Thursday 21 September - Wrap Up

 

Flytoget at Oslo Central

I caught a Flytoget express train to Oslo airport. These run every ten minutes throughout the day. Every other one stops at Lillestrom which was convenient as Paul joined me there, (he was staying at a nearby Lillestrom hotel). This is a high speed train which runs from the airport to Oslo Central station in 20 minutes. The trains are frequently crowded. This is an excellent service.

Compare this to the "service" OC Transpo will be providing to Ottawa airport. A diesel train a couple of stops to the Trillium line, change to another diesel train to Bayview, then change to the electric Confederation line to get downtown. Tourists are going to love this with their large cases.

We took a KLM flight to Amsterdam where  we changed to a KLM flight to Montreal and finally the KLM bus to Ottawa. We had anticipated some problems in Amsterdam with a relatively short transfer but everything worked out to the minute.

The cabin crew on the flight from Oslo were great, they were all joking among themselves and the passengers, having a good time and making it a fun trip. My thoughts went back to the time I watched an Air France crew behave in a similar way on a flight from Moscow to Paris. I wrote at that time (15 February 1974):

"I have never been so pleased to get on a plane.  The Air France stewardesses were smiling and joking. I didn't see a woman smile the whole time and the men only laughed when they had vodka in them.  I mentioned this to one of the stewardesses and she replied that people say that a lot to her on this run."

Of course Oslo was not a dull and dreary place. It was a happy flight made better by the crew.

The plane from Oslo was an old one and the safety briefing had to be done manually. It was announced that the briefing would be given in English only, even though we were on a Dutch plane with a Dutch crew and leaving from a Norwegian city. Nobody objected. This brings me to the fact that English is used extensively in all of the countries we visited. I was surprised to learn that in Switzerland German is taught in the German part and French in the French part but in both areas English is taught as a second language and not the second Swiss language. There is also a movement to require that because the complexity of operations in the many local languages all locomotive crews that cross national boundaries in Europe should be required to speak and operate in English. 

My conclusion is that English is becoming the language of commerce throughout much of Europe. I still wonder about Brexit.

Another comment on KLM. I started to explore the entertainment system available at my seat. I was astounded to see to the great amount of classical music available. I nearly hit the roof when I found all of the Beethoven symphonies and concertos. I was reluctant to leave the plane at Montreal and considered travelling back to Amsterdam to continue my orgy of this wonderful music.

My conclusions on the trip. The program we developed was a good guide and we achieved most of what we set out to do. The Swiss Travel Pass, although expensive, was well worth it as it allowed us complete flexibility on where to travel, when to travel and on what to travel (train, bus, tram, boat funicular etc.)

Travel around in Switzerland is easy. Of the many trains etc. that we rode the worst was seven minutes late while another started out five minutes down but picked up two before its final destination. 

Other countries visited cannot compare. In Germany our train was 30 minutes late reaching Hamburg but others were reaching there four hours late. Sweden just abandoned us in Lund while I noted frequent train cancellations and signal delays in Oslo.

Have we seen all we want see in Switzerland? I don't think so.