Norway 2014

Ashley and I had the opportunity to go to Norway by ourselves for a week at the end of our Europe trip. Ashley's friend Kristine, who was an exchange student with a family in our ward back in Arizona who got really close with Ashley and her friend group, let us come stay with her and her family for a week! Norway was cool because we actually got to stay with a Norwegian family and really experience the culture there first hand.

We stayed at their home in Porsgrunn for a couple days and then drove to their cabin, spent a day there, then drove to Bergen, then Oslo and then flew back to Prague. I don't have the greatest memory, so I'm just going to upload some of our pictures now and try to remember what we did. :)

Oh yes, I remember now.. a couple hours after we got there, Kristine said she wanted to take us to the "beach" before the sun went down, so we went to what looked to us like a cold lake, but it really was ocean water.. It's called a fjord and Norway is known for them. We saw hundreds of Fjords on our trip. :)

This is Kristine's house in Porsgrunn! 

It's very windy in Norway. :)

There are SO MANY WATERFALLS in Norway. On our drive from one city to the next, I think we counted like 110 or something. It was so cool

I love this picture. This was when we took a boat across a Fjord to get to Bergen

Another beautiful waterfall on our drive

The next 5 photos are all Bergen- this was my favorite place in Norway that we went. It was such a beautiful city. My favorite part was all the huge ships!

See the huge ship coming in? We took a tram up the mountain to this gorgeous view of the city.

This is such a cool picture Ash took. All those little houses are actually gift shops and stores!

This is at a beautiful park in Oslo

These next 4 photos are in Oslo, Norway. We walked around the city, went to the castle, went to a cool park with tons of statues, and then the Oslo opera house (we went really late though so we didn't take any pictures, but it was really neat)

Ashley's carrying ballet shoes that she bought at the opera house (they had tons of used ballet shoes from people who actually performed there!)

This is the castle where the king and queen live. It doesn't look like any of the castles we saw in Prague or Germany because it looks more modern.. It reminded us of the house in the movie "What a Girl Wants" haha 

Beautiful Fjord. Fun fact: the Disney movie Frozen was made about Norway. They talk about Fjords, wear bunads, sing Norwegian songs, have trolls (which are famous in Norway for some reason), etc. 

The leaves in Europe are really pretty.

This is a bunad! It's a traditional Norwegian dress and everyone in Norway gets one when they are around age 14 . It's part of their religion there. They're baptized into their church when they are only 3 months old, then they don't go to church again except once a year on Christmas and then when they are 14, they get to decide if they want to stay in the church or not, and if they choose to stay, they get one of these personalized bunad dresses and have a big celebration! Each dress is so unique and different.

So yeah! That was our Norway trip! It was a great experience and I'm so glad we got to add another beautiful country to our trip! Thanks Ausens for showing us your beautiful country!!