Try again from Norway

Lo siento, my blog last time didn't work when I tried in Oslo. I'm now in Flam, on my way through the fjords of Norway. Just finished riding on one of the Top 20 Railways in the World, according to someone. It was quite nice. Reminded me of the Munich - Interlacken train I've taken. I'm now blogging at the rate of 60 kroner for 60 minutes - about $10 an hour. It's no Easy Everything.

Speaking of Easy Everything, it was huge news here yesterday when London was awarded the Olympics for 2012. As Parisians were disappointed and exclaiming when interviewed on CNN World ''It's things like this that make us hate Tony Blair.'' (WTF?), my group discussed what percentage of Americans even knew NYC was vying for it. Maybe 30%? I don't know...

Oslo was nice. We saw lots of naked babies in Vigeland Park, had dinner at the top of a hill overlooking the city, and I toured city hall and went shopping at H&M. No, Alicia, I didn't go look at the Scream at the National Art Gallery, surprise.

So here's a news flash - the H&M I was in yesterday had a HUGE cosmetics department and carried both H&M store brand stuffs, as well as Loreal, etc. name brands. A huge department of makeup, hair stuff, and lotion. I tried out a face mask was was impressed - it smelled yummy, too. So heads up on H&M competing with mass merchants and Sephora for those beauty $.

News flash #2 - Europeans are super good at toilet flushing systems. I do not remember this from my last trip, but this time I've seen no less than 4 different ways to flush a toliet. Including my favorite (which made me think of old roommate Tacy): There's a button on the back of the toliet split in 2 - you have the option of pushing just one half for a ''half'' flush, or pushing both buttons for a ''full'' flush. Smart, eh? Good work Scandinavia for coming up with that one.

Also have learned much about the gov't and structure of Scandinavia. Basically for the last 500 years Denmark, Sweden, and Norway have been fighting about land. For a while, Denmark controlled the bottom half of Sweden after they won it in a war, Norway was controlled by Denmark until after Napoleon's wars when land got redistributed and Norway was ''given'' to Sweden, and Sweden controlled it till 1905 when Norway finally got their independence. At that point, they ''elected'' a king, selecting someone from Denmark who renamed himself and his family and started being the kingly family of Norway from then till now. Who knew?

Visited a fun resistance museum yesterday in Oslo. I love resistence museums.

Gotta run, everybody else wants to internet, too.