All posts by hannahviolin

I am a violinist. I also enjoy running, working out, reading, and hanging with my friends and cat.
Norway

Norway Trip #1: Too Good to be True

Sometimes I feel like my life is harder than it needs to be, but most of the time I feel pretty lucky. I think of how lucky I was to meet Louie when I did: both of us were recently out of long term relationships and absolutely nobody around us thought we would stick as a couple, yet nearly 9 years later, here we are.

Which brings us to Norway: because of Louie’s hard work and crazy life choices, such as pursuing a PhD while working full time, and after COVID travel was pretty much going again, he got asked to present at a conference in Oslo, so that meant I was going to, because of course! And if you’ve been reading the blog before, you know I made a plan for our trip which involved going about a week early to travel some other places in Norway first.

Between Rick Steves, Fodor’s, and Trip Advisor, I made a pretty good travel plan with the time we had. I prepared the itinerary, purchased tickets and tours in advance, and made documents of activities to do and good restaurants in each city or town we were staying. I was prepared!

This never stops people from asking questions a day or two beforehand as if I’ve never heard of the country before. “You should go to Bergen.” “You should make sure to see the fjords.” Like, sometimes I swear everybody thinks I am a complete idiot. Is it the smile? Is it that I’m a woman? Do they treat everybody they meet as if they are complete idiots? Are there seriously people who plan trips to a foreign country and do nothing beyond buying the plane ticket and wait for this person to tell them, the day or days before, what to do? But I digress!

I am a planner. I don’t always do well with changes. COVID taught me to be more flexible and to expect the worse, but I still prefer when things work as planned. You ask, why am I mentioning this, didn’t I have a nice trip?

Anyway, I think I’ll divide this blog into 4-5 posts. This is post one, and there will be one for Bergen, one for Balestrand, and then one for our return to Oslo, which may be turned into 2. So that’s the plan: stay tuned but also don’t stay that tuned, because going through pictures is tough, so many!

The day before we were to set out we were both still working, and I even picked up an extra gig to help out a friend who was isolating with COVID in their family. We wanted to check in for our flight but couldn’t, and this caused us some consternation: it didn’t say why we couldn’t and we were worried that something had gone wrong with something involving COVID somehow. Anyway, after an hour on hold with American, we learned that likely everything was fine and we could just check in at the airport.

It turned out the problem was that we were starting with American, but the second 2 flights were with Finnair, a partner, and Finnair didn’t let American customers check in online. No big deal. We got to the airport, got our boarding passes, seats, etc. Flew to Chicago, and had a long layover: had to change terminals, go through security, etc, so it was nice to have the time. We had lunch there, and facetimed family, and then had to get new boarding passes for our next flight (Finnair has some control issues) and we ended up with “comfort seats” which meant we would have slightly more leg room on our long haul flight…amazing!

We were in the minority with masking, but also removed them to eat meals and such.

In any case, our long haul flight was fine. We tried to sleep after they served dinner…I probably got 4 hours of sleep, which was pretty impressive. I had a neck pillow which helped tremendously.

We landed in Helsinki, and went through passport control, which means they stamped our passports and asked questions about why we were there. I was fairly incoherent and couldn’t remember at that point, but I’m sure the passport guys are used to jet lag and tired passengers. We had a short layover in Helsinki, and I was feeling lousy and nauseated from the travel (or was it), headache and dehydrated. We finally boarded our third flight, to Oslo, and I slept some more. The landing was tough and it was the first time to my recollection, that I almost threw up. In any case, we left Oslo airport without further incident (and no customs that we could tell unless we missed something super important) and caught a Flytoget train to Oslo S, the Central Train Station.

The Flytoget is the express airport train. In retrospect, for this journey we could have saved about $20 and taken a regular train since we weren’t in a hurry, but I’m not perfect in my planning. We go to the station and then found our first hotel for the night nearby: CityBox Oslo. It was early afternoon and before official check in but thankfully we were able to check in right away, which was great!

We knew we needed to keep moving, so we unpacked, cleaned up and then hit the streets, walking all over. It was a warm sunny day, and everybody seemed to be out and about. We grabbed lunch at a nearby restaurant first, pizza, which was a funny choice for Norway but it was easy and I thought it would sit well for me.

Louie, a bit wind blown and drinking coffee outside the Opera House.
The Oslo Opera House, which sits on the entrance to the Oslo Fjord. You can walk up the walls/ceiling, and we did!
The Royal Palace: Norway has royalty!
Another view of the Palace.

After we walked all over the place, we tried to decide what to do for dinner, and we settled on having a drink and a snack at a very old restaurant called Stortorvets Gjæstgiveri located relatively near our hotel. We had a lovely time there and kept ordering snack after snack until we no longer needed dinner. We went back to the hotel after that and I believe I was asleep by 8 pm (20:00 as the locals would say).

Our initial reason to go to the restaurant was to order grilled toast and this was that. It was terrific and we enjoyed the patio dining.

I woke up at some point in the middle of the night and noticed that while it was a little darker, it wasn’t that dark. It never really gets dark in Norway over the summer: the sun does set in Oslo, around 10:30 to 11, but it doesn’t go very far.

The next morning we had a train to catch for Bergen! We enjoyed a breakfast buffet at a nearby restaurant, Spor av Nord. It was somewhat attached to the hotel and offered a discount for hotel guests. We had coffee, orange juice, cheese, bread, smoked salmon, eggs, waffles, and more. Then we walked back to the Train Station and caught our train to Bergen. It would be a 7 hour journey, but everybody said it was a beautiful ride as well, and it was nice just to relax, since I was feeling exhausted, headachey, and still a little queasy here and there.

On the train! I look super excited, though was I? Hard to recall.
Kvikk Lunsj, or Quick Lunch, is a chocolate bar similar to KitKat that is a local tradition. They would go hiking into the mountains with an orange and a Kvikk Lunsj for their lunch.

We packed food: caviar in a tube and crackers and Kvikk Lunsj, for the journey. It was a nice trip, and watching the Norwegian countryside as we traveled along was almost magical. We got to the middle of the trip, up in the mountains and were surprised to see that the landscape was changing to snow!

It’s hard to get great photos out of a moving train window, but look, snow!
This landscape was amazing and breathtaking and we just stared at it for a long time as we went by.

After a while, we struck up a conversation with the couple on the train across from us, who were British from London, and that was nice. And finally, we arrived in Bergen. It was raining a bit and was about 5 pm.

That’s where I’ll leave this travel blog recap for now. I may not be doing day by day in the future, I’m not sure. It seemed to make sense to start out, but may not make sense in the future, but I’ll decide later. Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts in the comments! Have you visited Scandinavia before?

Travel

Back from Austin

I ended up having another trip just a few days after getting back from Norway. I had waffled on whether to accompany Louie to another conference, but I decided to because 1) it’s summer and I am self-employed and 2) I found pretty inexpensive tickets to go for a few days. So we headed out to Austin on Sunday, and now I’m back, and I already taught a 6 1/2 hour day yesterday after flying home in the morning and have another one today. I figured the best of both worlds: get some travel in, get some teaching in as well.

I won’t go into many details at this time and instead will leave you with the vague promise of more details later.

From a “BBQ and Wine Tasting” Tour I took: me pretending to hang out on the back of a pickup truck.

Things I have learned though, from back to back trips plus COVID: I get more tired than I think I will, and the heat in Austin is no joke. I ended up needed to come back to the room by mid afternoon to rest. Was that the heat, was it getting old, getting over COVID still (I feel fully recovered, but who knows), or even the remnants of jet lag, or do I just overestimate my ability to sight-see and be out and about? Who knows! It was a nice relaxing trip, with great food, some good relaxation, time with old friends, and some cultural stuff too.

The Texas State Capital, where laws are passed or not passed so that children can be murdered in their schools in the name of freedom.

I am still feeling so incredibly lucky to have spent 2 1/2 weeks in Norway, and I miss it. It’s always lovely to be home after vacation, and the cats are especially feeling our absences, but it is nice to get away and see the world, and realize that not everywhere is the same, even though more things are the same than you think.

I hope I can follow Louie to more conferences in the future: he is finishing up his degree this summer and who knows what the future will hold. I had a great time sightseeing on my own and enjoying the downtime, and would enjoy it again in the future. It’s also nice to be able to meet up with him for dinner: it’s much like our regular lives in that sense, except I get to sightsee during the day rather than teach and play violin. It also told me that I would definitely consider doing solo vacations in the future as well.

Norway

Things that are awesome about Norway/Things that are not quite as awesome

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We made it back home two nights ago! We both dropped right into work and such (laundry, house cleaning) but I thought I’d pop in.

If you are an instagram follower of mine you’ve been getting to see all of the wonderful pictures. Norway is gorgeous. It was a wonderful trip, with one major exception.

The major exception is that we both caught COVID on the trip (or likely, before the trip, in my case). So we fuddled through life the best we could, with poor information. And at the end, we had to change our flight to come back a few days later in order to ensure negative tests or a proof of recovery documentation for both of us, only to have the US change the testing requirement to mean we could have stayed with our original plans. Nonetheless the extra days were nice to make up for the sick ones.

So, 6 things things that were awesome about Norway:

  1. In the summer it never gets dark! The sun goes down around 10:30 to 11 pm but it doesn’t go very far, and then it’s back up by 4 am.
  2. Public transportation. In Oslo we used an app that you could buy tickets through as well as plan your route to wherever you were going. It was amazing to just step out on the street, walk a few blocks and hop on the bus or tram you needed.
  3. There was a delicious bakery around the corner from our AirBNB in Oslo that we ate at too many times to count. Good cappuccinos as well as pastries and bread.
  4. The people were wonderful and helpful. Everybody speaks English (they learn from a young age) and even though I felt guilty that I didn’t speak much Norwegian (really, any, more than a phrase or two) nobody seemed to be too bothered by this.
  5. The fjords really are gorgeous, and the mountains. The train from Oslo to Bergen was more beautiful than we expected.
  6. Boat rides: if you go to Norway, you MUST take a boat ride.

3 Things that aren’t quite as awesome about Norway:

  1. Everything, especially food, is incredibly expensive. If you get a sandwich at a restaurant, it’s $25 to $30. Even the grocery store is more expensive that you’d expect.
  2. It’s very far away. We had to take three flights, which on the way back meant going through security three times. There weren’t any reasonably priced options that didn’t have three connections.
  3. We had to leave! They wouldn’t just give us an apartment and jobs and let us stay there. We may have to look into that further.
One of those expensive sandwiches. And it’s not because it’s shrimp, all of them are expensive. Shrimp is common food.
Standing in front of Grieg’s composer hut. We saw a concert at the recital hall there.
On the boat to Balestrand, going up the Sogneford.
The view from our hotel in Balestrand. That is St. Olaf’s Church, and supposedly it inspired parts of Frozen.
Jostadeen Glacier.
Gustav Vigeland’s famous sculpture, Angry Baby.
A Stave Church at the Norwegian Folk Museum, a wonderful open air museum.
I loved all of the grass topped houses and want to live in one.

So that’s the teaser post. I’ll write a bit more about in the next week or two about each location we visited (and of course share more photos): Bergen, Balestrand, and Oslo (where we spent over a week and really started to feel like locals, haha.) If you have an opportunity to visit Norway, I recommend you take it!

Random thoughts

Summer Vacation

My early morning job is done for the school year! It ended after a Monday, which is weird, and some of my colleagues seemed to not notice that us part-timers were done for the year and didn’t even say goodbye, but whatever, I’m on summer vacation! I celebrated by falling asleep before 11 pm and waking up at 6:30 am. Since then I’ve updated my website, paid bills, and enjoyed two cups of coffee.

My summer is really starting to fill up with teaching. I’d be happy to have a few more concerts or gigs, but my teaching schedule is looking great. I’m probably averaging 18-20 hours, which is plenty. I said goodbye to a high school senior last night at her lesson, as well as goodbye to an elementary school age student who is leaving lessons. I got to have lunch with a former college student yesterday, which was wonderful. It was great to hear how she is doing in grad school and in life, and I was touched that she contacted me to meet up during her short visit with friends.

I have been struggling with feeling like I’m missing out—I haven’t been playing as much lately, which is a somewhat conscious choice, but I still get twinges of jealously seeing what concerts others are up to. I remind myself we get one life and we can’t fit everything in! I would love to do it all, but I can’t have a busy teaching schedule, travel with Louie to his conferences, and play all the gigs. I just can’t. And I have played things lately, and it’s been fun, and there is more on the docket ahead, but it’s also okay to not play everything…I mean, you can’t play everything, not even a fraction of it!

I would like to do more high level playing, either a more serious chamber music concert (I miss our quartet playing regularly) or perhaps a solo recital that I can sink my teeth into. I was stressed over my new music concert in March, but it was nice to have something to dig in and really work on. I enjoy sightreading tremendously, but it doesn’t give that musical satisfaction in the same way. I have tossed a program around in my head, and I suppose I should really just get something on the books at Wash U…but then I also really enjoy reading in my spare time. I can’t decide if I’m tired, burnt out, or just need something ahead to inspire me. It may be all 3!

In any case, I’m thrilled to be on “summer break” from my school job (okay, except I still have to get grades in) and my college job (truly done!) and just have my private students and gigs to deal with for a few months. Since our weather finally got hot last week, it does indeed feel like summer.

Teaching

Two in a row!

I slept in this morning. I didn’t set an alarm. I woke up a few times, but didn’t check the time for awhile. Finally I checked the time, and…it was 7:46 am. I suppose that’s sleeping in, but if there is one thing that makes me feel old, it’s my inability to sleep in!

When I was younger people always told me once I had kids I wouldn’t be able to sleep in as much. I first started waking up early more naturally after the election of 2016, the worry and stress woke me up. Then the worry and stress became a constant…it never went away, I never was able to sleep in again. I go to bed earlier as well, rarely seeing past midnight and often asleep before 11 pm. Once I got my morning job, I would find myself in bed before 10 pm, and felt like sleeping past 6 am was a decadent proposition.

So, here’s the thing about aging: you do it, regardless of whether or not you have kids. In my own personal experience, I wake up early, I can’t sleep like I used to, I pee often (another thing I was told would happen once I had kids).

Aging happens regardless, doesn’t it, and it sneaks up on you. The pandemic took so much of our time and energy that everything else fell apart, but as we rebuilt our lives after it (not that it is over, but that is no longer new) I realized that we had been aging, that somehow we felt middle-aged, and responsible, and that our parents were even older and that everything is changing and that life is going on in that inexorable march towards death. And that sounds very dark and all of that, but it’s just the truth, and it’s good to accept that, and to figure out, what are we doing with the time we are given?

This may be why so many people changed what they are doing in their lives, and why people change along the way. I often feel that my fellow musicians judge me for teaching as much as I do. It is a badge of honor to play poorly paid gigs and to struggle, whereas teaching means, yes, dealing with lots of children and working hard, but also making a decent and regular living, but without as much glory. The students, they don’t always listen, they don’t always do what you say, they often play out of tune!

I keep thinking I need to cut back on teaching, that I am doing too much, I don’t know. My Music Staff says I have 46 active students, but that’s not entirely true: 6 of them are starting this summer but 5 of them are quitting at the end of May or over the summer. It is probably too many, but this is the American way, to work too much, isn’t it? The stock market is crashing, we are heading towards fascism, my body is not my own, and somehow working more and more feels like something I can do, to cover unexpected medical bills, to save for a hoped upon one day retirement, to save for a new car and to pay for trip to Norway! And I hope that I make a positive influence on every student I see, that I make their day better, not worse, and that they find music lessons a source of solace.

Kitties sleeping with their feet together.

I played a wedding job yesterday on viola, and really enjoyed the challenge. I hope I can do more of that! I know I am HannahVIOLIN but the viola is a fun part of my musical life now as well…

Does this viola make my head look smaller?

I mentioned our little catio a few posts back: the cats absolutely love sitting out on it. We can open the inside window, or keep it closed with a little cat-door, so the cats can come and go as they please. Miles can be found on it late at night or early in the morning, as well as all day long.

With the inside window open.
The view of the catio from the back of the house.

It’s screened in so they can enjoy the breeze, and get the full view on the sides as well. They sit there and get to yell at birds and squirrels and such also.

One more day of my early morning class and then it’s summer break! I can’t believe we are hear, that we have made it to the last full week of school. Tomorrow I am meeting a former student for lunch as well, which is always fun. I love catching up with former students and hearing how they are doing!

Random thoughts, Travel

What a time to be alive

It’s been a minute since I blogged! I’ve been busy, tired, and burnt out, so I haven’t had much to say. Cats, teaching, worrying, planning for summer travel.

We had our big spring concert at my school last night. It was fun to see everybody all together! It was interesting to see how many people are absolutely okay being in a room, maskless, with hundreds of people…including other teachers. I wear a mask teaching, and have all year long. One of the schools that the kids go to is mask required due to the high number of cases, but those kids don’t have to wear masks other than at their own school, because…that makes sense.

Nonetheless, I have not been that worried about it lately. I have enough other things to worry about, and I just keep my mask on for work related things, because I decided awhile back if I was going to get COVID it would be NOT at work, but from doing something fun, and I’m sticking with that. I also wear masks at concerts and that sort of thing, because we are sitting there for 1-2 hours, side by side.

I digress a bit though. I didn’t plan to go on about COVID in this “post-COVID” world we are in, but it happens. I’ve been working hard collecting information about summer schedules for students, and tomorrow is the day I make the schedule, and I’m thrilled. I’ve been a little worried about it, but worst case not everybody will get a lesson every week they wanted it. I’ve taken on some extra summer students, and some of them have a lot of flexibility and it’ll work well, but others it turned out have less time and wanted two lessons a week during a 4 hour time period, and…we’ll see how that goes. I have decided not to blame people for trying, and I have learned a few more things about this year.

Okay, so I paused there for two days…in the meantime I got my summer schedule figured out and published to the online portal I use, woo hoo! Miraculously it mostly worked out and there were only a few days where I couldn’t fit everyone in, but mostly those students didn’t want a lesson every week anyway. I am coming up on the last regular week of teaching, then a 4 days “makeup week” for lessons missed during the semester (some were mine) and then, OFF TO NORWAY!

I’ve got a lovely trip planned for Norway. We fly into Oslo, spend one night there, then we take the train to Bergen. It’s supposed to be a really scenic train ride. We spend 3 nights in Bergen and then take a ferry to Balestrand as part of the “Sognefjord in a Nutshell” tour. We spend two nights in Balestrand, and will take an afternoon ferry trip to Fjaerland and the Glacier Museum, then finish our Nutshell tour with a ferry to Flam, a scenic train through the mountains to Myrdal, and then a train back to Oslo. We spend over a week in Oslo for Louie’s conference, and have a few activities planned there as well: a bike tour together (just regular bikes, not ebikes), and then I have two solo day trips planned while he is in the conference: a round trip ferry to Drobak and Oscarsburg, south of Oslo, and a bus trip that goes to Hadeland Glassworks and Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker. We are also planning to attend a few concerts in Bergen since we are there during the Bergen International Festival and we have tickets for Swan Lake at the Oslo Ballet. We may need a vacation from our vacation, (tripadvisor seems to think this is a bad thing, but I don’t, if it’s a sightseeing vation rather than a beach vacation) but I am so excited!

COVID gives us some worries of course, and we have to present a negative test to return home, which I think is ludicrous, but nonetheless still currently the policy. Why do I think it’s ludicrous? Because we aren’t required to follow any other COVID guidelines in the US,(such as masking on planes) and it seems completely outrageous that our own country could keep us from entering based on having a virus that…plenty of people here already have. So hopefully we won’t get COVID while we are there, because that would be a huge pain(especially as we are headed to another conference one week later) but I can’t worry about everything all the time! Norway has no entrance testing or requirements so that’s not a concern going there.

So that’s what I’ve been up to: teaching, finishing the semester, trip planning, scheduling, etc. Last weekend I finally got out in the backyard to do some weeding. I’m not sure my gardening plans this year: I keep thinking I’ll plant some things, but it’s looking less likely for this summer. We have enough travel going on that it will make it challenging to stay on top of things, though I still like the idea of fresh beans and maybe zucchini. I suppose I should decide and if so, plant in the next week!

How are you doing?