When we traveled to Qingdao, China in 2007 to meet our daughter, we stayed in the Crowne Plaza. I’m not really a hotel person – most of my travel has involved youth hostels – so I had never heard of the place before. It was comfortable and fancy but hardly registered at the time because we had big emotional stuff going on.
The only thing about it that really stuck in my mind was the tagline on all the stationery and swag:
Crowne Plaza – a place to meet
When I went back with my daughter in 2015 to visit and explore, I chose a much more quirky and historical hotel as our base of operations. But one day, as we wandered around the city, we stumbled on a family historical site – the Crowne Plaza Hotel we stayed in on the trip when we met our daughter.
When I visited Qingdao in 2015, I stayed in the historical German Concession area. The neighborhood’s mixture of European and Asian architecture constantly reminded me of the pseudo-European landscapes of Studio Ghibli movies. As a result, I took dozens of pictures of neighborhood streets that were completely ordinary but struck me as potentially magical.
When my oldest daughter was ten, she and I visited her birth city, Qingdao. Every day, we woke up early and gorged ourselves on the breakfast buffet in the hotel before venturing out to explore the city.
Most days, we ran out of steam midafternoon and headed back to the hotel for a rest before venturing back out to find dinner. Once my daughter discovered Boonie Bears, a two-hour block of every day belonged to local TV.
Neither of us spoke Chinese, and there were no subtitles, but the story was easy to understand. An inept Elmer Fudd-type character was trying to log a forest, but the clever bears who lived there kept outsmarting him.
For all the Looney Tunes silliness and cartoonish violence, there were some intriguing subtleties that I don’t think an American cartoon would have offered. The “evil logger” often gets chewed out on the phone by a boss or his father. He also cries when his mother calls him. In one episode, the forest animals help him get home to the city – not, I think, because they want him out of the woods, but because he needs to see his mother.
Once we got home, internet research told me the name of the cartoon, and I found out they made a movie of it in 2014. But so far, none of the streaming services seem to offer the tv show or the movie. I’d love to see it again with subtitles. To this day, my daughter still talks about the forest cartoon she used to watch in China.
A lot of people like folk museums for their down-to-earth “what life was like in the old days” approach to history. For me, the old days in question are never old enough. But when you’re traveling with a kid, the hands-on outdoor folk museum is kind of a no-brainer. Plus, the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History (Norsk Folkemuseum) in Oslo has a stave church. Since we were on Bygdøy anyway, that was enough to merit a quick visit. Little did I know they’d have to push us out the door at closing time.
The Draw
The Norwegian folk museum is an open-air museum with 160 historic buildings, mostly built in the last 500 years. One exception is the Gol Stave Church, a main attraction at the museum that was built in the village of Gol sometime around 1200. There are also indoor exhibits featuring Norwegian folk costumes, folk art, church art and Sami culture. They offer hands-on activities for children, and docents in period dress demonstrate old skills and explain aspects of life in different epochs. My daughter requested participatory art experiences on our itinerary, and this sounded like the kind of museum where you might get to try working at a loom or braiding rope.
The Reality
The reality of Norway’s hard divide between high season and off season with no shoulder in between meant that there were no costumed docents walking around or doing demonstrations. The majority of the buildings were locked up and only visible from the outside or, if you were tall enough, by peeking through a window. Surprisingly, running around on a sunny spring day peeking into windows had tremendous appeal to my ten-year-old. All the patience she extended to me at the Viking Ship Museum was now repaid, as she attempted to peek into every single one of the 160 historic buildings onsite.
The promised petting zoo of farm animals appeared deserted, and to my eyes, the dozens of elevated, turf-roofed farm buildings quickly blurred together. But my daughter was having a blast, stopping to photograph architectural details on nearly identical buildings and cataloguing the contents observed through dirty windows. We both found the apartment buildings where each unit was decorated in the style of a different decade entertaining. And the stave church, well, it deserves its own subheading. By the time we got to the indoor exhibits there were only a few minutes left to closing. We had to breeze past exhibits on folk art, clothing, and Sami culture. Fortunately these overlapped a lot with exhibits at our own Nordic Heritage Museum back home, so we didn’t miss too much.
Gol Stave Church
You may have noticed that I am irreligious. I have to work at being open-minded enough to stay on the polite side of antireligious. I do appreciate architecture, but churches don’t usually do it for me. (Exceptions include St. Stephen’s in Vienna and the chapel at Seattle U, both of which I can appreciate for purely aesthetic reasons).
I say all this is to set up what a tremendous surprise it was to walk inside the tiny wooden Gol stave church and feel something. Yes, of course it was pretty. But there really was a special atmosphere inside that little 13th century village church. Only one other visitor entered while we were there. She stopped short just inside the door, said, “Wow,” and quickly dropped to the floor to take a picture of the roof.
Medieval cathedrals in mainland Europe awe with their immensity. But this tiny church creates the same sense of smallness inside a vast universe using a very tall, narrow space. It almost felt like standing inside a concentrated column of energy.
Unexpected Highs
One of my favorite things about travel is how you’re guaranteed to have moments you’ll never forget, but they are almost never the ones you planned for. I never expected to have a spiritual moment in a church of all places. And I never thought that running around looking in the windows of old buildings would keep my 10-year-old occupied in sheer delight for a whole afternoon. I can only imagine what highs we might have achieved if all the activities I was expecting had been available. But then again, maybe the magic lay in having acres of old Norway all to ourselves.
Since I live so close to the Seattle Center, nothing will ever replace pre-AEG Bumbershoot as my ultimate family-friendly summer music festival. But since that festival doesn’t exist anymore, Pickathon is a close second.
The logistics are obviously a lot more complicated for a Seattle family, but there is a payoff in the resulting experience. And the lineup? While obviously not as huge, and with a genre bias skewed toward bluegrass and Americana, the lineup still comes close to Bumbershoot for its breadth and eclectic variety. Last night Pickathon announced their lineup for 2019.
