Norway is famous for its breathtaking fjords and Viking heritage. A hundred years ago at the Oseberg fjord, archaeologists discovered a Viking ship burial containing the bodies of two women. The ship was so well preserved that it could be entirely reconstructed. Now it’s the centerpiece of Oslo’s Viking Ship Museum and one of the country’s most popular attractions.
The Oseberg ship is 21.58 meters (70.8 feet) long and 5.1 meters (16.73 feet) wide. It had a single square sail and fifteen pairs of oars for when the wind wasn’t favorable. Researchers estimate it could achieve a speed of up to 10 knots and was built in the first decades of the ninth century A.D. Its prow and stern are elaborately carved and have graced the covers of many books on the Vikings. Check out the photo gallery for some close-up shots.
The identities of the two women found with the ship are a mystery. One was 60-70 years old when she died, the other about 25-30. Some researchers believe the old woman was a Viking queen or other noblewoman, and the young woman was her slave, sacrificed to accompany her into the afterlife. Others say they were female shamans. One outfit included silk imported all the way from China. Buried with them were household items, a cart and agricultural tools.
%Gallery-157476%The Viking Ship Museum has two other ships. The Gokstad ship is 23.24 meters (76.2 feet) long and 5.20 meters (17.1 feet) wide. It had 16 pairs of oars and a single square sail. Archaeologists estimate up to seventy people could sail in it. Like the Oseberg ship, it was a burial and contained the remains of an elderly man. It’s almost as well preserved as the Oseberg ship and only a little younger, having been made around 890 A.D. Some adventurous Norwegians made a replica of the Gokstad ship and sailed it across the Atlantic to visit the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.
The Tune Viking ship, dating to about 900 A.D., is also housed at the museum. Although only about half of it survives, it’s still impressive to see.
Besides the ships, the museum houses many of the artifacts found with them, including weapons, clothing, gold and silver, and furniture.
Now curators are worried because they have found the preservative used by the archaeologists who first worked on the Oseberg ship is slowly deteriorating the wood fibers. The race is on to save this precious survival from the early Middle Ages.
How can you afford to travel for more than a week or two? If you’re planning to move, use the occasion to put your things in storage and hit the road. If you want to travel for a month or more, it’s hard to pay a mortgage or rent plus travel expenses, unless you’ve got plenty of cash to burn. But if you have no rent or mortgage payments, you might actually be able to travel for less than you ordinarily spend living at home.
I’ve done the storage/travel combo four times over the last 15 years and have found it to be the most economical way to travel for a few months at a time. My wife and I both work from home so we have the ability to work from remote locations, as long as we have Internet access, so we’ve taken advantage of this freedom when we were planning to move anyway.When I was in the Foreign Service, we were also without our belongings in between posts, usually for a few months at a time, so I have plenty of experience traveling while my belongings are on a container ship or in storage.
No matter how carefully you pack, you’ll miss some of your stuff. But I’ve always found dumping all my things for a few months very liberating. You realize how much you have that you do not need and moving helps you pare down all your junk. And when you get your worldly possessions back, you’ll have a new appreciation for your favorite things. Here are a few tips for putting your things in storage and hitting the road.
Negotiate Free Storage with a Moving Company. Meet with moving companies that also offer storage, tell them your plans and try to negotiate a few months of free storage. Two years ago, United Van Lines offered us three months of free storage in order to secure our move business, and just a few months ago, we got two months of free storage from Allied Van Lines. After our two months are up, we’ll be paying $248 per month to store about 7,500 pounds, which is probably a typical weight figure for a family of four.
If you’re only doing a local move and have a much lower weight, it’ll be tougher to negotiate free storage, but if you’re a family doing an interstate move, you can almost certainly get at least a month for free.
Organize Your Belongings Very Carefully Before the Move. You’ll need to pack very carefully, keeping in mind what the weather will be like at your destination and also when you return. It’s usually complicated and expensive to extract things from storage, but mark the boxes you think you might need access to while in storage “high priority” and ask the moving company to place those boxes near the front of your storage unit, in case you need to get into them.
If at all possible, pack a suitcase or two of important items and leave them with a friend or neighbor, especially if you won’t move right into a new home or apartment when you return from your travels. Resist the urge to take loads of clothing with you on your trip. If you have to buy some new clothes on the road, so be it.
Pick The Right Destination. Whether you plan a domestic or international trip, do some research on sites like FlipKey, VRBO, HomeAway, Wimdu, AirBnb, and 9 Flats to get an idea for what it costs to rent apartments in your destination. Unless you have a huge budget, you can’t stay in hotels every night for months on end. And even if you did want to spend the money, you’d get tired of eating out every night.
Unless you’re traveling to a very popular destination during the high season, I recommend that you book a hotel first and do your longer term apartment search on the ground, in person, to make sure you get something you like.
We’ve spent most of this recent trip in Italy and Greece, and so far, we’ve found the Greek isles to be significantly cheaper than Italy. In Greece, we’ve found good quality apartments with Wi-Fi in Kos,Patmos and Samos ranging from the equivalent of $62-$68 per night (see videos of apartments below). Italy is about 20-25 percent more expensive, and in major cities like Rome or Florence, it’s probably more like 50 percent more expensive.
Given the fact that we were paying nearly $100 per night to live in our home in the pricey suburbs of Washington, D.C., Greece seems like a pretty good bargain to us, even factoring in the monthly storage costs, especially since we have daily maid service and a buffet breakfast included with our apartment.
Dealing with your mail and bills. Being officially homeless is a complicated affair, as you’ll need some sort of address for a variety of purposes. Pick a close relative or very good friend and ask them to receive your mail, or have the post office hold it for you, if no one can help.
Set up auto-bill pay for as many of your bills as you can, and if you do have a friend or family member willing to help, give them some checks and deposit slips so they can help you manage your financial affairs while out of town. This is especially important if you’ll be outside the U.S.
Skype. Skype is a terrific lifeline if you’ll be out of the country. We looked into buying mobile phones while overseas or using our U.S. mobile phones, but decided to save the money by discontinuing our U.S. service and just using Skype. For about $6 per month, you can get your own Skype line that includes voice mail and a U.S. telephone number.
Coming Home. As soon as you have your plans in order, let your moving company know when and where to send your things. This is especially important if you want to move at the end or beginning of the month in the summertime. It might seem complex, but keeping your things in storage in between moves isn’t actually much more work than moving straight from point A to point B, and the money you save on your rent or mortgage can help you see the world.
Bulgarian archaeologists have discovered two vampire graves in the city of Sozopol on the Black Sea. The burials, which are about 700 years old, were each held down with a massive iron stake through the chest. One vampire was buried in the apse of a church – a spot usually reserved for aristocrats – and showed evidence of multiple stab wounds.
Bozhidar Dimitrov, head of the Bulgarian National Museum of History, says more than a hundred vampire graves have been found in Bulgaria. He says that most suspected vampires were aristocrats or clergy. Interestingly, none were women.
One possible explanation for the vampire myth comes from anthropologist Paul Barber in his book “Vampires, Burial, and Death.” He posits the vampire legend started because people didn’t know how bodies decomposed. Rigor mortis is only temporary. After a few days the muscles ease up and expanding gases in the body will actually shift it within the coffin. Blood seeps out of the mouth and the face and belly get a flushed and puffy look. So. . .a guy dies, they bury him, and shortly thereafter several more people die. The villagers decide the first guy is a vampire, and when they open up his grave they find he’s moved, looks fat and flush with life, and has bloody teeth. When you drive a stake through a body filled with corpse gas it lets out a shriek.
There are several good vampire attractions in Europe, such as Dracula’s Castle in Romania, the Vampire Museum in Paris and Highgate Cemetery in London, scene of a wave of vampire sightings in the 1970s.
Vampires have long captured the imagination. Vampire stories were popular in the nineteenth century and some of the best early horror films are vampire tales. “Nosferatu” (1922), a still of which is shown here in the Wikimedia Commons image, sticks close to the Bram Stoker novel. A different take can be found in the film “Vampyr” (1932). Both monsters are spooky, kick-ass killers, not the angsty pretty-boy teens of today’s vampire craze. As Bart Simpson once said, “Girls ruin everything, even vampires!”
The rotund man standing before me on the dirt path was wearing olive-green military fatigues and held a sharp, bladed object in his thick, oversized right hand. He looked unhappy to see me. I was late. His hands – pudgy and exaggerated – seemed like the result of an unlikely sculpting partnership between Michelangelo and Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Standing beside him were two dogs, Jackie and Duna.
Ivica Kalcic, 56 years old, looked like he had become what he has dedicated his life to: a pasty version of a giant bulbous white truffle. “Let’s go,” he said, wasting no time. He unleashed the dogs and they darted up the path into the leafy, dark forest.
I was in Istria, exploring the less trammeled interior of this peninsula in northwestern Croatia, and had signed up for a short truffle hunt. Along with Alba in northern Italy, Istria is what the Caspian is to caviar or Mexico is to the mustache: a foodie goldmine, hiding nuggets of earthen deliciousness so expensive that to cherish them might be asking for the guillotine in some future revolution. It was black truffle season and Ivica, 56, has been traipsing through this forest nearly every day for the last 40 years (white truffles, the season of which is in the autumn, are the pricier kin to darker-hued subterranean fungus).
Though Alba may get more attention for its buried, edible fungus treasures, it was in Istria where, in 1999, the largest white truffle ever was discovered. The three-pound truffle, valued at $5,000, was found by local truffle hunter Giancarlo Zigante and listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. Zigante soon after opened a mini-chain of truffle shops as well as an eponymous eatery just up the road from where I was traipsing with Ivica and his dogs.
I doubted such a prize would be found today but soon enough, Jackie, the more experienced of the two hounds, was digging up dirt. Ivica waddled over, pulled the dog away, and began hacking at the earth with his pick. A few seconds later, he held up the prize: a golf-ball sized black truffle, which he says will fetch him about thirty dollars. A few minutes later, Jackie was digging up another. And another. And another. So much that I wondered if they had been planted for my benefit.
Whatever the case, Ivica, doesn’t have to go very far for his paycheck. Just up the road in the village of Livade and in the shadow of the majestic medieval hill town, Motovun, is Giancarlo’s restaurant, Zigante Tartufi. A few hours later, I was sitting at a table in the front room, scoping out the menu. If whatever dish you order doesn’t already have truffles in it, the waiter will be by in a second to grate some on. Even my ice cream had truffles in it. “We go through two kilos on a busy day,” he told me, as he was grating some on to my shrimp-stuffed ravioli. The food at Zigante was good but risked appearing gimmicky, like an all-garlic restaurant. It’s hard to blame them. After all, this is truffle heaven. A minute later, the waiter set on my table something that looked like a plaster cast of someone’s brain. It was a rendering of the world’s largest truffle.
Afterward, I felt like a walking, breathing truffle myself. So much so that when I got back to my hotel, a dog walked by and I wondered if it was going to lurch for me. Surely truffles were oozing from my pores. It gave me a long look and kept on trotting up the street.
Reserve your negative opinions about street art for a moment and consider this image of “Madonna and Child” spray-painted on the side of a who-knows-how-old building in Rome, Italy. Captured in the residential neighborhood of Trastevere by Flickr user AlexSven, the photo summarizes, at least for me, the living organism that is the Eternal City. The ancient and modern, the irreverent and the religious all co-exist in this magical city.
What’s more, the word “graffiti” is an Italian word meaning “illicit scribblings or drawings on the surface of a public place” and is a type of art and protest that has been in practice since the days of the Roman Empire. So this street artist (or vandal, depending on which side of the debate you are on) is continuing a tradition that has lasted thousands of years.
