Silk Road Shortcut

As I write this, I'm on a 300 kph Italo train, zipping from Milan to Rome. Italo is the only private high speed train in the world, and it's run by the chairman of Ferrari. Coincidentally, it has about the same top speed, and it's cheaper than the slower government run trains.

I started this trip over 2 weeks ago at the traditional start of the Silk Road, Trondheim, Norway. Ok, the Silk Road didn't really go to Norway, but Norwegian Airlines happens to have by far the cheapest flights to Europe, and a friend from California recently moved there, so it made a good place to start.

I had to go through Hell to get there (see below for proof). It's actually a town along the train line from Trondheim's airport into town. They preserved the old Danish spelling of "cargo terminal" for the amusement of English speakers. During the summer, they have to hold the train so Americans can stop for selfies.

Hell didn't exactly freeze over while I was there, though I did get snowed on the next day. Trondheim is really far north, a couple degrees below the Arctic Circle, roughly equivalent to Nome, Alaska. I'm already missing that weather, looking forward to mid-90s, muggy "spring" weather in Rome this week.

I'll post more photos of my adventures in Trondheim and Oslo soon, but for now see the photo below of the Lief Erikson statue, gazing west towards North America, taken at the stroke of midnight. He was supposedly dispatched by King Olaf from the old Norse capitol of Trondheim around the year 1000. The statue is much more recent, sent over by the Sons of Norway in Seattle. As a half-Norwegian from Washington State, I thought that was pretty cool.

I'll add more photos and adventures from my time in Norway, especially from the Constitution Day festivities in Oslo, where we watched seemingly every Norwegian citizen march past the royal family in the traditional garb of their districts. It was kind of like something out of The Hunger Games, except with lots and lots of food, which could only be lefse-wrapped hot dogs or cake. Even total strangers asked if I'd done my part by eating lots of cake and hot dogs.

From Oslo, I made my way south to stay a couple nights with friends in Germany. Along the way, I spent a night on an old sailing ship called the Barken Viking in the harbor of Göteborg, Sweden, but I wasn't there long enough to see much else. I saw a bit more of Copenhagen. I still wished I could allow more than one night there, but I only have 80 days!

After a couple fun days with friends in Germany, I caught another train to Switzerland to stay with friends there. That journey got a bit complicated when the German train engineers decided to go on strike, but I managed to get tickets on the right combination of 5 trains still running to get me out of Germany, just as the strike was ending anyway. 

Again, I'll try to share some photos of Germany and Switzerland soon, but I need to get you caught up before this train gets to Rome (we just stopped at Florence). My Swiss friends had a wedding to attend across the border in Annency, France, which simplified my train journey to Turin, Italy.

My reason for going to Turin may seem a little odd, but from a recent Stanford night class I took on Egyptian Archeology, I found out the best Egyptian museum outside Cairo is actually in Turin.

I also happened to arrive during the 2 month window this decade that the Shroud of Turin is on display. I managed to get in to see it even before the Pope. Although of dubious authenticity, it was still fascinating to go through the whole pilgrimage process to see it in person, before dashing on to Milan.

The World Expo in Milan was my main reason for the timing of this trip. I'm a big fan of World Expos/Fairs, having tried to attend as many as possible since my folks took me to the one in Vancouver, BC back in 1986. Since then, I've been to Lisbon (1998), Hannover  (2000), and Shanghai (2010), as well as trying to visit the sites and monuments from previous Expos Paris' Eiffel Tower is from the 1889 fair, Brussels' Automium is from 1958, and Seattle's Space Needle is from the 1962 fair.

While not quite as extensive or expensive as Shanghai's $48 billion Expo, it took me most of 4 days to visit all of the country pavilions and most of the other sights. Food was the theme, and the Italians went all out, as you'd expect. Picking highlights from my hundreds of Expo photos is going to be a challenge, but I'll try.

Milan itself really got into the Expo spirit, with all sorts of special events around town, including probably the biggest exhibits of Leonardo da Vinci's works ever in one city (they used the excuse to get everyone else to loan them their collections).

Although I'm really looking forward to seeing the sights in Rome, my main reason for going there is to pick up a certain extremely difficult to obtain visa to a country further along the Silk Road which has been in the news a lot lately. I'll avoid being more specific until after I've been there for obvious reasons.

Until a couple days ago, it was looking very unlikely that I would get the visa. I finally got the confirmation email from their Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and now the rest of my trip can actually happen.

I'll finish with a really great Italian innovation called an Appertivo. Almost every restaurant in Torino and Milano offers these "happy hour" specials, which include a fancy cocktail and tons of appetizers starting at about $7 total, with additional rounds half price. The deal is usually good from around 5pm until well after midnight. They're so filling that they're sometimes called appecena (appetizer-dinner - by any reasonable measure a filling dinner).

That feels sort of like my trip so far. Though I'm just getting to the end of the appetizer course, by any reasonable measure, I've had a very filling trip already, but it's just getting started.