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#this is what we call pancakes in Norway (and Scandinavia etc)
happyheidi · 1 year
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Tuesday night and Wednesday! VOLVO! And then on to Norway, home of a-ha . . .
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So, on Tuesday evening, we arrived to the Gothenburg Central Station and right across from it was the Clarion Hotel Post, which had basically a snazzy nightclub right outside and something of a British Royal Mail theme. The hotel was once some big municipal building, maybe their central post office, and it was refurbished into a nice hotel.  This was the night of our trip that was paid for by Volvo, and we would be having dinner in their fine-dining restaurant on Volvo’s dollar, or rather kroner.  We got all check in and then went up to our room.  In the room, some of the structural architectural elements were exposed, like a beam, that went diagonally from the bottom right corner of the room to the upper left corner  . . and  of course our resident monkey had to shimmy up that as fast as he could get to it.  Ugh.  Anyway, Cece has also taken to getting her wiggles out and exercise in whenever she can, and for her, it’s in the form of doing “pirouettes” in any space where there is more than two-square-feet for her to move in.  She puts her arms out, winds up, and then flings her body in a circle.  Anyway, I digress; after Rowan dusted that beam with his body multiple times by sliding down it, we headed out on the streets of Gothenburg for a few-hour walk before our 8:30 dinner reservation (yes, it was a late reservation, but that was per their decision, not ours).
We walked along a river, which had a linear kind of park, and then we wove our way back through a school’s playground (lots of climbing, swinging, balancing ensued) and a shopping district and got to the hotel with a few minutes to spare before dinner.  I will say, Gothenburg (and now Oslo) has a lot of construction going on, like, building construction and road construction.  It was also Pride week in Gothenburg and there were rainbow flags waving everywhere, and there would be at the Volvo HQ the next day too. So, dinner was to be Scandinavian delicacies, and the first course – which Eric and I got, but not the kids, because we didn’t get the pre-set meal for them and rather ordered off the menu, which we’d planned with Volvo European Delivery before we left—was some smoked fish and caviar and creme fraiche and some other little dollops of things.  We are not really “fine dining” people (I always think back and chuckle at the crazy insane fancy meal Cece, Alia, my dad, and I had in Riga, during which they brought my dad’s meat on a tiny little pyre of pine which they lit on fire at the table), but Eric cleaned his plate for that first course and I shared some of the fish with Cece.  Our second course was a white fish in a cream sauce with asparagus and tiny potatoes.  That was delicious.  The final course was dessert and it was super intricate: little gelled tartlets with meringue knots and yuzu sorbet and a few chunks of rhubarb and caramelized white chocolate sprinkles and white chocolate brownies, in three tiny pieces. See, I could barely remember all of the elements. Rowan devoured what was left of Eric’s, and Cece shared mine with me.  The kids main course was actually a mac-n-cheese variant and a side of roasted head-of-cauliflower, which I though was very delicious.  They also got sparking apple juice, which of course they loved. OK, so the next morning, the Volvo driver picked us up at 8:40 and drove us to HQ.  At about 9:20, we had the keys to our new car! It all happened so fast and rather unceremoniously!  I mean, there was some ceremony in walking through these sliding glass doors into a big room with curtains on the walls, where the new car was parked.  Maybe the romance was dimmed a bit by our squawking children.  For some reason, they were kind of at their worst at exactly the wrong time.  We were trying to get all of the info about the new car from the guy who was orienting us to it, and the kids were supposed to be playing just on the other side of the glass doors (we could see them) with Legos, and of course, they mutually decided it was a perfect time to terrorize each other.  Well, never mind, once we got the car all set up and got them somewhat sorted out, we went over for a really quick spin in our new car over to the Volvo Museum, which was really close by but was kind of a struggle to get to because of some super-sizable freeway construction plus a roll-over accident with a semi that closed a roundabout that was crucial to us.  That messed us up on the way back, too.  Anyway, the Volvo Museum was so cool!  The kids kinds of settled down once we were there, checking out all of the amazing old Volvos from through the years, including buses, construction equipment, firetrucks, and even a plane.   We made our way back to the Volvo HQ and were treated to lunch in the little café there.  It was very yummy: smoked salmon, potatoes, meatballs for the kids (which only Cece ate) and some vegetarian pancakes that Eric and I split. After that, it was time for  tour of the factory.  We had to put our cell phones in a locked drawer and don safety glasses and then hop in a multi-car little “train” wagon thing, with the other guests.  We were in the front car, with a very cool woman who was the MC (she is American, from Dallas, but married a Swede, and lives in Sweden, and guides these factory tour for European Delivery guests; she thought our kids were hilarious). The kids were soooooooo engaged by the tour.  It was amazing.  We went into the body shop part, where the metal pieces are ��assembled and welded.  Then we went into another building where the other parts are assembled too: doors added on, components inserted, testing done, etc. It really appeared to be a very gender-balanced and age-distributed workplace.  The tour took and hour.  I would love to give more details, and I will when salient aspects pop in my mind, but my brain is tired right now, so this will have to suffice. When we got back to the HQ, we got our phones back and gave the glasses back and got a found out how we could avoid stopping to pay tolls on entering Norway (by doing an EZ-pass kind of thing where it just reads our license plate and charges our credit card).  Then, we re-packed the back of the car, got the kids latched in, and whizzed off on the road to Norway!  The land of a-ha!  My long-time dream!  I was joking that I was sure that as soon as we crossed into Norway, there would be a huge billboard saying, “Welcome to Norway, the Land of A-Ha.”  That wasn’t the case, surprisingly. We used the built-in navigation on our Volvo during our drive – and I have not yet stressed how nice this car is. It is so nice.  I mean, even though in Finland, Sweden, and Norway this car is like the standard one for taxis, it still resonates with me as the nicest ride ever.  But, the reason taxis are luxury cars in Scandinavia is because the industry is, and I quote Eric via an article he read because we were scratching our heads about it, “highly regulated and hideously expensive.”  Anyway, we got to our apartment in Oslo and we then had a struggle to actually get the keys to our Airbnb.  They were supposed to be with the employee working at the corner store, called “Joker,” and we went in, and the guy was like, don’t have ‘em.  He told me I was at the wrong Joker.  So, Eric went back to that one, because it was at the intersection we were told to go to, and the guy rebuffed him again.  So, Eric went a few blocks over to another Joker, and that guy was super nice and was like, nope, you were at the right Joker originally. So, we *all* went back to the original Joker, and lo and behold, the guy finally found the envelope with our names on it.  Then, the apartment building is a four-floor walk-up, which I can hang with since my apartment in the Renaud was too, but in this case, we didn’t have clear information on which apartment was the one we needed to enter.  I looked back at the original Airbnb posting and it said “sunny top floor,” so that answered that question, but there were two apartments!  So, we gambled, picked one, tried the key, and it worked.  Whew. It was super nice (I mean, it *is* super nice, as I am writing this from the extra-long kitchen table in this, indeed, very sunny top-floor apartment). I texted with my friend Ryley a bit, who lived here, and we went out by car to a grocery store near her and then popped by her place for a sec.  She’d made us banana bread and gave us a bottle of wine and my kids were bananas for seeing her kids, and they watched some hilarious puppy videos together while we chatted.  Then, we got back to our place, fed the kids yogurt and banana bread for dinner, and got them down – late again! And, in the next post, I will tell you all about our first day in Oslo when I did not, surprisingly, run into any members of a-ha.
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