69 degrees north

UGH! My Crown Royal I bought in Calgary airport was taken away by the Brits in Heathrow airport :( There was nothing I could do to keep it, as I didn't have access to my check-in luggage. There goes $35 - oh well (At least I didn't buy it here, where it would have been 3 times the price - we found out the hard way how expensive alcohol is here - a pint for 85 NOK or roughly $15 CAD!!). I have a feeling it's difficult to get too inebriated in Norway.



Well, at least we are here now, 5 planes and two days later.

The 8 hour flight over the Atlantic was slightly difficult, it was overnight (In Canadian time) so I attempted to sleep, but it just didn't come, as I heard babies crying and I watched them grow. I was really impressed with the stewards though, as a German couple a few rows ahead of me didn't have working Entertainment units, and they were treated very well and would receive a refund because of it.

LHR is huge, but we still managed to eye up a few other young looking people and determine they must have been CaNoRockers (It's a word) as well. So we introduced ourselves and started our journey together with Lohrasp, Alex and Russell, A Physics major, Environmental Science major, and an Astronomy major respectively from the U of C.

LHR with David (left) and Taylor.

As we had a few hours to kill in LHR, we just sat and talked with our new friends from the U of C, It is surprisingly easy to talk to people you barely know that are in the same general area of academia. We talked about preparation for the trip, where they had none, and we had a bit from a couple of online courses within the two weeks we had prior to departure. We talked about traveling, and where we had been before in the world (they had all travelled within Europe and other places before, where we hadn't had as much experience).

The Fjords of Norway!

Murphy caught up with us again later in the day when we landed in Oslo, Norway (where the airport seemed more homely, with wooden floors and not too many people running around). Taylor's bag was lost! I believe it is on its way now though, so no issue there.

In Oslo, there were two lines for passport checking - One for European Union citizens (which went extremely fast) and one for all other passports, which I was in, along with the other Canadians. I believe we were the only caucasians in that line, and people around me told me to go to the EU line (even though I told them Canada was NOT in the EU)... It's the second time I've felt foreign, the first being in Japan, when we were randomly searched. I cannot imagine what some people must go through in airports, being "randomly" searched several times because of how they look.

After landing in Oslo, we found a bus that would take us 10 minutes away to the hotel Gardermoen (Budget in big bright letters on the side :) ). It cost us 70 NOK ($13 CAD). By the time we all checked into our rooms it was 10:30p.m. We found a brochure for Peppe's pizza in our rooms and all came to the same conclusion and met downstairs ready for Pizza.

PIZZA - Basically a cheeseburger and fries pizza and a taco pizza, soooo delicious!

At this point we were all loopy as can be. We were promised an amazing breakfast though, so time to steal away to bed (not before the best shower of my life however, you know how when you feel so greasy you could provide hair grease to anyone in the cast of GREASE?)

The hotel Gardermoen is cool. It was difficult to find our rooms however, the first digit of the room number doesn't correlate well with the floor number... I was in room 120, so 2nd floor. The first digit corresponded to the module of rooms we were in (several smallish modules connected by hallways).

Brown cheese? Yes please!

Breakfast lived up to it's name. As you can see by my above picture. There was pickled herring, and some sort of sardine stuff. Various sandwich meats, cheeses, yogurt, toppings for yogurt, "meat balls" fruit.... and melon - not sure what kind, but melon.

Now we are in Andoya, in our rooms, where we have more than 1MByte of bandwidth (as in hotel Gardermoen). We took a taxi to town (Andenes - 2km away) and walked around after having supper - shown below :)

Basically meat, potatoes, meat, gravy, meat and some more meat.

So, if you've made it this far (good for you!) the question of the day is: What song did I reference in this post? (Hint - third block of text where I couldn't sleep).
That might be a tough question, so I'll have two this time around - What latitude am I at right now?

Until next time, when I'll reference another song (It will be more obvious next time) Cheers, Mate!