Ferries rock!

This morning we left Frederikshavn on the Stena Line ferry you see here, called appropriately enough the Stena Saga. Very pan-Nordic or Scandinavian: built in Finland, owned by a Swedish company, and operated mostly by Norwegians. One of the things I am looking at this fall is how much the tradition of cultural closeness and economic interchange between Nordic countries matters for television and other cultural industries and businesses. Do the Scandinavians continue to trade very much television with each other, after options have expanded with satellite TV, Internet, etc.?

Back to ferries. Here you can see Sandy striking a pose as the Danish coast recedes in the distance and we head toward Oslo. I really like ships in general, and big ferries between countries are particularly interesting.

We took one between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico way back in 1987, but Sandy spent most of the time worrying that Chris, then two, would fall to his death off the thing, which was about the same size as this one to Norway, which is to say big, a long way to fall. She even tried to keep him on a kid leash, which he was quite indignant about. Rather hard to imagine now that Chris is 22 and 6'4".

The ferry trip was a little like Las Vegas on the waters for much of its first half or so. We had a small cabin but went look for a place to sit more comfortably, do some reading and people watching. There were a lot of copies of a ad featuring a new perfume, Covet, by Sarah Jessica Parker. We were looking for a companion scent for men called False Witness, but maybe they thought one big Old Testament style sin at a time was enough.

We tried the main, large bar area but it had serious second-hand smoke going on, plus a number of people trying to really drunk fast, so they could sober up a bit by the end of the trip. Very interesting scene. Closest to us were some tough-looking middle-aged guys who reminded me of truck- drivers in the U.S. -- in fact, there are a fair number of truck drivers on the ferry (trucks below in the hold), so maybe they were -- and their equally tough looking female friends, who might have been drivers, too, since a lot of women in Denmark do what would be considered hard, working class jobs in the U.S. They were all drinking hard and laughing a lot. Just beyond them, a group of South Asian and Arab teenage boys with computers. Then some Norwegian twenty somethings doing some serious drinking and flirting.

Around the boat, people were also doing some serious gambling on slot machines (including surprisingly small kids), video game playing, serious shopping (including one large boutique just for perfume--hence all the Covet ads), sleeping, reading, and walking on the view decks. The latter was our favorite, particularly once the ship entered the long Oslo fjord and the scenery really began to be pretty spectacular, as you can see from the photos.

More Norway to come.