Norway : My Heart Returns to the Place it Came From

We North Dakotans are so proud to be Norwegian. (I'm sure I've mentioned this before a time a two.) We carry the blood of farmers and fishermen, and with it, the weight and pride of working the land, of hauling old traditions into the new world. We sponsor the continent's largest Scandinavian festival, during which the local news channel displays the weather back in Oslo. I guess it makes sense: during the Great Immigration Days, 1/3 of Norway's population left home to become 1/3 of North Dakota's population. The mountains leveled out into plains like lefse dough beneath a rolling pin, and we became the new Norwegians--or, perhaps, the Norwegians became us.

The roots of my family tree spread deep underneath the ocean, curling across the Swedish coast, poking a few spare tendrils out of the earth in Germany and Romania. Primarily, though, my heritage is a collection of sprouts and blossoms tended in Norwegian soil. In sixth grade, we were assigned our first-ever major research paper; everyone's topic had to be a different country, and there could be no overlap. I remember sitting at my desk breathless, anxious, scared to death that someone else would snap up Norway before I could. I had no backup plan. I needed to write about trolls and the midnight sun or I would shrivel away under a pile of bibliography cards! Turns out I needn't have worried: my classmates were preoccupied with England at that time. Sweet Norway land was mine, and I was thrilled because I was Norway.

My great-grandma Anna immigrated to the States as a young woman, and though this is the story of most of my great-grandparents, hers has always been special to me because she lived in the little house just across the street from where I grew up. I never met her, but I knew that she could beat the crap out of anyone in a game of Chinese checkers. I knew that she was sassy and funny and that, while churning the butter one day, she didn't notice my dad consuming his fill of the final product. (Fifty-some years later, my dad is still leery of excess butter.) She married a farmer, raised two children, instructed my grandma to marry grandpa in a dress, not a navy pantsuit, and was buried four years before I could meet her--except in old stories. She lived to see my parents marry in a crowded church on a sweltering August afternoon and left behind photo albums full of the cards she received during her final days in the hospital.

I think she's beautiful.

Not everyone left Norway when Grandma Anna did. Several of her siblings remained in the homeland, and they, along with their children and grandchildren, maintained the contact between North America and Europe. So when my parents mentioned in their last Christmas letter that they had a daughter in Spain, the daughter of my dad's dad's cousin sent an email inviting us to visit Norway and stay with Ola (my dad's dad's cousin's husband). (From now on, I will refer to the Norwegian family members as "cousins," since that's much easier, and since I don't really know how to figure these things out.)

It did not take much convincing.

After a week of frying our skin off in the Spanish sun (and, mind you, looking quite healthy in all the pictures, due to water we were drinking and the miles we were walking), we arrived in rainy Stavanger. Cousin Mona and her husband introduced us to the fjords via boat. Ola welcomed us into his house with wide-open arms, and even the sun stayed up a little later to make sure we were settled in. Now, I had met Ola once before; when I was five, he and his wife came to the States. They left me a Norwegian picture book, which I spent hours trying to decipher before finally making up my own stories. The book itself never struck me as particularly different, except for the words, of course. It was about a little girl on a farm, poking at chickens in cages and feeding cows, and that was exactly my childhood, only in English. And that, even on the first day, was how our boat ride, our landscape, our reunion felt: not particularly different, not foreign. We don't have mountains in North Dakota; we really don't have that many trees or lakes, either, especially not when compared to our easterly neighbor, Minnesota. But on the quiet water, with nature shooting up around us, it was as familiar as that small girl in the book with all her farm animals. It was just like where we came from.

(There is one notable difference: Norway's western coast doesn't get as much snow as we do. Ridiculously unfair!)

Ola had just purchased a new Toyota, and his great delight was driving us around. He'd swing by a family member's house, take a nap while we chatted in English, and awaken to check his watch, informing us that it had been an hour and that it was time to go now.

My mom was intrigued by the coffee tables that were actually used for coffee. Let me just admit it now: I will never live up to the domestic standard set by Norwegian women. We ate like hobbits that week, completely counteracting all of the walking and water-drinking of the previous week. Norwegians have four meals a day: breakfast, a light lunch, a midday meal around 4pm, and supper. So we'd sit down to a table, still digesting our last meal, and someone would bring out the coffee pot and the cakes. Cakes, plural, always in the kitchen, ready to go should a spare neighbor or long-lost relative stray in. And I, I who did not drink coffee until moving to Spain, I who am used to just a shot of caffeine swirled away in milk and sugar, was offered straight black coffee at least thrice a day. Ola snickered the first time I requested sugar, then took to passing me the sugar bowl with a smirk. If I have been culturally insensitive about anything (and I'm sure I have), let it never be said that my insensitivity regarded food. I was drowning in black coffee that week. In fact, I think my body was composed of 80% coffee. Aunt Inga would've been so proud.

Here's another admission: I make fun of tourists. I watch them stop every ten seconds to fiddle with cameras, take a fifteenth pose in front of some monument. Often, though, I play this same game. I collect the magnets and the kitschy playing cards. I take the same photos. I pretend I'm knowledgeable because I've got the Rick Steves guide telling me what I'm looking at. But when you're winding through the mountains in the backseat of a Toyota with Norway's most punctual man, you don't stop at the tourist shops. Ola barely had patience for a fifteen-minute beach detour, so I quickly realized we wouldn't be browsing downtown Kristiansand. In theory, I like to stay off the beaten path, but once I found myself there, I felt twinges of disappointment. Because, well, where is everybody?! All the cool kids are shopping for wooden trolls to put on their knick-knack shelves in America, and here I am, cruising up the coast while my dad is trying to make conversation in Norweglish.

Wait. Wake up, Shar. Here you are, showered in generosity and sweet brown cheese, not on public transportation because you are with your family. You are not coming home with things. You are coming home with stories.

I saw the inside of the house where Grandma Anna grew up, complete with a mysterious giant stone in the front yard. I saw the graves of my great-great grandparents, the wooden trunks that carried a great-uncle's belongings. I learned that some of Anna's siblings were imprisoned for plotting to build up an arsenal against the Germans occupying Norway during WWII--just torn from their homes with small children left peering out the windows. Cousin Sverre was one of the little ones, orphaned for a year and a half, taken in by the neighbors. The parents of his neighbor, Olga, sheltered American soldiers who had to abort mission due to a plane malfunction--stowing them away in the barn. Sverre would grow up to be a ski jump judge at a few Olympics. We spent one night at his son's house in Kristiansand, in a neighborhood built into the hills. We had seen maybe ten cars on the highway when one of them turned around and said, "The traffic around here is just getting so much worse." I smiled and thought, "So this is where we get it."

Sverre's son, also Sverre, told us he'd recently read that last names beginning with Vidr had potential links to Vikings. That, of course, includes Grandma Anna's last name, which only further proves my theory about tall men who date ridiculously short women. (I have a lot of opinions about very tall men with very short women, all of which can be summed up in this one word: don't.) It's like they sense Viking blood and get intimidated, as if tall girls will be too busy plundering and pillaging to settle down and bake the twenty cakes required to be on hand at all times. This really isn't fair, because I think Viking heritage seems kind of attractive. Heck, it predisposes us to be adventurous, adept at carving, and seaworthy.

However, as Cousin Magnus pointed out while we peered over Viking etchings, "While the Greeks were busy writing philosophy, my people were playing with sticks."

Cousin Mona's son got married during our trip, and they were so kind to include us in the festivities. Let me tell you, Norwegians know how to throw a party. It started with the ceremony, a lovely affair in which the bride and groom sit across from one another, one attendant seated next to each of them. Halfway through, they switch chairs so that they are finally sitting on the same side. Other than the chairs, the wedding was fairly in line with a traditional American one. Right up until the waiting food.

We drove half an hour to the reception venue, and still the reception wasn't scheduled to start for an hour and a half. Outside the hall, a long table was spread with sweet rolls, buns, breads. "We're not going to have room for supper!" said mom.

"This is what we call waiting food," explained Magnus' wife, Drude. "This is normal."

And, you know, we're all about trying to blend in with the culture, so we acted perfectly normal and ate as many sweet rolls as possible.

Once the bride and groom arrived, the doors to the main dining hall were opened, and the guests were called in, each by name, to their seats. The servers handed around giant platters of meat and vegetables, and when the tables had exhausted these, fresh platters appeared. Between bites, the parents, siblings, friends of the couple made speeches--not your average 3-minute best-man speech, but 10-minute tributes! We sang songs set to traditional tunes, lyrics reworked to tell the story of Hege and Martin and how they'd met. Halfway through the wedding-fest song booklet, our plates were whisked away. Now, I only know about twenty Norwegian words, but I had undoubtedly understood sjokolade mousse on the menu. So far, we'd only seen two courses. But suddenly, the entire crowd was dismissed. People began shuffling out of their chairs. Mom and I just shrugged at each other.

"We just take a break now," Drude explained.

"A break?"

"Yes. Just a break."

Yes. A twenty-minute break. To smoke, to talk, to nap, whatever. After the break, we returned to the hall for more singing, more speeches, and, finally, the mousse. Then everyone was gathering their coats and purses, and my dad went into farewell mode, making sure the relatives knew how thankful we were. We stood around in the hallway, watching the photographer collect group pictures. Dad kept mange takk-ing and you have a fin familie-ing. The family seemed less affected by the goodbyes. It wasn't that they were being distant, though. It's simply that the party wasn't over.

See, after an hour or so of milling about during the photos, there was a dance. Just one. It's a traditional Norwegian dance in which hand-holding couples line up and walk around the building. It also includes making arches with your hands, walking under the arches, and clapping. In order words, the perfect dance for someone with no moves like me. (Sarah, I know you're reading this, so yes, I held hands with a boy. He is my fifth cousin or something like that, and he definitely wiped his sweaty hand on his pants once he'd let go of mine. In other words, no one fell in love.)

When that dance ended, everyone was called back into another giant room for the variety show. A guy and girl in diapers (representing Hege's daycare job) emceed another couple of hours of videos, songs, speeches, skits, which Magnus and Drude leaned over occasionally to translate.

And then, and then, with midnight approaching, we were ushered back into the dining hall for wedding cake. The table was spread with at least fifteen varieties of dessert. Remember, we had been eating off and on for the past eight hours, and now there was jello cake and Norwegian wedding cake and regular fondant-covered cake and brownie cake and chocolate cake and things that weren't cake and lefse. So, once again in the name of cultural sensitivity, I loaded up my plate. Besides, I didn't get lefse for Thanksgiving or Christmas this year, and the calories consumed after midnight count for the next day, not the current one. And anyway, calories don't count at all in Europe because they're measured as "energy value."

I was absolutely wiped out by 1:30am, which is when we arrived back at Ola's house (an early end, I'm told, to a Norwegian wedding).

We left on Monday, exactly a week after our arrival. I said goodbye to family I'd never before met and already felt I'd always known. I wondered how Grandma Anna had ever chosen to leave this place. She'd been back to visit, but still--when she sailed away from the fields and mountains, did her heart splinter like the firewood stacked outside her childhood home? Did all she gained make up for what she'd left behind? Could she ever understood what a beautiful legacy she would leave in two countries, for two children, for one grandson, for two great-grandchildren she never got to hold?

For better or worse, I believe the places we come from leave indelible marks on the people we become. Perhaps I'm even prouder now of being Norwegian. I follow Magnus as he traces an old pathway through a wheat field to his favorite childhood spot on the beach, and I am eight again, brushing through tree rows, biking prairie trails, plucking wild roses from the side of the road. I sit in Ola's rocking chair, looking out at the mountains, and I'm thirteen, captivated by the Black Hills rising around me, even as our tent fills with rain. I climb the stairs to the low-ceilinged room where my great-grandma was rocked to sleep in a wooden cradle, and I am home, I am home, I am home. In the steady rhythms of the land I can recognize my own heartbeat, and the pulse becomes a lullaby. Ja, vi elsker dette landet.

Backpack Backtrack: May 19th-20th

It seemed brilliant when we bought the tickets in March. I have been listening to the Wicked soundtrack regularly since spring of 2006, when my friend Anna and I would twirl in our dorm rooms to "I'm Not That Girl," using the extra mattress from my roommate-no-longer as a stage. After Will busted out "Popular" during supper at the Chinese restaurant in Álcala last fall, Sarah and I started discussing the possibility of seeing Wicked for real. Like, on Broadway. So when we found cheap tickets and flights in May, we booked! The only problem was that we had only a weekend to get to London and back, and our flight options left us with roughly 24 hours in the city.

London is its own special brand of magic. You don't even realize how London has seeped into the culture of your childhood: Narnia and Paddington and Hogwarts, Big Ben on every poster, your dad shouting "Penny Lane!" every time some Beatles imitation group asks for requests. Whenever I visit a new place, I look forward to it, but when our bus from the airport crossed the Thames and I saw the outline of the London Eye, my inner organs dropped to my toes in the fulfillment of every small-girl dream. I got anxious and giddy and started picking at the seat fabric because it didn't seem appropriate to yell, "LOOOOOONDON!" just then.

Before our 2:30 show, we'd seen guards playing a brass pops concert outside Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the outside of Westminster Abbey. We hadn't even gotten into the city to watch Will wolf down his full English breakfast until 10am, so there wasn't much time to do anything fully, just shuffle down the sidewalk and gape at everything along the way. Like I said, 24 hours. The sweetened condensed tour.

And Wicked. Oh, Wicked! The lights! The frill! The dancing! I think my heart stopped multiple times. I had to remind myself to breathe, taking in those voices. Sarah would grab my hand and squeeze it at key points, or she'd slap my legs as one of our favorite songs started. The soundtrack of our school year! I can't remember the last time I felt so fully captured by something. I would buy that ticket and take that early-morning flight again, live it over a hundred times, even considering what came next.

I know Spain's 8pm supper time is not usual, but I really wasn't expecting everything in London to close so early. By 5:30, the Tower of London was closed. Cafés, closed. Restaurants, closed. Subway! Closed! Maybe we were in a bizarre section of town or something; maybe we'd picked a secret holiday. Still, it wasn't until 9 that we found a little fish and chips place with an exasperated waitress. We'd hoped that maybe we could fit in some other magic before bedtime, this likely being Will's only trip to London and all, but when we left our dirty supper dishes for a final excursion to the London Eye, there was a disappointing lack of people standing in line outside. Because, like everything else that day, it was closed.

So we walked to Trafalgar Square instead. A drunk man was wading in the fountain, yelling, "I'm going to jail!" (I think that was a lie.) It just so happens that on this very night, the police were busy with more than drunken fountain waders, because on the 19th of May, the Chelsea football team was playing a match against Zurich, and it just so happens that this was the first time Chelsea had made it into the finals.

And it just so happens that on our one night in London, Chelsea won.

And it just so happens that our hostel was in Chelsea.

We'd spent an exorbitant £4.30 on a tube ticket earlier, so we opted for the No. 11 bus. On the top deck, Will turned to the guy behind him and asked, "Does this bus take us to Fulham Broadway?"

"Fulham Broadway? No, no this one. There are two No. 11s--one goes to Fulham, but this one doesn't." So...what?

At his advice, we jumped off at the next stop to wait for the other No. 11--he assured us it was only six minutes behind. When No. 11.2 number pulled up, Will asked the driver about Fulham Broadway. "No bus is going there tonight," the guy explained. "Too full." He gestured to the traffic that was picking up around us: Chelsea flags waving from car windows, people chanting, "Chelsea! Chlesea!" while blasting victorious music, and drunk men running half-clothed into the streets to bang on car hoods and cheer with the drivers. "No bus is going to Fulham tonight--it's blocked off."

"Is there any other bus we can take to get there?"

"No bus will get you closer. It's all blocked off. And if you are going there, hold hands with these girls and don't let go." Yeah, as much as my students would like to see that happen, I wasn't anticipating that Will would grab our hands as he warded off Chelsea fiends.

On the upper level of Bus No. 11.2, Will again asked a guy behind him for help. "I'm getting off at [whatever stop]. That's as close as you'll get tonight."

"Then we'll follow you when you leave," Will decided.

The bus stop was somewhere between Fulham and Complete Madness. Drunk Chelsea fans were stumbling in front of traffic, cheering, screaming, while cars backed into lanes at angles no sober person could deliberately make. Policemen on walkie-talkies exchanged information about someone who, we guessed, who was lost or dangerous or insane (or all three) and was probably the focal point of the giant helicopter floodlight overhead.

But where was our hostel? We went several blocks down a promising street, Will stopping anyone fully-clothed to ask if they'd heard of Bagley's Lane. All we got were a bunch of I don't know, man, I don't really live around heres. We turned back, tracing our path to the end of the road where we'd started, stepping around the same puke puddle for the fifth time. We flagged down a taxi to ask for directions, but the driver claimed he'd never heard of the street. It was back and forth on that street until a girl smoking outside her apartment warned, "Hey, people keep coming from that direction, complaining they've been hit with water bottles. I wouldn't go there if I didn't have to." Perfect. Victory and assault all in the same night.

The printed directions made no sense, no matter how we tried to interpret them. Our hostel was probably right in the middle of all this, the brawling and screaming, right at the tip of the helicopter searchlight, and the fugitive was probably in our room, setting fire to our sheets.

We'd been wandering for over an hour. Will stopped a random woman on the sidewalk, a woman who seemed fairly confident about the alleyway she was pointing toward. It turned out to be the right one. Our hostel was full of men watching game highlights, and we checked in at 1am.

Did I mention that we'd left the restaurant at 10?

Our credit cards were denied as we tried to buy train tickets to the airport for our 8:30 flight. I knew that if I fell asleep at 1:30, I'd never get up by 5, so I spent the night in the hostel lobby, keeping record of all the happenings on the back of a Starbucks bag. A mouse scuttled underneath the couches.

One more thing: I figured I should know where Sarah and Will were sleeping, in case they didn't appear at 5 and I had to shake them out of various stages of rigor mortis. Room 12, the guy said. We walked up the steps, up again, up, up, up to rooms 5 and 6 and 7, then 8. Back down again, 1, 2, 3, 4. Back up. Only 1 through 8. Back down, but then, oh, around the corner--a secret hallway. More rooms: 9, 10, 11. Back down the stairs, through the bar/lobby, someone was asking where the room was, the edges of my brain were entirely fuzzy, and then we were walking through a back hallway into an outdoor courtyard, where a bunch of guys stood around speaking French, and on the edge of the courtyard was room 12, dark and full of sleeping men.

My brain came unattached from my brain stem somewhere around 2:30am, but I remember reading a newspaper and watching the mouse. Sarah met me at 5:30, but Will hadn't appeared yet. She'd been the brave one, sleeping in the dark, dank man room, so I got to be the one to creep through the courtyard. To squint in the shadows that smelled like dirty man socks.

I had just figured out which bed was Will's when a soft alarm sounded. His silhouette turned over to me--me in some stealth dinosaur pose in the dark--and whispered, "Creeper."

So we got no sleep but we did see Wicked, and it's all still worth it somehow.

Irish Eyes

The crazy thing about the UK is that people speak English there.

The first weekend in May was Spanish Labor Day, so Caitlin and I hopped a plane to Dublin. I could understand every announcement on the plane and all the flight attendants getting snarky in the back. And then I could understand the people on the bus and the tour guides and the cashiers, and I tried not to say too much about it to Caitlin, because she's in love with a Welsh man and is well aware of this whole English-speaking phenomenon.

I tend to zone out when I'm surrounded by Spanish speakers; unless someone enunciates their words well in a crowd, it's all mushing together in my head as a drone. I'd love for it to not be like that, but it is like that. I am, however, good at catching certain swear words. After eleven months of letting my ears function at a low level of alertness, all this English was like candy. It makes you feel so intelligent: I just overheard two different conversations at once and understood them! I have moved to the fluency level required to order fast food! Next I'm gonna write a Master's thesis!

Of course, my foreign language default was on, so I kept telling the cashiers, "Gracias!"

It rained the entire weekend, which was not disappointing in the least because Ireland is supposed to be wet and green. And the houses! They're free-standing, not all built on top of each other like Spanish brick houses, and the bus drivers say things like, "Watch your umbrella there, love," and the tour guide at the old jail kept making sure people could understand what he was saying. In a country where customer service is not a high priority, this was all so refreshing.

The crazy thing about good stories is that they're mostly born of things gone wrong, plans come undone, and except for the drunk Dubliner who asked Caiti, "When're you gonna stop being so good-lookin'?" there wasn't a lot awry during this trip. No accidental five-mile walks to the ocean, no hostel roommates asking to borrow deodorant at 6:30am. Instead, we learned bookfuls (or at least bookletfuls--bookletsful?) about the Irish fight for independence, tested the Guinness and corned beef and cabbage, and watched the sun sink into the River Liffey.

The only thing I wish our trip had included was sheep. It was a lovely, rainy little weekend, and I remember thinking to myself as we flew back to Madrid, "How nice. How...strangely uneventful." Which, of course, is exactly what believers in Murphy's Law advise against thinking, but since I am not superstitious, I thought it anyway. Perhaps some would attribute the madness of our next UK visit to such thoughts, but here's what I think: when you go anywhere that's not home, awkward things have that much more potential to occur. And when you throw drunken sports-lovers into the mix, awkward just becomes awesome.

But that's another story.

Then I died and went to Switzerland

A 7:00 alarm on a spring break Monday morning is equally as pleasurable as awakening to a cat clawing the inside of your ears. I was still thinking about the awful number--7am--when my watch turned to 11 and we hadn't yet boarded our 9:40 flight.

In moments like these, the key is to casually glance around and make sure everyone else is as confused/frustrated as you are. The people directly in front of and behind me had tickets that said "Geneva," so it couldn't have been just me. I had already stuffed my book deep into my one piece of hand luggage, so there wasn't a lot to do other than sit on the floor, watching the other people in line get agitated. Then I reminded myself that this inconvenience was the result of having a long spring break and the money to travel--nothing like a good dose of self-degradation to put some perspective on first-world problems. Oh, and the guy in line behind me somehow lost his passport.

Once on the plane, the captain announced that there was a French transportation strike prohibiting us from flying over French airspace, meaning the plane was forbidden to leave until ten past noon. My thoughts as we taxied around: "Crap. I'm never getting to Switzerland."

Two hours later, I was in Switzerland.

 

You know how you can visit a place you've never been and feel like you've belonged there all your life? That was Switzerland. I grew up far away from mountains...and oceans...lakes, kinda...okay, most natural landforms...so I don't know what it is exactly that is so inviting, so home-like about a mountainscape. All I know is that when I think about mountains, I am all ready to part my hair into two braids and go frolicking about with some goats.

And the Alps (the pre-Alps, really) were more mountainy than any mountain I've seen before. The mountains I've known have only been foothills to mountains I could see from L'Abri. For five days, there was an Alp staring down through my bedroom window, I slept in a wooden-walled cabin room that reminded me of camp, and it felt like home.

The village bells ring every fifteen minutes.

L'Abri, founded by Francis Schaeffer in the 1950s, isn't really a retreat center. It's more like a mountainside study center where you live and participate in the community--with some who've stayed all term, some just for a week. The Schaeffers' intent was to create a place to discuss life and Christ and the world--without necessarily trying to fit ideas into the narrow confines of cultural Christianity. A place to ask questions without being made to feel that the questions are stupid. A place where everyone cooks and cleans and sells their twice-a-week showers for extra pocket change.

We sat in the living room at night, talking about heaven and hell and why they even matter right now. Some were so certain; others, so uncertain, yet no one was panicking over the questions, trying to smother them with the right answers. The planes of thought were cutting through one another at odd angles. No one's thoughts matched exactly, in background, in interpretation. Yet a thing I love about God and brains is that He'll use one person's thoughts to pry open the closed spaces in another's. Everyone is teacher and disciple, everyone is stepping forward together. It's nothing profound, really, but it was striking in its distinct visibility at L'Abri. At, I suppose, any place where people are willing to be real.

I was scraping crust off the lip of a bug-killer bottle during daily chores when another student said, "You have thirty minutes for tea break. We work hard here, but we also rest well." And that was L'Abri: work and rest, a beautiful blend. I attended two different lectures and two "formal" lunches (wherein someone poses a theological question and we spend the meal discussing it), read in the basement of the Farel House library, and watched fog swallow up the Alps. For as much as I enjoy walking my feet off in new places to get to all the "cultural attractions," my favorite sort of vacation is one where I can wander and taste the nature. To have time scheduled into the day specifically for reading and study--the life ideal. If I'd known it was going to be so wonderful, I'd have stayed a few extra days. "You'll just have to come back again," they kept telling me.

I hope so.

Thursday was our free day--no lectures, no chores, sack lunches in the fridge. Someone suggested I check out Montreux, just down the hill. ("Just" includes a bus ticket for the horrifying sum of 6.40, a train ticket, and multiple occasions requiring French. In which I know three phrases, and I'm not sure about the third.)

Montreux sits along Lac Léman, seamed in by mountains. But the flowers! Oh, gosh, the flowers. They edged the lakeshore in precise color schemes and patterns, a gardener's love exploding in the hues. First-grade me erupted at the sight of all those flowers (by this, I'm referencing the six-year-old Shar who, after reading a story about Native American naming techniques, dubbed herself "Rainbow-in-the-Mist" and asked her parents about moving into an earthlodge). I might have gone a little overboard with the whole flower-love thing, but seriously: GIANT BRIGHT POPPIES. That is all it will take to convince me to miss a flight and conveniently stay in Switzerland forever.

I can't fail to mention my travel buddy here, but lest he ever develop an interest in libel cases, let's just call him "Bill." Bill left L'Abri a few days early because he hated the two-shower-a-week rule (hey, water's expensive in the mountains!), and also because he hated chores. To be fair, Bill paid 4 francs for a water bottle and 9 francs for a storage locker so he could wander Montreux with me, and he never said a word about the fact that I was photographing every single flower I passed. But poor Bill had two weeks left for sight-seeing in Switzerland, and with the way he spitefully clutched that 4-franc water, I sure hope his nerves lasted the rest of the journey.

We spent some time at the Chateau de Chillon, a fortress on the water which apparently inspired some of Lord Byron's tales. (His name is carved in the dungeon, though I forgot to look for it.) Most of the displays inside were about torture chambers and witchcraft--so, overall, an inspiring and uplifting tour. Especially when accompanied by Bill asking (twenty thousand times), "I don't know. Is this worth taking a picture of? It's picture-worthy, right? I mean, you'd take a picture of it, right?" Bill. You have a digital camera.


Also, I'm not sure if you noticed, but I'm kinda busy over here, taking ten thousand flower pictures.

By Friday, the temptation to skip my flight was peaking. The supervisor of Chalet Bellevue only furthered the desire when she mentioned, "We've got a place called the Eagle's Nest--it's as high as one and just as comfortable. I think the snow would probably come in, but we could get you a few extra blankets." I told her to look out for crusty hitchhikers breaking through the woods in the next month or two. I'd be the tall, shabby one.

I spent my last L'Abri day reading C.S. Lewis on a tree stump near a waterfall.

Switzerland is my new favorite place in Europe, perhaps in all of the world. So if I disappear mysteriously one of these days, you'll know where to find me. I'll be the tall, shabby one in the Eagle's Nest, repeating three French phrases over and over. Even if I'm not sure about the third one.

North and South

The edges of Spain carry a hundred cultures between them.

I live in the middle, in Madrid, in medieval remnants. The buildings are stocky; the earth is dry. Madrid is filled with the ghosts of kings, frozen in stone and bronze statues, with old whispers of horse hooves clip-clopping on cobblestone. It is castles and crypts and artisans who picked just the perfect flat rock to fit next to thousands of other flat rocks lining the steps that would point toward a garden that tourists, six hundred years later, would pay 10€ to walk over, never noticing quite how the grit and the gravel fit together so tightly.

The last time I remember rain in Madrid, it was night, it fell only for minutes, I was still not sleeping well. October, maybe. Madrid sees wisps of gray clouds and prays for them to fill the reservoirs; Camarma has been rationing water off and on because it is brown, dusty, dry here. Here in the land of the kings.

At the end of Christmas vacation, I bought a train ticket to Málaga, down on Spain's southern tip. Katrina was patient with me as I pointed out the orange trees on every corner, snapped pictures of water and palm trees and blooming flowers. Flowers! In January! From the top of a steep cobblestone hike, we thought we spied Morocco peeking over the edge of the Mediterranean.

Andalucía, the southernmost region of Spain, is the Spain you see on postcards and travel brochures. The tropical Spain, the Moroccan Spain. The Moors rounded the corners of their windows, their doorways. Stars are interwoven in the woodworking. It is warmer there, still ancient, but of a different flavor. You don't sense the merchants and lords and ladies on horseback as much. They are women in head coverings, stirring spices into Moroccan soup--as far from Madrid as you can get, with its bland sauces. You taste fruit and color; you are gathered into rhythm and unfurled into Arabic script, and it is just as much like Spain as you'd ever imagined.

During February's winter break, Sarah, Caitlin, and I rented a cheap hostel room in Sevilla, also part of Andalucía. We had lumpy mattresses and a roommate who asked Caitlin to borrow her deodorant at 7am, but other than that, Sevilla smelled like spring.

Sevilla is Christopher Columbus' burial site, a marriage of Gothic and Moorish, an Islamic mosque turned Catholic cathedral, an intricate carving stamped with a Spanish coat-of-arms. It is so many different kinds of history linking together in patterns that don't match and won't match and somehow still do match.

(Actually, the mosque-cathedral is in Córdoba, which is north of Sevilla. But still in Andalucía.)

Sevilla is flamenco, bullfights, trees so loaded with oranges that they're dropping to the ground in buckets, too sour to eat. We wandered the Alcazar gardens for hours, cheeks burning in February sun, and the inside of the palace was a galaxy of carving, woodwork, and keyhole doors, just dripping with magic. I started making plans just then to marry one of Europe's remaining 39 single princes, so as to move into Alcazar (a summer home, of course). And we hadn't even seen Plaza de España yet.

The fence is ceramic. CERAMIC. The fence is ceramic, the plaza has a moat around it, and we were surrounded by sour orange trees. In all of Spain, Sevilla is my favorite, like a rainbow hand-wrung over summer sky. Even when our train tickets say "Coche 9" and there are only five cars.

But if you should go north, which we did two weekends ago just because we could, Spain will be new again. On the northern coast, Spain reaches into the Bay of Biscay for British flavor. Bilbao felt how I imagine Ireland to feel: wet, wistfully lush, comfortably dreary. We slept across the street from the ocean, which was too cold for anything but fishing clam shells out of the sand, and we walked toward windmills on green cliffs while the wind grabbed our hair by the fistfuls and pulled straight up.

Bilbao is too modern for Madrid, too chilly for Sevilla, too northern-European to be Spain, and yet...it's Spain. It's all Spain, all these wonderful handfuls of mismatched foliage sprinkled across a giant peninsula that's at once dry and drenched. God is pressed into every inch of it, and you can see his tender care in the raindrops that splatter across the Basque Country, just as evident as it is in the apple blossoms that sway over dust clouds as I look out my classroom window. He is here in breeze and dust and drought, and I cannot help but fall in love with this country I never expected to live in, on a continent I was never that interested in, visiting cities I'd never thought about.

But it's so full and it's so beautiful, and He comes squeezing out of the middle of everything, and sometimes I wonder if I could explode from trying to take it all in.