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Lysefjorden and Dalsnuten

Two Korean friends, Seyeon and Youngsoo, visited me for a few days in Stavanger before continuing their month of travel around Europe. I treated them to some outdoor fun, a stroll around old Stavanger, and splashed about in a forest lake nearby my apartment. We rode the Clipper tour boat into the beautiful Lysefjorden and were lucky enough to get warmth and sun with only moderate cloud cover. I took them walking about the city and Sandnes and up nearby Dalsnuten, probably the shortest climb nearby and fitting for a couple of city slickers.

I think they enjoyed their time here, and it will provide a bit of contrast to their more urban and cultural sightseeing elsewhere south on the mainland. Interestingly, I think they were most impressed with my young cousin Frida. They seemed to appreciate her vibrant energy and fearless adventurer’s spirit.

They seemed especially surprised when, as we approached our neighborhood forest, she jumped off her bike and ran full speed into an unharvested wheat field, rolled about in the tall stalks there, and yelled for my friends to join them.

I have uploaded a selection of pictures from Lysefjorden and the short Dalsnuten climb closer to the city:

Lysefjorden and Dalsnuten Pictures

Trollkjeften, the Mouth of the Troll

Sunday was hiking day. I have been biking around islands recently, but it was time to head to the mountains for a nice day trip. Joining my uncle, cousins, and a number of friends, we took the ferry to Tau, and drove to one of my favorite places to hike in this area: Trollkjeften.

I don’t know if this is the official name of this mountain ridge, riddled with caves, but the locals apparently call it that. Thomas heard rumors that there were a lot of caves in some mountain in the area when he was in the Norwegian military but old locals he spoke to had never heard of them. I can’t remember how he finally found them but he has been visiting them ever since. Each time Thomas brings his climbing equipment and we enter the almost hollow mouth of the troll by rappelling into one of the deep chasms on the top.

The Ghost in the Mountain

The last time I joined him here was in high school, on a camping trip with children from Stavanger’s karate club. He sent a friend and fellow climber up the mountain and into the caves the day before to hide the skeleton of a sheep. After we arrived and had all rappelled into the mountain’s interior, we set up candles around the edges of a large cavern. There Thomas proceeded to tell us the (fictional) story of a group of German soldiers who went into the mouth of the troll during the war while looking for Norwegian resistance forces who had earlier abandoned the caves. Thomas claimed that the Germans fled in fear of something inside the mountain but that one of their troops never emerged from the cave alive…

At just this point, and the timing just couldn’t have been better – one little boy suddenly jumped up and screamed at the top of his lungs. All of us turned our flashlights to him and saw that throughout the telling of the story he had been sitting on pile of bones… Only later that night did Thomas tell me that the bones were not human and I don’t think the other children were ever told. As best as I can remember, we all fled the cavern in fear.

Today Thomas told me that the boy was apparently not permanently traumatized by the shock and is now a university student in Oslo. However, he apparently told Thomas that he has never forgotten that moment of complete terror.

The entrance we chose to rappel into today involved dropping down about 23 meters and connected to a medium network of cave passageways. There are hundreds of such entrances and cave passageways, slimy dark granite slits found in a mountain which essentially amounts to a large pile of huge boulders left by the glaciers.

The kids loved this trip, as of course did we. Rappelling is lots of fun, and not something non-climbers get to do much for fun, not to mention cave exploration. We explored the mountain’s interior for a few hours, and then made our way back on a trail taking us through a mossy forest and a refreshing swim in the river below. All of the forests are covered in a bed of heather and blueberry bushes. At any point we could reach down for a bit of sweet blue goodness and like most hiking trips which include a pass through a forest in this region, the adventurer can scarcely avoid returning without fingers stained dark blue. The mountain waters are delicious and as always, we refilled our water bottles anywhere we came across running water.

I posted various pictures from our trip today here:

Trollkjeften Pictures

Trip to Kvitsøy, Rennesøy

I hopped on my bicycle and left Saturday afternoon to go on another elaborate reading/biking adventure. I decided to go to Kvitsøy which is a small island full of historical relics which is accessible by ferry about 30 minutes bike ride from my home. My uncle Thomas’ last question to me as I left the house, “Shouldn’t you check the ferry schedule?” I simply replied, “No problem, I’m going to read and if I’m early, I will just read outside in this beautiful weather.”

I didn’t know the ferry was not going to get there for 3 hours. I did get some good reading done and the weather was beautiful but I ended up falling asleep. In my somniferous state I did notice a few people and cars pass me but when I actually woke up, the ferry had left some 10 minutes before. I was not about to wait for the next one. I decided to make the best of the remainder of my afternoon and catch the bus to Rennesøy, another very scenic island, just north of Mosterøy, which is the subject of a previous entry. The bus passes nearby the ferry to Kvitsøy so things worked out alright.

When I got to Rennesøy, I decided to enjoy a few hours scenic riding around the Eastern half of the island, then finish off by going over the top of the eastern hilltop where there is a little nature reserve on top, before catching the bus home. Half way around the coast, however, my back wheel got a puncture and I had to walk my way back to one of the two small villages on the island from which I could take a bus home. I have been borrowing a very old but nice quality bike from my friend Glenn and already replaced a dangerously bulging old front tire after my trip to Mosterøy, before it could finally give way. I was warned by the store clerk that the back tire looked bad too but I told him I thought it would hold out for my last week here in Stavanger. No such luck so I will have to replace the back tire as well, as its dangerously worn state probably led to my puncture.

Hålandsvatn

After a night and morning of heavy rain, the sun emerged from the thinning clouds this afternoon, long enough for me to put my reading aside for a few hours and go out to enjoy it. I hunted down my young cousin, borrowed his bicycle and went on a short bike ride to one of the two lakes nearby, Hålandsvatn. Both lakes have nice trails around them and are absolutely wonderful when the weather is good, whether is it for a walk, a picnic, or some swimming in the summer.

The area surrounding the lakes are mainly residential areas and a few farms. On my hour and a half or so bike ride around the lake and back to the apartment, I passed all sorts of creatures, some pictures below.
Continue reading Hålandsvatn

Children’s Math Abilities in Norway

I’m enjoying a month back in my hometown where I’m trying to teach myself basic reading of German and reading about treason trials and political retribution in early postwar Norway and Denmark. I am also enjoying this time back here to hang out with my friends and relatives of course.

The most fun way of connecting with my young 13 year old cousin is by playing role-playing games, which is something I have also very much enjoyed since as long as I was old enough to read. I sent my Dungeons & Dragons books, etc. to my mother’s apartment here in Norway and have kicked my rusty old mind into gear in order to create some adventures for him and his friends (two other 14 year old boys in the 9th grade in Norwegian school, plus another to join next week). Today, during our little gaming session my enthusiastic young adventurers decided that they wanted to lay a trap for a powerful and diabolical monster (a Night Hag) who was preying upon a village at night (For the record, I usually but not always try to subvert the simple Good/Evil binaries and various race-based generalizations which are a trademark of such games). It is a bit complicated to explain for those who don’t know how these games work, but suffice to say my players decided to raid the Night Hag’s cave while she was out hunting and steal something called a Heartstone inside, which she would notice immediately. They would then await her return and hope that she would fall for the trap when they would try to ambush her.

They wanted to dig a large pit in front of the Night Hag’s cave. Unfortunately, there is nothing but stone outside the cave, which is on a mountain side. Their priest has a divine spell which can turn stone to clay, but only 30 cubic feet per spell cast. If they can cast the spell 4 times, and without using other creative techniques to remove the stone, they can turn a total of 120 cubic feet of solid stone into soft clay which they can then dig out, fill with wooden stakes prepared by the cooperative villagers and then hide the trap with an illusion to deceive the Night Hag (who has some spell resistance, but they don’t know that).

This is all very technical and somewhat irrelevant, but to make a long story short, they had to calculate how wide, long and deep they wanted to create their pit. At one point this meant that, in order to calculate one possible configuration of the size, they had to figure what 120 divided by 16 was. I ruled that they were not allowed to use a calculator (on their cellphones) since I wanted to see how my young friends did at calculating this out and was amazed to discover that after 15 minutes of trying, they were not able to figure out 120/16 by hand. I got the answers 6 from one boy while another emerged from a trance of complicated and bizarre notations to declare, if momentarily, the answer to be 25.

Now, these kids are actually very smart. They had lots of great ideas during the adventure and were able to solve all of the other puzzles I created for them (including a classic one involving riddles and mirrors to open a secret door). They were also surprisingly worldly in their estimations about how various other people in this fantasy world would behave. That is, by observing their internal debate over how to interact with people they met they showed they were able to make very complex and realistic appraisals of how strangers would behave in reaction to certain situations and adjusted their own decision making in accordance, something which reveals considerable experience in social interaction and overall maturity.

In addition, while we played the game almost all in Norwegian, whenever characters spoke, or riddles or inscriptions were read, it was in English (both for my convenience, since I’m more eloquent in English, but also in order to create a certain mystique) and these 13-14 year olds had almost no problems understanding any of the English in the dialogue or puzzles or replying – on behalf of their characters, in English. The only exceptions were not understanding the word “passageway” and sometimes using distinctly Norwegian word order in their English sentences.

However, while they came up with creative solutions to other various problems, simple math like the division of 16 into 120 stumped them (Disclaimer: I also suck at math really badly, so I was amazed, if momentarily comforted, to find anyone with greater difficulty than myself, albeit among those half my age). I asked when they learnt how to do division at school and they said that they remember vaguely having learnt how to do something like 120/16 in 6th or 7th grade but can’t remember how it was done. I don’t know how representative these boys are but I couldn’t help but wonder how old the average child in other countries, especially in East Asia where I have spent so much time recently, can do this kind of math? Then again, if they are not to be engineers or mathematicians, does it matter in a world of cellphone calculators?

Picture Page

I have a very disorganized collection of pictures from my travels that I have linked to in various older postings. They are floating around online but not much fun to hunt down without looking through the archives of this blog as well as over at my homepage. For convenience, I will be keeping links to the various online pictures in one central place:

Muninn Picture Page

All pictures are available for use under a Creative Commons license.

A Few Notes on Traffic in Seoul

I don’t drive in Seoul so I don’t have to face any traffic jams and such. The subway system in Seoul is fantastic, easy to use, and is very cheap compared to Tokyo and even New York and Boston. The network is in my opinion far superior to New York and Boston. One of the things I find most annoying about New York is its annoying design which effectively segregates the East side of Manhattan from the West side and has such inconvenient connections that almost everyone has to go through Times Square to get anywhere interesting.

Though the nasty smelling and polluted streets of Seoul will fill your nostrils alternatively with the scent of sewage, tobacco, and car exhaust, Seoul subways are also far cleaner than New York’s smelly and dirty subways, where conductors occasionally yell at passengers, make bizarrely grumpy announcements, and the summer months are plagued by cars whose air conditioning is broken. The one thing that we can all appreciate about the New York subway is the fact that they very conveniently run 24 hours.

Since I have only been in Korea for a week so I shouldn’t be too confident about my observations but two things I have noticed so far about traffic rules: First, as if the pollution isn’t bad enough, scooters and motorcycles often drive on the pavement. This is perhaps partly because many of the streets make it difficult for them to cross over to the direction they want to drive. They billow out foul smelling exhaust from their tailpipes and I’m not the only one to cough and hack as they drive past. The scooter exhaust mixes with the smoke that flows out from street venders selling various kinds of orange colored food. In Taipei I remember them sticking on the road mostly, often in the hundreds as they collect at intersections. Some of the streets in central Taipei even have “no scooter” streets (such as the one near the central train station).

Secondly, red lights seem to be optional in Seoul when they are by crosswalks. On many occasion I have been happily crossing the street at a crosswalk with a green man showing (and a red light for cars) and the cars will drive by me (albeit somewhat more slowly) both in front and behind. I know they must be annoyed at waiting for pedestrians, but this can’t be a very safe practice. I like to be able to cross crosswalks when the man is green without having to be too paranoid about being run over.

Visa Troubles and the Seoul Immigration Office

I went into the language institute at my school to inquire about changing my 30 day visa here to a D-4 student visa as described on the website of the school. I had all the paperwork I thought I would need in the form of pictures, school admission and enrollment letters, tuition receipt and bank statement.

“Oh you have that stamp in your passport. Hmm…you’ll need to go to Japan twice and come back since you don’t have the short-term stay visa.”

What? I have to what? Leave the country, once or maybe twice in three months? I was supposed to have applied for a special tourist visa before I came? What…are you serious? What the…

This is a pretty good summary of my first 20 minutes of conversation with the administrator. My friend Craig and I both seem to have missed this whole C-3 visa application thing and came to Korea thinking the stamp we get on arrival is a standard tourist visa.

I was not happy about further complicating my already crazy travel schedule this summer and dishing out hundreds more dollars to go to Busan, hop on a boat to Fukuoka, Japan and either apply for a C-3 visa there or go to Japan twice.

This would not have been an issue if I simply used my Norwegian passport and I could always go to Japan once and come back to Korea on the Norwegian passport. Norwegians get 90 days in Korea, along with most of the developed world. Canada gets 180. Why does the US get 30? To put it simply, it is because we treat the world like shit. To be specific, we probably give Koreans 30 days so that is what they give us. Serves us right.

That’s it, I’m no longer traveling on my US passport by default when I go anywhere outside the US. Gone are the days when Imperial Citizenship provided the most convenient way to travel. For example, I have discovered that traveling as a Norwegian saves me money on visa applications to China, gets me into Chile for free (instead of $70 or something), and probably slightly lowers my chances of being shot or blown up.

When will this whole nation-state madness end? Probably not in my lifetime but we can all do our part in contributing to its peaceful and gradual destruction. For now it is mostly selfish traveling bourgeois types such as myself who complain about it on the practical side. Now let me tell you about my adventures at the Seoul Immigration Office…
Continue reading Visa Troubles and the Seoul Immigration Office

Dexterity and Chopsticks

At a dinner recently, I was told by a Korean friend of mine that the now famous Korean stem cell researcher Hwang Woo-suk recently claimed that the Korean metal chopsticks (which I find admittedly relatively hard to use in grabbing greasy noodles and other slippery food items) have developed the dexterity of the Korean people to such a high extent that it allows them to be better at the detailed work of science at a microscopic level.

Ah yes, I found Hwang’s quote online here :

Their secret weapon? A mastery of wielding steel chopsticks. “This work can be done much better in Oriental hands,” he says. “We can pick up very slippery corn or rice with the steel chopsticks.”

It has been mentioned many other places as well, including a Wired news article. Also, it apparently isn’t just manual dexterity, it is our very mental capacity for concentration which is at stake here in chopstick use:

To use chopsticks, the use of some 30 different joints and 50 muscles is required. The use of chopsticks thus stimulates the cerebrum far more actively than does the use of a fork. The everyday practice of using chopsticks is said to enable people to improve vital developmental functions, such as muscle control, coordination for handling small objects, and mental concentration. It is a well-known fact that practicing certain hand movements during early childhood, such as playing with string or molding clay, are helpful for developing the brain. Some have conjectured that the reason Korea was able to become a global leader in semiconductors, despite a late start of some 30 years, was because of its people’s manual dexterity, which is especially well suited for delicate work. Moreover, they claim that such manual dexterity is a product of Korea’s chopsticks-user culture. A similar interpretation is used to explain the exceptional success of Korean athletes in such sports as golf and archery.

When I did Kyûdô archery in Japan, I was told that the fact I came from Norway, which is made up of a “hunting and gathering people,” contributed to the speed of my improvement in skill. If only we used metal chopsticks in our hunting villages along the fjords.

Second Full Day in Korea

I’m slowly getting settled in here. I went shopping for basic living materials today. I had a success rate of 3/4 today for getting my meaning across in Korean. First getting my luggage from the hostel to the dorm I had to navigate a taxi driver. I would like to thank my old 初めての韓国語 textbook that I studied in Japan for the taxi survival Korean needed to achieve this miracle. My second conversation was to ask where they sell lots of electronics in Seoul since my friends and I all need adapters for our computers fit the wall outlets. I knew there was a place full of stuff like that from my last trip here but couldn’t remember where (it was Yongsan Electronics market).

My third conversation was a complete failure. In my painfully broken Korean I tried to explain to a bewildered electronics salesman that the outlets in the wall are different in the US and Korea and we wanted to buy a little piece to make our electronics (which can handle the conversion without a transformer) fit the wall here. The poor attendant stared at me throughout the entire exercise like I was asking him for directions back to the moon. When I finally finished what I thought was an explanation, and asked him if he had such adapters, he said, “Ya ya, show me your camera.” I tried again but he had this look in his face which seemed to say, “If I just stay completely still maybe this freak will not know I’m still here and will go away.” Ok, I completely botched that one.

I moved onto fresh prey at the next electronics store. After drawing a detailed, albeit barely recognizable collection of pictures of the plugs and wall outlets in Korea and the US and a picture of how the adapter would fit together with our American plug, I showed it to the next attendant and said, “I want to buy this.” He said it was called a Pig’s Nose or something and pulled out one from under the table. When we said we wanted several he ran around to other stores and collected them up and sold them to us for a thousand a piece. Excellent.