This blogging thing isn't coming back to me as naturally as I had hoped. I have started some entries but find it difficult to sit down to finish them.

Until I get off my ass... or actually until I get onto my ass, here is the funniest English translation we saw in Guadeloupe at the Fort Fleur d'Epee.

My vacation, which I spent half of last year looking forward to, is over. I am home now and while it is good to be home it is very sad that there is no more vacation. I will really miss beaches and swimming!

I wont miss the French as much but that is another story. Why don't the French know how to stand in line? They will ask you if you are standing in line to wait for some particular thing and when you respond "yes" they will either barge ahead of your or quietly walk to the beginning of the line and sneak into the line there.

Cultural differences are quite fascinating even though they are extremely frustrating at other times. The people on both Antigua and Guadeloupe were very polite and said hello to you in the streets. It made you feel welcome. They were however very relaxed, which could mean that you had to wait for a long time until they would serve you in restaurants.

Anyways, I am just rambling a little so that I could squeeze in that complaint about the French, trying to disguise it as a cultural observation...

No again, the vacation is over. So what to look forward to next, now that I no longer have my Caribbean vacation? I really need to find something or otherwise I will feel lost. That will have to wait for tomorrow though, as I have a mountain of clothes to wash and hundreds of photos to go through!

Being on vacation is a certain process. You spend the first days being excited about everything and nothing. Your mind is churning and you are simply what could be termed as “high on vacation”. Then you hit the part of the vacation when you start relaxing, all the old built up work exhaustion gets to you and you go into a vegetative state unable to think and you just pass through the days without really being able to process what is going on around you.

Honestly, there really isn't much difference between you and the coconut in the tree hanging above you! I have been in this state for few days now. Sleep, relaxing, and not thinking were my highest priority. Thankfully, my mind seems to be back! I was getting worried that I had turned into some kind of “vacation vegetable”.

Talking about vegetables. This is really an island with lots of exotic vegetables and fruits. Couple days ago we rented a car and drove around the northern part of one of Guadeloupe's butterfly wings. We visited among other things a rum factory, “Domaine de Séverin” which makes rum from sugar canes. We also visited “La Maison du Caccao” (The House of Cacao) where we got to see the cacao fruit grown, dried, and even to taste it at various stages. Ok, I must admit that tthe last state was the best (when it had become a nice delicious chocolate cake), but this was very interesting.

Today André decided he had to buy a coconut at the beach. I got kind of worried when the guy selling it took out a big, black machete and starting hacking at the coconut. I probably didn't need to be worried, everyone here seems to be very nice. With the exception of the old ladies at the market and in small vegetable stores. I decided to take a photo of one of those stores and had a old lady come running out and shouting something at me. I didn't really understand anything but it didn't sound to nice. Since when is it not allowed to take photos of houses? The old ladies at the outdoor markets seem to get very angry if you happen to pass by their stalls and not buy anything. I am staying away from the outdoor markets hereafter.

Back to the coconut at the beach. It was cool to sit with a coconut and drinking from it with a straw but the taste was a bit boring. Lets put it this way. We didn't manage to finish the whole coconut.

Over to today's highlight! So here we have been in Guadeloupe for more than a week being dumber than a coconut. We have been under the impression that we needed to take some long exotic trip (involving potential encounters with snakes) to see one of those iguanas which we think are very cool. What do you know, they are just few hundred meters from here in the park at our hotel hiding in the cliffs. I think we will be regulars at that park until we leave.

Right as I speak, we are watching a Mardi Gras Carnival celebration at our hotel. Obviously they have hired in bunch of people to do a simple parade, dancing in white with hats formed in the shape of houses on their heads. The grown-ups seemed to be having fun but it was quite cute watching the kids who just seemed to be a bit tired and bored. Sneaking off to sit down and probably swearing at those boring foreigners around them, just sitting still and watching them. Hmmm... maybe time to stop blogging, stand up and dance when the get back from their latest parade around the beach...

We are now in Guadeloupe, scratching our heads over what people around us are saying. Pretty much every conversation starts with "Bon jour", a "Je ne parle pas francais" and a silly apologetic smile. Thankfully, people are very nice and most people understand at least a little English. At least we know how to ask for beer and the check in French. We will survive!

Guadeloupe is surprisingly different from Antigua. It seems to have retained much more of its character and culture, which is good! (But the infrastructure is mostly paid for by EU and France, hence is in a different league compared to the other islands we visited.) We no longer get the beaches to ourselves, but the beaches here are quite nice. And the sovenirs here are to die for! In Antigua they only had cheap crap made in China with an Antigua sticker on it. Ok, some of the souvenirs here are probably also made in China, but they are at least very cool. There is even a shack outside of the hotel where there is a man actually making woven hats, baskets mats etc on the spot. He seems to be there from sunrise to late into the night. We never saw anything like that on Antigua.

Here we're staying at a resort so some of the authenticity is lost compared to the little hotel we stayed at in Antigua. I really miss my donkey and rooster alarm clock that woke me up every morning in Antigua. I however don't miss the spider and the occasional cockroach as much :) . Oh well, there are some strange creatures here too. I haven't quite gotten used to the typical French topless, smoking "lady" at the beach :) .

But I am busy looking up into the palm trees at the beach so no more blogging today!!

(Very) few pictures are now posted in my Antigua album and my Guadeloupe album.

The Antigua Racer is thought to be the rarest snake in the world, with only about 200 snakes left. The only place you can find an Antiguan Racer is on a small island outside of Antigua called Great Bird Island. By surprise we found ourselves on the beach of that island last Wednesday…

On Antigua itself, our friend the mongoose has gotten rid of all snakes and we were feeling pretty comfortable. What we didn’t know when we signed up for a kayaking/snorkeling trip was that they stopped on that island for a short hike. We even got to see on of those 200 snakes when a local pointed one of those out right next to the beach. It seemed pretty harmless and it isn’t poisonous but was slightly disgusting when it slithered around in the sand. But in an odd, twisted way it was a bit cool to see it before it becomes extinct.

It was a nice little island with a lady selling beer at the beach. “What kind of o'silver do ya’all have?” she said with a pirate accent when we dug up the local currency Easter Caribbean dollars from our pockets. For some reasons we seem to be the only tourists who pay with the local money instead of US dollars. They quote all prices to us in US dollars. Come on tourists show some courtesy and get the local money!

The stay at Antigua is coming to an end and we are heading over to Guadeloupe today. It is sad to leave because the people here are very nice and the beaches are just fabulous. We have spent quite some time at the beach, done some sightseeing, done a boat trip around the island, and I am becoming a big fan of snorkeling. Oh, and we have had quite a few Wadadli beers which is the local beer and is quite good.

I hope I will be able to post few pictures soon. We are having some technical difficulties with the Internet here but I will explain that one later :) .

We were only minutes away from missing our flight to Guadeloupe. The flight from Oslo was delayed because of weather. The Caribbean ocean was a bit colder than expected and it has also been raining a bit since we arrived. In the few days I have been here I have gotten quite a few mosquito bites some of which seem to be infected…

If reading the first paragraph made you happy, stop reading now!

Because despite these few minor problems we are having a great time enjoying wonderful Antigua. The rest of this entry will be pretty much praise.

We started the trip by flying to Guadeloupe and staying there one night to rest after what seemed like an endless flight. The next day we flew with Liat Air to Antigua. We weren’t quite expecting an airline that wrote their boarding card by hands and put us on a tiny little flight with only 21 passengers but we survived. It turned out quite nice actually because we got a fantastic view of both Guadeloupe and Antigua.

We are now staying at a little, cheap hotel, La Galleria Inn which is quite close to three wonderful Caribbean beaches which we have been spending our time at and we are “slowly” turning into what could be termed as red nosed lobsters.

We have also visited the capital St. John and English Harbor. We decided to take the bus, but were a bit concerned when a rusty, green minivan that seemed to be about to fall apart arrived. I don’t think that minivan would have gotten through the EU control in Norway but we made it to St. John alive. We even risked taking the bus again later that day to English Harbor. It was a bit interesting to take the bus. People just shouted “Bus stop” (loud enough to scare the hell out of you) when they wanted to get off the bus and some of the bus drivers played music at full strength in the bus. You don’t exactly expect to enter a bus with a young, hip black guy as the driver, playing Celine Dion at mind blowing strength. I guess he felt like he was making up for the missing manliness by driving like a maniac but then again they all did.

St. John was a bit of a downer. The town was full of cruise ship tourists which didn’t really make it enjoyable. English Harbor was also a disappointment with too many rich tourist stepping off their yachts. Thankfully, we live close to a small village which gives us a slight insight into the local live. The surroundings of our hotel are quite nice and we can watch goat herds and an occasional mongoose snooping around. When eating breakfast on the balcony we see an occasional humming bird buzzing in the trees and there are tiny little lizards running around.

That together with drinking local beer on those wonderful beaches really makes this a wonderful place to be!

Only few hours until I need to get up again to head to the airport. The fact that I am going on the coolest vacation of my life hasn't really hit me yet so I am pretty calm.

So the plan is to blog once in a while. Mainly so I can look back at it later and remember what a cool trip I went on.

There are however two factors that might ruin that plan for me. If there are no updates it probably means that I haven't got access to the Internet or that I have been eaten by a shark...

Au revoir for now!

One thing I always do before going on vacation is to worry myself senseless about various silly things. It struck me today I wasn't the only one worrying and I started wondering whether this is something people feel like they have to do to cap their excitement? The Web is full of travel material, but what you should stress about before going to different places is never covered. So to help other people that are planning on traveling to the Caribbean, I thought I should compile a checklist of some good but useless things to worry about.

* Worry about sharks attacking you. If it feels unreal I recommend watching Into the Blue which apparently is filmed somewhere in the Caribbean or maybe Jaws.

* Read a book by a local author that isn't particularly fond of their home country. For Antigua I recommend A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid. That gives you scary information about how the locals will despise you, enlightens you about where the stuff you flush down the toilet goes, highlights the shortcomings of the local hospitals, and even mentions something about feeding tourists with broken glass...

* Start focusing on the weather. Keep checking the weather and extensively discuss with your travel partner every time the temperature is under the average, it rains, or when it is cloudy. You know you are successful when you start dreaming about minus degrees and wake up whimpering about it.

* If you have to transit between two airports, use it for all its worth. Expect that you get the baggage late, that you cannot find the bus, that nobody speaks English to help you, that you have just missed the bus when you find it, that there is a traffic jam between the airports, and that you of course will miss the flight. Worry that the later flight that day is overbooked or that the airline tries to blame you for being late and forces you to buy a new flight at very steep prices.

* Worry that the hotel has lost your booking and that you have to pay a fortune for a new place to stay at.

* Worry that the local Caribbean airline you plan on flying with goes bankrupt when you read that they are having problems with striking workers and costs.

* Worry so much that you will get sick right before leaving that you actually start developing a sore throat for no apparent reason...

* Start worrying about snakes and other scary creatures. Do some research and you might find out that you are going to one of total of four Caribbean islands with poisonous snakes.

* And the most important thing to worry about is of course that you have been looking forward to the vacation for so long that it will never live up to your expectations....

Feel free to offer hints for more stuff to worry about. I still have few hours left :) .

I have been busy and not blogging much lately... (feel like I keep saying this all the time now). This time my big excuse is that I am about to move into my new beautiful apartment. We have been waiting for it to be built for over a year now so you can imagine the excitement. Finally more space! Finally the computers get their own room. It has truly felt like Christmas every night in the bedroom for a long time now. All those beautiful infrared, bluetooth, whatever computer lights in all imaginable colors blinking all the time like a hyperactive Christmas tree. It is still couple of weeks until the actual move will happen but there is a lot that needs to be prepared (or simply just stressed about).



I did manage a one week vacation last month. Went to Barcelona for few days and played a tourist. Barcelona almost instantly made it to the top of my most loved cities' list. What a spectacular city! Gaudi has put his finishing touches on the town by many of his spectacular architectural designs. The city is a bit like Gaudi's style which borders on being vulgar due to its excessiveness but always stays within the boundaries. There was almost too much of everything there but just within reasonable limits.



It felt quite nice walking around the narrow streets of Barcelona. You almost felt like you were within people's homes due to laundry hanging off almost every balcony. There were bars and coffee shops everywhere and the place smelled of ham, cheese and the occasional extreme pee smell that seems to characterize every corner in Spain. *Curling my nose in disgust*.



The people seemed friendly but extremely distant at restaurants. It seemed like they expected you to be grateful that they served you and not that you were paying their salary by being there. Another thing I noticed was an extreme obsession with designer clothes. Few girls wore huge glasses with Dior written in huge bold letters on the side that seemed to have the only purpose of making it obvious that they were wearing Dior glasses. Me, being eager to fit in desperately tried to find glasses which would have a designer name on the glass itself so it would be even more obvious. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to come across any:-).



We also took the train to Vilafranca a small village an hour away from Barcelona. Wonderful little village with character. From there we took a taxi to the Torres vineyard. Unfortunately, that put some of my romantic images of people tramping on grapes to make wine to rest. At the same it put an end to my eternal fear of drinking wine made with stinking toes. The vineyard was more of a factory than anything but it was still really interesting to see.



There was simply too much to see in Barcelona so after a while I just decided I would take it easy and plan on coming back one day!


But now, back to stressing about the move!

Two weekends ago, I went to Bergen to attend Divisha's and Kristian's wedding. Next to the hotel was a slightly puzzling restaurant that advertised that they had take away and the best international taste.
Now, I know what Indian, Mexican, Chinese taste is like but can't quite put my finger on what International taste would be like.

Indian Tikka Masala with Swedish meatballs? Japanese sushi wrapped in Italian pasta, or maybe Mexican tacos with Icelandic rotten shark? I guess International taste gives you endless "delicious" possibilities. I almost regret not trying it...