Rihanna sings "You can stand under my um-brella- ella-ella" and TLC sings "don't go chasin waterfalls". We did both of these today. What R and B song should we tackle tomorrow? Feel free to suggest titles in your spare time. It was a rainy day in the fjords today (which are also the complete lyrics to a rather repetitive song I made up this afternoon and Mark made me turn on the tv to try to get it out of his head). Our pictures are hazy, but this place (Geira...

We are in a little city named Molde (pronounced Mole-duh), Norway's city of roses. It rained lightly for most of our tour today, but we were mainly in the bus so it didn't matter too much to us. The pictures are grey-on-grey, but that just adds atmosphere and contrast to yesterday's sunny shots, right? Now that we're about to leave, the sun is shining again so we hope to get some nice shots of the snow-capped mountains on our way out. Out bus tour took us ou...

Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty. We are in a living postcard today. I woke up to find Mark sitting out on our balcony taking pictures as our ship threaded its way between the green hills and colorful farmhouses on the way to the little village of Olden. Thank goodness that we live in a time of digital photography instead of film because we have taken a whole lot of pictures today from our waking moment to our return to the ship after our hike. The bus ...

We arrived in Stavanger this morning and had coffee, yogurt and waffles outside on the deck of the ship overlooking the scenic old section of the fourth largest city in Norway. Every place we went today, I kept thinking, "I wonder what it was like for Bob and Patty to live here for a year." (Bob was one of my colleagues at Eagan High and he did a Fulbright Teacher Exchange with a teacher from Stavanger in 2001-02). It's a very walkable town in the city center wh...

Today on the ship was a 'sea day' which means lots of lounging around and exploring the ship. We sat through 2 lectures on Norway by a visiting professor - the first was on the Vikings (the people, not the football team). We learned that they didn't wear horns, as people believe (time to change the football helmets) and that they really were quite clever to raid and pillage the churches, since they were unguarded and that was where the money was and the monks ...