Pepys   I see the last entry was on New Year’s Eve. It has not been a dry spell, but an overabundance of activity that’s caused the long pause. I see I closed last time with Samuel Pepys’s often used closing in his diary: And so to bed. On the chance that not everyone knows Pepys, let me start out for once with a digression. We would not have a fraction of the understanding of mid-1600’s British life and government if it weren’t for the diary that Pepys kept for approximately the decade of the 1660’s, when he was Chief Secretary of the Admiralty. He lived through, and described, the Great Plague of London of that decade, and the Great Fire of 1666. His name, curiously, is pronounced PEEPS. The diary is one of those things that goes on for volumes and volumes that few people actually read, usually scholars. It’s of greatest interest to researchers. I came across Pepys when I was working part time at Klapper Library at Queens College. While shelving in the new books section, I came across the book “Mr Pepys of Seething Lane”, a narrative based on the diary. I was so taken with it that, once we got married, I made sure Beverly had a chance to read it as well. Whenever walking through the City in London I remember Pepys talking, including noting casually one night that there was some story of a fire breaking out in the East End, something about a bakery catching fire in Pudding Lane. He wrote the books in a sort of shorthand that had to be deciphered.

Pepys was not some dry historical character. He was a ladies’ man to put it mildly. You could almost say he never met a friend’s wife he didn’t like. He frequently would describe his encounters in a specially coded manner, beyond the simple ciphering. He was fluent in French, Spanish, and Italian, and these coded passages were nothing more than a mixture of words in these languages mixed in with English. You can look at the Pepys website for some interesting examples. And yet, his catch phrase “And so to bed” at the end of most days does remain quite innocent.

Around Central Park   Knowing I was going to spend February in Florida, there were some things I wanted to get done in January. One of them was a special exhibit at the New-York Historical Society (don’t forget that hyphen) on Central Park West. The day in the area turned out to be very enjoyable.

Coming up out of the subway on Central Park West at 72nd Street, I could see immediately that I was next to a major building. It was castle-like, and looked like either a French Château or maybe a German Schloss. I turned the corner to 72nd Street and sure enough, I was in front of one of the most famous apartment buildings in the world, the Dakota.

The Dakota is one of those places that is not marked, like some exclusive restaurants. Only the logo on the doorman’s lapel confirmed where I was. I suppose the thinking is, if you don’t already know, you don’t really need to know.

The Dakota was the setting for Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”, and was where the picture was filmed. Outside the front entrance was where John Lennon was shot in 1980. Yoko Ono still lives in the building. Celebrity tenants present and past include Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, Judy Garland, Judy Holliday, William Inge, Boris Karloff, Gilda Radner, Rex Reed, Carson McCullers, Paul Simon, Sting, Connie Chung & Maury Povich, José Ferrer. This artsy celebrity list is typical of this area, the Upper West Side, which is very blue-state-ish. In contrast, the Upper East Side on the other side of the Park, from Fifth Avenue to beyond, is very high society and red-state-ish.

We have to bring up a language issue here—how the Dakota got its name. It started as a put-down, which brings us to an interesting niche of naming practices: derogitory names, but ones that stick.

I first came across this practice in the 1950’s watching on TV the national party conventions. Those were the years when it was worth watching them, since real decisions were made and not just rubber-stamped. Anyway, the convention I have in mind took place in the Cow Palace in San Francisco. I remember the comments at the time on that odd name. The building was put up during and after the Depression, was derided as a waste of money, and, because it would also be used for agricultural shows, was referred to as being nothing more than a cow palace. And the name stuck.

South Florida is covered by the Everglades, but only the southern Everglades is within the national park, with an older highway, the Tamiami Trail, running just north of it from south of Naples to Miami. When a new highway was planned through the Everglades, cutting directly across from Naples to Fort Lauderdale, since it would really be a coast-to-coast highway with minimal internal connections—it has I think only three exits, all to minor roads—it was derided as being nothing more than an alligator alley. Today, this section of Interstate 75 is now officially Alligator Alley.

This sort of naming is not only contemporary. Here’s a medieval example. From 500 to 1200, the favored architectural style was the rounded-arch, minimalist Romanesque style. Starting about 1200 (to 1400), and newer, heavier, pointed-arch and highly decorative style emerged. The establishment was scandalized. They wanted to point out how barbaric this new style was. The reference that developed was to the long-gone Germanic tribe of the Goths (who had nothing to do with the style), and the new style was called Gothic. Do try to picture that this style that people love to look at when they go “cathedraling” in Europe was meant to be a put-down. “Gothic” architecture originally was meant to mean “Barbaric” architecture.

And so we come back to the Dakota. When it was built in the early 1880’s, life in New York centered from downtown Manhattan to the Teens, Twenties, and Thirties. Times Square (then Longacre Square) in the Forties was on the edge of town until the subway arrived in 1904. Central Park, from the Fifties into the Hundreds, was a suburban park, and when it was announced that a building of this size was going to be built way out of town on 72nd Street, people laughed at the folly of it. What nickname could they have given it to show how foolishly out-of-town it was—the Canada? Instead, they kept it a US reference and said you might as well build the building way out in Dakota (Dakota Territory had not yet been divided into North and South Dakota). Since a basic tenet of marketing is that there is no such thing as bad publicity, the name was allowed to stick, and it remains the Dakota today.

A little research shows that the height of construction for luxury apartment buildings on Central Park West was, strangely, at the beginning of the Depression. North of where I was, between 90-91st Street, the El Dorado went up in 1931, and the famous Beresford, at 81-82nd Street, in 1929. Facing the Dakota across 72nd Street, the Majestic went up in 1931. But on my walk north just beyond the Dakota, at 74-75th Street, and almost as famous as the Dakota because of its two high towers, the San Remo was put up in 1930. From across the park, it’s easier to spot the San Remo than the Dakota because of its imposing towers. Present or past celebrities living at the San Remo are Steven Spielberg, Steve Jobs, Donna Karan, Demi Moore, Dustin Hoffman, Bono, Steve Martin, Bruce Willis, and Eddie Cantor. You can see that the West Side is less High Society and more Show Biz. You hear that in Los Angeles, they sell maps of the locations of the “Homes of the Stars”. In New York, the big names tend to be a bit more concentrated.

Central Park was laid out roughly in the center of Manhattan island. It is a rectangle much longer north-south because that’s how the island is, and much narrower east-west because that’s how the island is. The city has moved up to encompass it, so it is no longer in the boondocks. It runs 51 blocks from 59th Street, which changes its name along the park to Central Park South, to 110th Street at the southern edge of Harlem, which becomes Central Park North. The Park is only three Avenues wide, running from Eighth Avenue, which becomes Central Park West, to Fifth Avenue, which changes its name—not at all. Don’t ever go looking for a Central Park East. As prestigious as that name might sound, if you lived on Fifth Avenue, would you want to start changing its name?

The park looks as natural as you could want it to be, with streams, lakes, paths, boulders and rock outcroppings. It has the Central Park Zoo, an ice skating rink, the Great Lawn, Belvedere Castle, and much more. As natural as it looks—none of it was there to start with. The park was originally raw land. Every rise, valley, lake, stream was meticulously put there by its designers Olmstead and Vaux. It is one of their masterpieces. If you are unfamiliar with the landscape work of Frederick Law Olmstead, who lived in the last three-quarters of the 1800’s, he also designed Prospect Park in Brooklyn, the “Emerald Necklace” in Boston, a series of interconnected parks, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina, Mount Royal Park in Montréal, the US Capitol grounds, and so many others.

Walking up Central Park West on a pleasant January afternoon, the street was already in afternoon shadow, as was the low stone wall across the street surrounding the park. The old, bare trees beyond the wall were in black silhouette, and it was easy to look across the narrow width of the sunlit park to the still brightly sunlit Fifth Avenue side, over toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a splendid view.

I talked last about the New-York Historical Society, located across 77th Street from the American Museum of Natural History, when the baloons were being inflated for the Thanksgiving Day Parade (Reflections 2004 Series 18). This time I wanted to see the well-reviewed exhibit at the N-YHS called “Slavery in New York”. It was very well done. We always hear about slavery being elsewhere, and it is conveniently forgotten that slavery existed in the North, in New York as of the landing of the Dutch, until it was legally abolished in 1827. It technically lasted longer in the North only in New Jersey, where it was finally officially abolished in the 1860’s. Much of the exhibit discussed the institution in general, but it was most interesting where it discussed the local situation. It was pointed out that the Italians are known for having built the subways, the Irish for having built Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, but it isn’t part of our culture to even know that enslaved Africans built the wall on Wall Street in New Amsterdam, and Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.

I just had to spend a bit of time upstairs to have another look at the N-YHS’s extensive collection of paintings of the Hudson River School, Cole, Church Cropsey, and others. These artists did paintings of South America, (Indian cultures, the Andes) and the American West (German-born Albert Bierstadt at Yosemite), but their views of the Hudson River itself, such as those that gave the movement its name, are the best, since they convey such a feeling of location, and the collection here is very good.

I backtracked past the San Remo and the Dakota to 67th Street, where I wanted to have dinner for the first time at the Café des Artistes. In the period between the wars this street had had a lot of artists, who had congregated here. After a period of decline, the restaurant was brought back, and is now one of the most successful restaurants in the city. It is cozy and is filled with romantic-style murals everywhere. In the back I noticed on the wall a reference to Gundel in Budapest, dating from 1894 (Reflections 2004 Series 12). Research showed that original owner George Lang, a Hungarian native, not only brought back the Café des Artistes, but was the driving force in bringing back Gundel to the prestigious heights the restaurant had had before the war and then the Communist takeover of Hungary. One rarely realizes how small the world is.

Back from Florida after February, I was informed by e-mail that I could dine at the Met, so after visiting the West Side in January I went back to the East Side in March, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had celebrated our 40th Anniversary in August 2002 at the Trustees’ Dining Room (Reflections 2002 Series 7), but normally my type of museum membership only allowed using the dining room on summer weekends. This year though, March weekends were added, so on Saturday, March 11 (as it turns out, the next day would have been Beverly’s 69th birthday), I went to the Met on Fifth Avenue, curiously just INSIDE Central Park at 82nd Street rather than opposite it. I’ve recently written about the Museum Mile of Fifth Avenue, including the Neue Galerie with its Café Sabarsky at 86th Street and the Guggenheim at 89th. [Note: “the Met” also refers to the Metropolitan Opera House.]

I spent only a few moments in the art galleries. I was here to see the building, Central Park, and to dine. My first stop after the galleries was on the roof terrace, on the fifth floor. In season, there’s a pleasant terrace bar up here with views. In any case, at least the views were still available in the late afternoon. You could see down Fifth Avenue to Central Park South. The Plaza Hotel is at the corner there. It is presently being partially converted to condominiums. Further along Central Park South is the Essex House. A few years ago we stayed there on a freebie, and then walked over the next day to Fifth Avenue to see the Saint Patrick’s day parade. You can’t miss the Essex House from a distance because of the huge sign on its roof with its name. The story goes that some years ago, the management of the hotel had to really scurry to do repairs when the first two letters of the sign burned out. That story may be apocryphal, but it’s too good not to repeat. Across on Central Park West, the Dakota was just visible, then the two towers of the San Remo, followed by the N-YHS and the American Museum of Natural History. Just behind the Met in the park was the Egyptian obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle, corresponding to one in London. The view to the north is not easily seen from the terrace. It is interesting to visualize how the park must of looked during the record 26.9-inch snowstorm in February while I was in Florida. It should be noted that New York City weather is measured in Central Park, and official readings are recorded there.

Before dinner, I went down to the Great Hall, one of the grand open spaces of another era, such as at Grand Central Terminal. It’s just open space, nicely decorated, but of no practical value other than, of course, giving one a feeling of place. The huge stone flower urns are famously always filled with flowers due to a bequest in the will of Lila Acheson Wallace of the Reader’s Digest. This time the urns were filled with forsythia, too early to bloom yet outdoors, but “forced” to bloom in the Great Hall.

There is a large mezzanine upstairs around the Hall. On Fridays and Saturdays for years, it has been converted to a café with music. Beverly and I only came to this once. This time, before dinner, I got a table close to the music, ordered some dips and wine, and listened to the concert of two violins, a cello and piano. Afterwards the dinner in the Dining Room on the fourth floor was four courses paired with wines. Very enjoyable.

North to Scandinavia   I have talked in the past about Beverly and me being Eurolanguists, and that remains my specialty. However, we had concentrated our travels for many, many years in the Euramerican region. Then we finally started our “directional” trips, extending our travels to the south, west, east and north. Beverly got to make it only to the trip south, sailing with me on the Caronia around South America in 2004. I then did my west-to-east trip via Siberia by myself, in 2005. The only extension left is to go north, which will be my next stop, in 2006, completing the four-direction series in three successive years.

Doing a directional trip west-east is a continuous ring trip around the world, but going south or north is a dead-end trip—you go, and then come back. Going around South America (Reflections 2004 Series 5), the furthest point south we reached on the surface was just south of Cape Horn, at 56° S 0’, which is 62% of the way from the equator to the South Pole. When we flew over Seymour Island next to the Antarctic Peninsula, we reached 64° S 30’, which is closer at 72% of the way south. I commented in that earlier piece that, beyond going on a government or scientific expedition to the South Pole, because Antarctica is a (frozen) continent (curiously just fitting within the Antarctic Circle, which is at 66° S 32’, or 74% of the way to the Pole), the closest travelers can regularly get is the Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches toward South America, and we just flew over it then. I plan to remedy that this November, and actually set foot on Antarctica, although not any further south than before. Rereading that earlier piece myself, I see that I called people who do this “adventurers”. Perhaps I had the image in mind of managing a wheelchair, but as fate would have it, that is no longer a concern. I’m doubly shocked that the ship I’ve booked, without realizing it, is the same one I said we saw when we were there. But all that is another story, for later this year. Stay tuned.

A digression: ant- is the short form of anti-, used before vowels. It only now occurs to me that Antarctic really means anti-Arctic. Most people live in the northern hemisphere, which is culminated in the Arctic around the North Pole, so we take that as a base line for normalcy. The “Non-Arctic” at the South Pole now even seems to me remoter than ever, as though languages were referring to it as the ends of the earth—“that other place”. And it’s true—considering the Eskimos and Aleuts in the North, the Arctic can naturally accommodate human habitation, while the Antarctic can do so only artifically, under scientific expedition conditions.

This section is called “North to Scandinavia”, so let’s get back to that. If the Antarctic Peninsula is the most likely location for travelers to reach a southern point, where would the best location be to go north? Let’s look around the globe. My trip through Russia was in the Forties and Fifties, the furthest north being in Saint Petersburg at 59° N 55’. You could see the White Nights there, but you weren’t beyond the Arctic Circle. Moving east, to Alaska, in Fairbanks we were at 64° N 50’. Of course, you can go beyond the Arctic Circle in Russia, say to Murmansk, and in Alaska, say to Barrow, but there are no commercial ventures to go sailing north even beyond that. Iceland is (just) below the Arctic Circle.

And that brings us to Scandinavia and Finland. But we can limit it even more. Finland and Sweden do reach north of the Arctic Circle, but they have no north coast to sail beyond (and Denmark is certainly out of the question). So we reduce it to Norway. And its northern colony, Spitsbergen.

Never, never, never underestimate the importance of the Gulf Stream to the existence of Europe. Most northern areas are next to uninhabitable, but Western Europe enjoys its entire civilization to the warming effects of the Gulf Stream coming up from the Caribbean. That includes not only the Norwegian coast, as far north as it is, but also Spitsbergen even further north. In my research I also find that the Gulf Stream when it’s that far north reaches only the western side of Spitsbergen, and that is the only inhabited side. And that is where I’m going in June. It’s also worth commenting on again that, while Antarctica is a (frozen) continent, the Arctic region is a (frozen) sea, the Arctic Ocean. This, along with the help of the Gulf Stream, makes the area more accessible.

In 1973 Beverly and I reached the North Cape in Norway, the northernmost point in Europe at 71° N, or 79% of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, so I’ve already been way further north than I’ve ever been or ever will be south (72%). The ship is scheduled to get to a place called Moffen Island just north of Spitsbergen (with possible sightings of walrus), at which point we should cross the 80th parallel. 80° N is 89% of the way to the North Pole from the equator. Use this as points of reference: while 70° N runs along the north coast of Alaska, 80° N cuts through the northernmost piece of Greenland and through Ellsmere Island in northernmost Canada; nothing on mainland Russia comes close to it. I needn’t go further north than that. That will do me just fine.

Scandinavia & Finland   The upcoming trip in June and July will be to Scandinavia (Sweden, Denmark, Norway) and Finland. I fleetingly mentioned our stop in Finland in 1972 (Reflections 2003 Series 10) during our sabbatical, leaving the Soviet Union with our VW, visiting Helsinki and the south coast for a few days, then taking the Finnlines ferry on a two-night crossing to Travemünde in Germany. As for Scandinavia, I mentioned (Reflections 2004 Series 24) Beverly’s first visit in 1958 to see her relatives, especially her Farmor (Grandmother) that she’d never met. She liked to tell two stories about that trip that bear repeating now.

Sweden at that time, and three years later when I first visited, was a very different place. Cars were rare in small towns. People bicycled to go visiting. Telephones were new. Prosperity was just arriving. English was not as common as it subsequently became. Beverly had arranged to take an intercity bus called the Europabus up to Sweden. She liked to tell about chatting with the stewardess on the bus about her plans to visit “new” relatives in Sweden. The stewardess said “You mean you don’t speak Swedish” “No.” “And they don’t speak English?” “No.”, to which the stewardess just looked up and rolled her eyes. Beverly enjoyed telling that story, because after the fact she realized she had participated in an ideal language learning situation. She just plunged in—and swam. After a visit of a few weeks, she went home speaking Swedish.

The other story she loved was that, when she first met her Farmor, even though Beverly was a young adult just having graduated from college, Farmor pulled Beverly down to sit on her lap, with the explanation (in Swedish) “I wasn’t able to do this when you were a baby, so I’m going to do it now!”

Christmas 1961 fell in the academic year we were studying in Mainz, and we decided to go to Sweden then. Just before Christmas we took the overnight train from Mainz to Copenhagen. After Hamburg in the north, the route goes diagonally, and the train gets onto the ferry to sail cross the Femer Bælt to Denmark. Bev’s parents flew into Copenhagen, where we had rented a car, and we drove to the Swedish relatives in central Sweden. Near the town of Värnamo (VAIR-na-moo) is the village of Horda, and Farmor’s farm, where Beverly’s father had been born, was called Stenslund (Stony Grove). It was a visit with aunts, uncles, cousins, and everybody else in town, it seemed. We were far enough north that the winter days were quite short; the sun rose at about 10 and set by 2 or so in the afternoon. I remember taking pictures of the most beautiful winter red sunset through the silhouette of the trees of Stenslund.

At that period, Sweden still drove on the left. Our car was rented in Denmark, so the steering wheel was, as is normal, on the left. Someone has pointed out (although I didn’t notice it myself at the time), that local cars in Sweden also had the wheel on the left, even though one also drove on the left, so a few years later, when one fine weekend all traffic, under an especially low temporary speed limit, was told to start driving on the right, the changeover was less traumatic than you would think, since the cars were already set up that way. The situation is totally different in Britain. I remember getting Swedish postage stamps at the time promoting “Högertrafik”—Right-hand Traffic.

The relatives pronounced Beverly’s name BAY-ver-ly. Vincent they had no trouble with, except that they had assumed I was German, since Bayverly had gone to study in Germany and was coming back to Sweden with someone they assumed she had met there, so we had to set them straight. One evening early on at Stenslund, Bayverly and I stepped into a quiet room upstairs and said “So what do you think?” and we came out of the room engaged. We told her parents, who told Farmor. There was a houseful of the usual aunts, uncles, cousins and so on just before Christmas, and Farmor stepped behind us, pushed us forward into the group, and announced that we were the förlovade. At that time I knew no Swedish, but recognized from German (thank goodness for Germanic languages) that the Verlobte (förlovade) were the Engaged Couple. It’s pleasant to visualize what the nighttime scene outdoors might have looked like, with the Stenslund farmhouse windows all aglow and all the congratulations bubbling out into the night air.

During those holidays it was dinner each day from one house to another, and yes, with that many relatives it was a buffet, which as everyone knows, is a smörgåsbord. At home I’m used to a somewhat raucous scene at holiday dinners, with everyone reaching at once. I’m sure some families have a more sedate situation, but there was nothing quite like the extra-sedate protocol experience we found in Sweden. When it was time to go to the smörgås table (bord means table and is related to “board”) everyone lined up for the dining experience, however, very automatically, Farmor was at the front of the line, then the aunts and uncles, then the teenagers and younger ones. It was just the respectful way it’s done. Therefore, the time was just so much more impressionable—and, as you can see, I remember it to this day—that, just before starting, Farmor walked back in line, got behind Bayverly and me, and pushed the förlovade up to a position in front of her. It was a gift Farmor gave us that impresses me still.

The last memory of that trip I want to tell was New Year’s Eve 1961. All the cousins and Bayverly and I made a reservation in a restaurant in the “big city”, at the Stadshotellet i Värnamo (City Hotel in Värnamo). It was a regular sit-down dinner and we had a great time, but we were wondering what would happen at midnight. We were quite surprised when midnight was announced, 1962 was coming in, and everyone stood up and sang the Swedish National Anthem: Du gamla, du fria (Thou old one, thou free one). It was a memorable ending to my first Swedish trip.

A dozen years after that, in 1973, was the last time Bayverly and I were in Sweden (and Denmark, and Norway). We leased a car and drove everywhere. We drove to Stockholm and covered every square meter of Scandinavia that we wanted to see. In Denmark, after Copenhagen, we took ferries (all the new bridges hadn’t been built yet) to the other islands, and to the mainland, Julland (the Jutland peninsula), where we went to Skagen in the northernmost tip and walked out to Grenen at the very end. We took an overnight ferry to Oslo, and drove through the mountains, to Bergen, and across fjords on the ferries.

We saw something very clever on the Sognefjord. The schedules said two car ferries regularly cross the fjord, one from A to B and the other from C to D. However, there was a point X transfer point, just in case you wanted to go, say, from A to C, but it was made clear it was for passengers only, and not cars. We wondered what that was all about. We found out. In the middle of the fjord, we saw the other ferry approaching us and stopping. The two ships pulled up side by side, and ran their engines to push them together so that they touched. Railings were raised, and a gangway (not really needed) was thrown between the two ships for passengers and their luggage to cross. How clever! I’ll say cars wouldn’t be able to do this. This was called in Norwegian a midtfjords transfer, which is obviouslly “mid-fjord”. I have purposely scheduled things this summer so that I will be able to transfer midtfjords between ferries.

We had arranged to take the ferries of the Hurtigruten in Norway. The “Hurry-Route”, better translated as Express Route, is a service dating from the early 20th Century of ships leaving from Bergen (we parked the car in Trondheim and took it from there), which make scheduled stops all up the coast, around the North Cape, to Kirkenes, facing the Russian border. Meals were included, and occasional tours in points of interest. We saw the much fancier cruise ships doing just what we were enjoying the more relaxed way.

We had scheduled to take a three-week course in Swedish at Göteborgs Universitet (the University of Gothenburg), on the west coast of Sweden. I remember that Bayverly and I, after home study, tested out for the advanced course, but were the only ones, so we were put into the intermediate course. It was a nice time living in Göteborg. Her diary said all of us were invited to a reception in the Göteborg City Hall, but frankly, I have no recollection of that event. We had the car, so weekends we would go driving off to all points. Twice we crossed the famous Göta Kanal, and looked down from the road at the old wooden locks for the canal boats to cross through. We kept a brochure dated 1973, which I still have, and which I will take along with me this summer when I spend three nights crossing Sweden in a canal boat on the Göta Kanal.

We also went back to the relatives. Farmor was gone by then, as were some uncles and aunts, but we enjoyed getting together with the rest. I remember Bayverly and I wanted to treat on a meal in return for the dinners we were given, so we pre-ordered a smörgåstorta at a local shop and then picked it up to serve to the relatives one afternoon. A smörgås torte is not a pastry. Its a selection of the salads, veggies, meats, and all that you’d get at a smörgåsbord, but formed into a cake form, and sliced like a cake to serve. It’s a great party idea.

Just as I have the charming recollection from the first trip of Farmor pushing us to the head of the line, I have a similar one from the 1973 trip. Gustav Rehn was an elderly gentleman who had gone to live in Minnesota most of his life, but who had come back to Sweden to retire. He knew Bayverly’s parents, we had also met him, so during this visit he invited us over to his home for tea and pastries. It was a typical Swedish house, with lots of lace doilies. Gustav Rehn, even when seated, leaned forward on his cane. We were chatting away, when he asked us what we did for a living. We told him we both taught school, and his face dropped. He apologized. He said he NEVER would have had the presumption, if he had known, to invite TWO SCHOOLTEACHERS to his humble home; that would have been reaching too high.

We of course smoothed all that over, but his refreshing attitude on the esteem and value of the teaching profession, even coming from someone who had lived in the US for most of his life, was Gustav Rehn’s gift to us to complement Farmor’s gift from the earlier time.

Nevertheless, with all this pleasant history, I’m not planning on looking up relatives on this trip. That was all a long time ago, I’m traveling by rail this time, and it would be one thing that without Bayverly just wouldn’t be right.

So how does one cobble a trip like this together? I must say, it’s been a lot more difficult (but fun!) than putting together the rail trip around the world last year. That was linear. Start at point A, keep going west, until you come back to A. Really quite simple. With this trip, I had to work around all sorts of ship schedules, so that resulted in a degree of backtracking on the land parts. Here is how it came about.

I noted at least three years ago that, although many ships go up the Norwegian coast to see the fjords and Nordkap (North Cape), the Deutschland, regularly around the time of the summer solstice in June, did not only that, but added on Spitsbergen. That became the core of this trip. It makes it a 16-night round trip out of Kiel, on the German Baltic coast. I finally got the 2006 dates days before I left for Siberia in 2005 (you see the overlap involved in all this planning in advance to get exactly what you need). I’ll call this Part 2 of the trip, for reasons that will become obvious.

The next step was crossing the Atlantic. I always want the QM2. Before Siberia also, I figured out two things. It would be overkill, considering the amount of time sailing on the Deutschland, to go round trip on the QM2. In addition, while checking the schedule, things were such that there would be FAR too much time in Europe between eastbound and westbound sailings on the Mary, so I chose one way, westbound as always. But the best news was a surprise. I had heard that the Mary had been greeted warmly in many ports it visited for the first time, but few moreso than in Hamburg. I understand it was just a wild time the first time the Mary came to Hamburg. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised, but not shocked, when I called Cunard (before Siberia) and found out that, instead of shuttling in six days between Southampton and New York, there were to be in addition two round trips to Hamburg. That is, New York—Southampton—Hamburg—Southampton—New York in the early summer, and again in the late summer. The leg Hamburg to New York would take eight days, which was just fine with me. It looked like on this trip, instead of England being my staging point, northwestern Germany would, including Kiel, Hamburg (with a quick visit back to Bremen), and Lübeck-Travemünde, where the Finnish ferry would come in. Germany and the QM2 would be Part 4 of the trip.

I would have like to fit in all else I wanted to do between the Deutschland and the Mary, but there wasn’t enough time, so I had to fly in a week earlier than the Deutschland left to see what I wanted to see in Norway. Here is a summary of how this trip fits together.

It is one more day longer than Siberia, making it exactly seven weeks long. I will have a Eurail Selectpass for the train connections.

Part 1: Fly Newark to Oslo. Train to Bergen, Flåm and the fjords. Ferry #1 Oslo to Kiel.
Part 2: Sail on the Deutschland to Norway and Spitsbergen.
Part 3: Train to Copenhagen and region. High-speed train X2000 (Beverly’s train) to Stockholm. Stay in Gamla Stan. Göta Kanal three nights to Göteborg. X2000 back to Stockholm. Ferry # 2 to Finland for a short visit. Ferry # 3 to Germany.
Part 4: Local city visits in Germany, QM2 to New York.

Aside from the night on the plane (2%), on this trip north I will have 31 nights (63%) on the water and 17 (35%) on land, roughly two on water to one on land. This contrasts to the trip south to South America which was all on water, and the west-east trip, which, except for flying the Pacific and sailing the Atlantic, was all on land, and by rail.

The themes of what I will be writing about will not only be going north, and Scandinavia. I also plan to discuss extensively the Baltic, and Germanic Languages.

I’m not big on Latin, but there is one Latin expression I’m going to use here: carpe diem. I had never known what it meant until I saw Robin Williams playing a teacher in “The Dead Poet’s Society” and explaining to his students that it means “seize the day”. A duller way of putting it is “do it now”, but the literal translation “seize the day” comes off as being much more vivid.

You’ve been wanting to go back to Alaska to see Sitka and Skagway since 1970? Carpe diem!

You’ve been wanting to see Flåm, ride the Flåmsbana, and transfer midtfjords since 1973? Carpe diem!

You’ve been wanting to see Spitsbergen since writing a report on it in the sixth grade? Carpe diem!

You’ve been wanting to cruise on the Göta Kanal since 1973? Carpe diem!

You’ve been wanting to physically set foot on the Antarctic Pensinsula since 2004? Carpe diem!

You’ve been wanting to ride the X2000 (Beverly’s train) since the late 1980’s? Carpe diem!

I think you get the point. Life is short. Carpe diem.

Swedish Family Members   I’m going to close this essay with a bit of language study. We can dedicate it to Farmor. Look at these Swedish words depicting family members. If you thought Dutch words looked like English, then welcome once again to the Germanic Languages:

First a warning on O: it’s usually like OO, unless you’re told differently, so say MOOder, and BROOder, but son is SOHN.

The next step is that some of these words almost always appear in short forms.

To describe the generations, Swedish does not use a prefix like “grand”. It just combines the basic words.

First, two generations older:

In 1958 Bayverly met her farmor. Her farfar in Sweden had died years earlier.

In Minnesota, she had known her morfar, but he had died when she was young. She saw her mormor regularly into adulthood.

Now note this odd combining form:

Now one generation older:

In Sweden she had one farbror, and more than one faster.

In Minnesota she had one moster, and more than one morbror.

For younger generations:

If you have a dotter, you may also end up with a dotterdotter or a dotterson.

If you have a son, you might also end up with a sonson or a sondotter.

If this doesn’t satisfy you, just continue upward to your farfars far, farfars mor, farmors far, and so on, or downward to your sondotters dotter, dottersons son, .... If you do it right, you should get eight of each. I’ll bet you never knew you knew so much Swedish vocabulary.