 60-odd in Denmark, meaning there are 60 odd bishops) is that it is the final resting place for 39 kings and queens since the middle ages and each and every Danish king and queen since the reformation. King Bluetooth is thought to be buried on the grounds but no one knows where. Queen Margarethe’s spot is ready to go although it’s hidden from view until it’s needed.

I won’t bore you with the Danish royal lineage (I dozed off in the bus when the guide droned on and on explaining it), but here are a couple of tidbits interesting to me:

• There have been two royal lineages since the 1400s: The house of Oldenburgheld the Danish Crown between 1448 and 1863, when it passed to the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. The two houses are related at the cousin level.
• The neat thing about Danish royalty in these two houses is that they’ve been named Christian and Frederick, alternating, time after time. The last ones were Christian X and Frederick IX. Frederick IX had three girls so Girl #1, Margarethe, picked up the reins in 1972.
• The only other Queen, Margarethe I, was the one who succeeded in uniting Denmark, Sweden and Denmark into a single kingdom.
• Many of the kings spent lots of time and fortune fighting the Swedes. They stayed out of European wars until Christian IV dragged Denmark into the 30 Years’ War.

Finally we visited the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde. Back in 1962 five Viking ships from 1070 were discovered in the Roskilde fjord. The remnants were recovered and put back together and are on display at this museum. The five ships were deliberately sunk (filled with rocks) to block one of the three entrances to the Roskilde Fjord. The ships were of different sizes. Some were built to carry cargo; some were narrower and hence faster war ships.

Based on these ships a number of replicas have been constructed using not only the same design but also the same tools and fabrication methods used by the Vikings. They have been sailed to a number of European ports, including Dublin, Ireland in 2007. One replica has been under sail (and oar) for more than 30 years and has been retired. A replacement is under construction and visitors can watch the hewing of wood, forging of nails, weaving of sail fabric and rope making.

So that was a busy day. We’re going to have another one tomorrow: an all-day trip to Berlin. The train leaves at 6:30 AM so we need to get to bed early tonight. The weather forecast is for 89 degrees with showers possible in the afternoon.

Before knowing any better we signed up for the “West Coast & Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse” tour while docked in Aalborg. But what we later figured out is that choosing the lighthouse meant missing the city of Aalborg. Our experience on this trip so far has taught us that we really enjoy exploration on our own over daylong bus tours. Viking offers “included” (i.e. free) city tours, typically lasting two hours, thereby leaving time for solo poking around. We asked to cancel this “optional” tour in favor of the freebee but we were too late. Sigh, oh well.

But it turned out OK. It was nice to see the Danish countryside and the North Sea up close and personal. The lighthouse’s big deal is that it’s being enveloped by an encroaching sand dune. Turns out that the mid-fourteenth century period was unusually cold; the area around the lighthouse was stripped of trees. Later, after the lighthouse was built the ground was overgrazed. Erosion ensued and today the lighthouse is covered by sand half way up its side. The nearby attendant quarters have been reduced to ruble. It’s possible to climb up what remains for nice views of the ocean and coastline, and of course we did. But in maybe 20 years it will all be gone.

Rubjerg is a cute little village with a story. Rubjerg was on its last legs; everyone had left town. House prices were depressed; starving artists discovered the town; more artists came and bought houses; it was discovered by tourists. House prices climbed and today it’s a tourist attraction with cute shops, galleries and a beach. The artists can’t afford to live there anymore.

In Rubjerg we went to the sometimes movie house (movies are shown when tourists are gone) and had tea and pastries. Being rather slow culturally, it took me a while to figure out the pastries. At first I though, “Hmmm, reminds me of the Holiday Inn continental breakfast bar.” Then it hit me: “Duh, this is a Danish.” We’re now in Denmark, get it?

On the way our guide told us that Danes pay roughly 50% of income in taxes. Of course all public services – health care, education, etc. – are paid for by the state. And Denmark has a strong income redistribution system to provide support for the poor and needy. Are most Danes happy with this system? “Yes, I think so,” she responded. “Of course if you do a survey Danes agree that taxes should be lower. But if you do another survey and ask if services should be reduced, the answer is always no.”

Denmark has strong alternative energy programs, especially wind turbine generators. Windmills stretch, literally, in every direction and as far as the eye can see.

We returned to Aalborg and our ship but before re-boarding we took a quick walk up the main shopping street, around to the landmark church (Lutheran I’m sure) and back. Aalborg’s claim to fame is that it started life in the 10^thCentury as a Viking trading center. Aalborg is strategically located along the Baltic trading lanes but far enough inland up the river to protect against enemy invasion.

Vikings, by the way, have a deserved reputation for being fearsome, ruthless pirates and raiders of lands near and far. They ranged from at least Constantinople to L’Anse au Meadows in Newfoundland. Their reputation overshadows the fact that they were a great merchant and trading society. The bad stuff came to be because the eldest son inherited everything. The younger boys had nothing else to do but rob and plunder wherever they could. Mix in the Viking mythology of fearless all-powerful gods and you’ve got the Viking of present-day lore.

We’re going to the Viking Ship Museum tomorrow afternoon so we should get a better appreciation of Vikings. Judy and I are going to do a self-directed walking tour of Copenhagen, returning for lunch and departure for the afternoon trip.

Stavenger, Norway is a boomtown: a place propelled by an influx of herring, then sardines and now oil. And oh yes, the occasional cruise ship and land-based tourists add to the economy. I didn’t catch the exact dates but herring fishing lasted for 60-odd years in the 19^thcentury; then the herring swam away. Sardines came next. At one time Stavenger was the sardine-canning factory of Norway. The last canning factory closed in 2002. But the real boom was oil: the first North Seas oil discovery was in 1969 and today Stavenger is the oil capital of Norway.

Oil drilling and production is, for us, a topic of interest since nephew Chris is deeply involved as a chief maintenance engineer for highly sophisticated deep-water drilling platforms. The Petroleum Museum, our first stop on our two-hour guided tour gave us a great insight into the technology of oil drilling and production.

As usual, our guide’s personal story proved to be interesting. He’s American but was raised in Japan. He learned to speak Japanese as a kid but has needed to increase his vocabulary since he now leads Japanese tour groups. He worked in Rocky Mountain National Park as a ranger but moved to Stavenger in the 1970s on a one year teaching contract, met the girl, fell in love, married, had kids and hasn’t left since. Somewhere along the line he became a drill platform supervisor so he spoke with great authority: “This is a model of the platform where I used to work.”

Norway may produce a lot of oil but the country is almost completely energy independent using hydropower. Norway promotes electric automobiles. Electric vehicles carry no sales tax and travel toll free on highways and bridges. Two-thirds of cars sold today are electric.

I asked our guide, “How long will the oil last?” He said that, with improved extraction methods oil production should continue for 40 or 50 years. “Then what?” The Norwegian government has put aside funds from oil production to pay for future pension and social programs. All Norwegian political parties have pledged to spend no more than 4% of annual income on current expenditures.

He turned out to be a great guide with excellent knowledge of and personal experience living in Stavenger. He asked us for positive recommendations since he faces stiff competition: young kids from Eastern Europe who memorize the guide book and sell their services at a steep discount.

Stavenger is a pretty town despite its position as an industrial center and tourist destination. Rather than clearing land for high rise developments Stavenger has elected to maintain the 18^thand 19^thcentury wooden homes, freshly painted and, in the old town section, with nice flower gardens. It’s had the usual string of disastrous fires every hundred years or so; fire remains a great concern even today. The only stone buildings we saw were the cathedral and a 19^thcentury bakeshop.

The cathedral has an interesting history. I can’t quote names and dates but the gist of it is that a Norwegian king in the Middle Ages married but grew tired of his wife. He fell in love with a Stavenger gal and asked the local priest for an annulment. The priest demanded promotion to bishop in return, which was the king’s prerogative to grant. But there was one catch: a bishop needs a cathedral. So the king built him one, married the Stavenger girl and promptly died, leaving no heir. Meanwhile the first wife married a man who became the king of Denmark and her grandson became the new king of Norway. She had the last laugh and Stavenger got a cathedral.

Our tour lasted until Noon or so. Judy and I broke off and paid a visit to the cathedral and were back on board by 1:00 PM for lunch; the ship left at 2:00 for Alborg, Denmark. So we’re having a lazy afternoon. We’ve attended two lectures this afternoon on Denmark (I think) and Viking history. I napped through the first, Judy the second. Tonight we’ll dine in one of the ship’s two specialty restaurants. Kinda nice to knock back and goof off for a few hours, even if Judy did sneak in a load of laundry!

No, not that kind of emergency-airlift-evacuation kind of fall, Rebecca and Jeff , we’re talking waterfalls here. And did we see waterfalls and spectacular Norwegian mountain scenery. We’ll post some pictures to show you what we mean.

The trip itself involved three bus segments and two train rides totaling about 7.5 hours, including a three-course buffet lunch, something we needed like a hole in the head: lots of sitting today and not much walking. In Southeast Asia I suffered from swelling of the ankles. This time it’s swelling of the belly.

The signature piece of today’s trip was the Flan Railroad, a 22 Km line built in the 1940s as a tourist attraction. It runs from Myrdal to Flan through spectacular mountain views and a mind-numbing number of tunnels. We got to Myrdal first by bus, stopping on the way for our first major waterfall, to the Vass train station. There we caught a regular train to Myrdal, a 45-minute ride in a most modern electric train. Only one hitch: a single toilet (#2 was out of service). So Judy and most of the rest of our crew spent the entire ride standing in line. I waited until 5 minutes before arrival and was the next-to-the last participant.

After the train ride we drove by bus to a resort hotel high in the mountains for the aforementioned luau. And then back to home base.

Speaking of tunnels, have you ever seen a guy who got a new tool and couldn’t stop finding uses for it? It’s that way with Norwegian road engineers and their tunnel-digging machine. Now granted, the eastern part of the country is built on a mountain range and tunnels do come in handy. But boy, do have they ever dug a bunch of tunnels. Long ones too: you can catch a 10-minute nap in most of them. One we went through today had two roundabouts underground.

And speaking of Norse mythology, check out the picture of the girl dressed in red, dancing by the falls. She’s some evil being who seeks to marry a baptized man at which point her tail falls off and she turns into an ugly wretch with whom the man is stuck forever. Don’t ask me; I report the myth, you judge.

Our guide (a guy from Netherlands today) said that it’s a reversal of the Old Norse folk stories about gnomes. Gnomes were said to live inside the mountains and would come out of night to bedevil human Norsemen. But gnomes, it turns out, are rather easy to fool so to avoid trouble humans had to trick the gnomes into doing stupid things. Then, at dawn, the gnomes would turn into stone. Today, Norse folk spend half their lives in the mountain tunnels; he didn’t say whether the Norse folk are simpletons like gnomes.

And speaking of mountains, our guide gave a simpleton’s explanation of fjords. About 20 million years ago the Iceland and Scandinavian plates collided pushing up the Scandinavian mountains that we traveled through today. Rain erosion wore away v-shaped valleys. About 12,000 years ago the last ice age deposited ice in the valleys. The weight of the ice dug out the v-shaped valleys to depths of up to 2,500 feet below current-day sea level. When the ice receded it left behind u-shaped fjords we know and love today.

The warm weather we’ve been experiencing on our trip so far has melted much of the snow at higher elevations (mountains around here top out at about 5,000 feet; the tree line is as low as 2,500 feet). The result: the better-than-normal waterfall flows we enjoyed today.

Our guide gave us a bit of Norwegian history too. Turns out, Norway was ruled by Denmark for 400 years or so. When Napoleon retreated from northern Europe Norway suddenly found itself free and independent. They wrote a constitution and signed it on May 17, 1804; May 17 is celebrated as Norwegian Independence Day. Norwegians of all walks of life dress up in Norse garments on that day.

“Not so fast,” said neighboring Sweden. The Swedish-Norwegian war started in July of 1804 and caused Norway to be ruled by Stockholm until 1905 when true independence was established. Then, neutral Norway was invaded by both Britain and Germany in 1940. Germany won a fierce battle and controlled the country until 1945.

Independence in 1804 kicked off a search for meaning: “What does it mean to be Norwegian? What is our culture? What do we stand for?” I’m sure the answer is complex but one interesting part of Norwegian life is the Freedom to Roam principle. It is legal for a Norwegian to occupy any non-commercial land for any purpose – a tent in someone else’s woods for example. Norwegians seem to have a strong connection with nature and the outdoors.

Schooling in Norway is completely free: Primary (6 years), Lower Secondary (3 years), Upper Secondary (3 years) and University (3 years). It’s free even for foreigners. High school seniors complete classes in April of their final Upper Secondary year. Then, for three weeks leading up to the May 17 independence holiday, the take off in their cars and travel the county or the nation, kicking up their heals and doing whatever well-behaved, I’m sure, Norwegian teenagers do for fun. They then come home and take their final examinations.

Enough of that. Tomorrow we’re in Stavanger, the home of Norwegian North Sea oil production, the industry that makes Norway the prosperous and progressive country is today. There’s a lot more money to be made selling crude oil than cod oil, that’s for sure.