Oslo!

So I’m sitting in my hotel room in Amsterdam, where mom and I met up with Jerry earlier today. I’m mostly in the dark other than the light from the bathroom and some weird mood lighting along the baseboards. I have no idea how to get any of these lamps to turn on, but I’m exhausted so I’ve decided I can do without them. Plus, at least my bathroom walls are real. In the hotel in Oslo, the bathroom walls were made of clear glass. Luckily I don’t spend much time in the hotel anyways. It’s more amusing than annoying. But on to the past few days. This is going to be a long one…

This has been a great week, but Oslo was definitely my favorite part. Everywhere we’d been earlier in the week was absolutely beautiful, but things moved a little bit too slowly for my style of travel. We spent most of Wednesday on trains, going across the country to Oslo. Actually, yesterday one of the wooden tunnels in Middle Of Nowhere, Norway caught on fire and basically incinerated a train (all passengers and crew were evacuated) so the line is down indefinitely- a bit of good timing on our part.

When we got into Oslo it was evening, so we decided to walk to a big park nearby that was designed by a super famous Norwegian sculptor named Gustav Vigeland. The main attraction (at least for tourists) of the large park is a long pathway flanked by life size bronze sculptures of people, with a large sculpture fountain at the end. It was incredibly impressive (see soon to come facebook album for some pix). One thing that I noticed was that almost everybody who owns dogs in Norway seems to own GIANT ones. I guess the smaller ones don’t do so well in the snow.

Thursday morning we got up early and hit the ground running. First stop was the Nobel Peace Prize Museum, which was one of my favorite parts of the trip. I won’t go into a ton of details about it, but I learned A LOT about Fridtjof Nansen, who, as it turns out, is pretty badass. For more info see the ever-so-scholarly Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fridtjof_Nansen. I even learned a lot about Alfred Nobel, who invented, ironically, smokeless gunpowder to help soldiers see on the battlefield. Also, fun fact: he invented dynamite! I literally could have spent all day there, but eventually it was time to move on. Oslo in one day takes a lot of dedication.

Next stop was the Contemporary Art Museum. Not much to say about that… everything was pretty angsty in the kind of omg-nobody-understands-me way. Still glad we went though.

Last museum of the day was the Edvard Munch museum. Well first a munch at the Café Munch (bahaha) and then the museum. Who knew he painted so many other things besides The Scream. Turns out, the museum owns like 1200 paintings or something like that. Not all of them were out, obviously, but there were plenty. Seeing The Scream in person was pretty cool. I had never really focused on the sky before, but it really stands out in person. They were restoring a bunch of his paintings too and the studio had a glass wall to look in, which was really cool to see. They have so much super fancy equipment in there!

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering around the city, first in some random residential neighborhood just outside the city center and then the shopping district. Then, in the evening we went to see the opera Peter Grimes, which was fortunately in English. The actual theater is designed to look like a glacier, and the architect pulled it off really well. For the sake of time I will refer you, once again, to the soon-to-be facebook album. I hadn’t been to an opera since I was old enough to sit through it without fidgeting—ok. I fidgeted a little in the middle of this one too, but it was very subtle and the thing was over 3 hours! If you’re going to see opera though, that is definitely the way to do it. The theater was huge and paneled in gorgeous wood. the performers sang beautifully (not that I’m a great judge), and the plot was much more complex than I expected it to be.

After that we had a late dinner at a really cute café with a view of the Akershus Fortress. The only reason I bring this up is that my mother, mistaking a different restaurant for the one we were trying to find, tried to convince me to eat in a dark, hole-in-the-wall bar with a skull and crossbones flag covering the window of the door. I will be more than happy to explain this in more detail to anyone who asks:-)

So now onto the second leg of the trip—Amsterdam and biking through Friesland. The airlines lost our luggage, but we’re optimistic that they will find it and get it to us sometime tomorrow. Otherwise, all I have to bike in are my flip flops, so that should be interesting. For now, I’ll leave you with the only Norwegian words I can remember (most words I had no idea how to even begin trying to pronounce).

Utgang- Exit
Ingang- Entrance
Airport- Flyplass
Train- Tog
Gate- Street (it’s pronounced gata, though we didn’t figure that out until Thursday)
Fiske- Fish
Kylling- Chicken