Satomi Kojima, the Japanese girl I traveled with to Iceland, visited me from the 8th to
20th April 1998. I took the week of from work and we drove down to Florida to get some
heat. And warm it was. We spent 3 nights at Daytona Beach where we visited the Kennedy
Space Center and the Astronauts Hall of Fame. That was a lot of impressive history with
real size models of the space-shuttle and a lot of other stuff.
Then we went to Orlando and visited Universal Studios which had a real good Twister and
Earthquake simulation. At Seaworld the Killer Whale show was excellent. At Epcot center of
Disneyworld the Norwegian section was brilliant.
Ronny Heie, my very good from Moss in Norway came over on the 19th of March and stayed until the 11th of April. He has done some seriously good work at Massachussetts General Hospital. Ronny has also found his love in America. A very nice young medical student with the name of Amanda Green is his love. Ronny has spent every weekend except one in Kingston, Woodstock together with Amanda and her nice parents. I have also been there a couple of times and can assure it is nice people.
Me and Ron, which he likes to call himself in America also took one trip down to Baltimore, where we visited the National Geographic museum and spent the night out with Jessie and Baltimore-Amanda in Annapolis.
The story of my cousin's 67 Camaro RS Convertible. My cousin Brian had some serious problems of getting finished with the restoration of his dream car. He had had it in a friends garage for years, but had not done very much with it. His friend Mark's house where he had the car were now being sold and Brian had to get the car out of the garage by Mark's parents request. By looking at his car the first weekend I helped him you could not believe that thing would drive in 6 weeks time. Almost everything was still apart. Thanks to me Brian stopped walking about thinking about the car, but got seriously started. I have sanded and grinded for 5 weekends. The last weekend I was there the engine ran and the brakes were being installed. Now Brian has fixed the steering and painted it. It is finally drivable.
Progress Software Corporation in Bedford, Boston MA, signed a contract with me October 1 and I landed at Logan 3 January to start working for them on monday the 5th. I am working as a Progress associate consultant helping clients with their software projects.
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Boston is
beautiful: The place I am living in is such a nice, high class city. They can boast some excellent universities including Harvard and MIT. Historically, it's the place they started the uprising against the English, Boston Tea Party, and wrote the constitution. Boston has a low rate of criminality and a very high educational rate. Nice areas surrounds it such as Cape Cod. My favorite football team is of course the Patriots. |
I visited not only Progress in September, but also my relatives in Red Hook, NY. Me and my friend Ron, Ronny Heie, really appreciate the extreme hospitality of my good relatives, the William's family. During our 2 weeks stay we seen WW1 planes in an airshow at Rhinebeck Aerodrome, the Williams' next door neighbor. We seen a WW2 airshow at Duchess County airport, and our favorite plane the SR71-Blackbird on the USS Intrepid in NYC harbor. This together with a visit to the Smithsonian National Air & Space museum fulfills our needs of planes for a short while.
We have seen the Jets play the Raiders at the Giants stadium in NYC where the Jets suddenly turned the game from losing to winning in the end of the third quarter. They did a lot better than our local hero Brian Williams and his team-mates in the Kingston Panthers when we saw them loose 0-45 at their home grounds.
The Vanderbilt and the Roosevelt mansions, West Point and Hudson valley were also an experience. Altogether with NYC, Washington, Boston, Buffalo Chicken wings and McDonalds we have experienced a time of our life. I signed for a job with Progress and Ron got accepted into Massachusetts General Hospital for his medical practices becoming a heart surgeon. All in all you cannot possible do much more in a two week holiday.
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Icelandic experience: I visited Iceland together with a Japanese girl Satomi Kojima in July. We brought a tent and mostly camped all around Iceland. Iceland is supposed to be expensive, but bus tickets were the main cost for that trip. We went to the south region, Skaftafell and saw Svartifoss and Vatnajøkull. Around the southwest region we saw Gullfoss, Geysir and Blue Lagoon was a muddy hot spring great for relaxation. |
| Japanese experience:
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Last year, July I had a good 5 weeks traveling all around Japan. No plans were made
ahead of the flight so I had to speak to the natives and thrust their suggestions on what
to do next. Most Japanese living in the cities speak reasonable good English, but very few
in the countryside. Surprisingly the countryside I experienced in Japan is less populated
than the countryside I know from Norway. There is big nice forests and lot of nature. In
the cities on the other hand, people live closer together. In Shinjuku, Tokyo the city
extended New York in three dimensions, streets, walkways, subways were like a maze where
one didn't know where the ground-level was. Japanese Shinkansen (super-train) construction
would run straight through a sky-scraper if necessary, but normally 30 feet above ground
if there was. It would arrive and leave on the scheduled plan, on the second. It would
also stop exactly at the marks for entry and exit doors so that people would line up at
the entry marks prior to the train arrival. All in all, Japan with volcanoes, hot springs, beautiful nature, beaches, islands, interesting history and an amazing culture and way of living. |
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