We made it!

Oh heavens, we finally made it to Oslo. I love being in different countries, but I really dislike long flights and waiting for hours in airports. Both of which are guaranteed when you're traveling with almost 90 people in a single massive group. Our group was composed of Orchies, Bandies, and LaLas (Choir folk, and really, this is not considered an offensive name!). We were flying IcelandAir to Reykjavik and then on to Oslo.

We sat around the MSP airport for a long while, chatting and trying to pass the time. I called home one last time--"Yes, as of twenty minutes before boarding time I am still alive and well, goodbye, dear family, talk to you in three weeks"--hung out with friends, and then we got on the plane. As soon as we were all seated we began playing Musical Airplane Seats, moving around and trading so that we could be near friends. I think this bothered the flight attendants--we hadn't even taken off yet. Everyone was excited, happy, anxious, eager, and loud. Fortunately there were so many of us that there wasn't much for other passengers who could be bothered by overstimulated college students.

The flight was long and uneventful. One beautiful thing I noticed was that the sun never actually set. It got down close to the horizon, but never once dipped below it. The lack of night made it seem like less time had passed. The sky was brilliant with hot pinks, magentas, purples, and pale orange shades of sunset. It was amazing.

Reykjavik! A foreign country! Halfway there! Some folks took pictures of the landscape from the terminal windows. "And see that mound of dirt, way off in the distance? That's a mountain, or something, in ICELAND."

When we finally landed in Oslo around 3 pm on Tuesday afternoon (Norway time...around 8 am American Central time) most of had only gotten about two hours of sleep since Sunday night and were quickly crashing. We collected out luggage--it seems to take soooooo loooong when your suitcase is DEAD.LAST. like mine was. I had horrible flashbacks to August in Moscow when they lost allll the checked luggage and we were running around the capital of Russia in the same clothes for three whole days. Icky. We boarded buses and drove up to the Holmenkollen Ski Jump...a really tall ski jump, with lots of stairs.

I woke up as we walked around the ski jump grounds and realized, "Oh my gosh, I'm in NORWAY!!." From the grounds of the ski jump you can see most of Oslo down below, and although Oslo is the largest city in Norway it doesn't "intrude" on the surrounding natural beauty. There are forests on almost all sides, lakes in wo directions, pasture and farmland as your drive towards town from the airport...What I love about [Western] Europe is the way that the citizens and governments have been able to put quite a lot into a rather small space. Small streets, smaller homes, smaller cars, public transportation, and so on. It may just be that this strikes my wide-open-spaces-American eye as different and therefore better, but I
really do enjoy the idea of being able to live smaller, ride my bike to and fro across town, and so on.

Anyways. We arrived at the hotel a bit before 5 pm, time enough to steam away the nastiness of the airplane with a deliciously hot shower. It's amazing how a little make-up and some contact lenses can make me feel like a realy, honest-to-God member of the human race again! We had dinner downstairs in the hotel dining room, and oh what a meal it was. We hadn't eaten since breakfast on the flight to Oslo and so were all starving, stomachs turning inside out from hunger. We stuffed our plates to overflowing, went back for more, had even more dessert and then absolutely fabulous coffee. It was heavenly. Afterwards I went out for a walk with my Orchie friends Beth and Hayley. ALthough it was 8 pm it was still as light out as if it were 4 or 5 pm in Minnesota--I suppose that's due to the famous White Nights of the northern reaches of the world. We wandered around Oslo, stared into the exhorbitantly expensive and tasteful shops, yearned for shoes, stared at the statue of a tiger outside the main Oslo train station (tigers? in Norway?), wandered some more, got a little lost, then suddenly realized that we were exhausted and should scoot back to the hotel before we collapsed on the street.

And thus ends this entry. Tomorrow night is our first concert, all the organizations together! Oh man, it's going to be amazing. I cannot wait to hear how gorgeous we sound in the Konserthuset! Now I really am crashing--"system failure, exhaustion overload, must recharge"--so the end.