Three Perfect Days in Oslo

In late September, we spent a three-day weekend in Oslo. We got what is called the Oslo Pass, which gives you free access to all public transportation, entry to most museums, and discounts at some restaurants. We packed in as much as we could to make the Pass well worth it. Since we did so much in Oslo, we, Porter and Jack, have decided to write this blog together.

The first place we went on Friday evening was the Oslo Opera House.

Rare is the building

that is built in a way

that allows one to stroll

over the top of its roof

And yet rarer is the night

that finds one on

such a rare roof

To watch the moon

turn a rusty red

as the earth blocks the sun

While beneath that roof

a story is told

told in the Italian song

of an opera

And such was a night

on the Oslo Opera House

The September night

of a stunning blood moon

We went to visit the Oslo Opera House every night. It had impressive architecture, which included a ramp up one side. The ramp and the rest of the roof are open to the public. It was a nice view from all directions. On our second night, Jack and I discovered a fun way to use our shadows. The very highest part of the Opera House is a cube with sides that are lit by lights on the ground. By standing in front of these lights, we could project our shadow on a fifty foot wall. The closer we were to the light, the larger the shadow.We had fun making one of us appear as a fleeing person while the other like a giant, lumbering after him. On another night, we got up at four in the morning to see the lunar eclipse, as my poem describes. It was cool to see something that occurs so rarely, from the roof of a famous building. -Porter

Here is the Opera House on our first night with the moon rising above it.

A better angle on the Opera House the next night.

The pair of us and our shadows.

The Lunar Eclipse

JackRabbit: We next went to the Viking Ship Museum. I was excited because I have enjoyed learning about Vikings and this museum sounded interesting. It had two complete Viking ships and a lot of old artifacts. While in the museum, I learned a lot about the ships.

The first viking ship was about one hundred feet long. It had an interesting shape: long and thin. The sides came together at the bow and curved steeply upward to form a sort of post. The stern did the same. We observed the ship for a while. Along the keel and the outside of the bow and sternposts, were intricate carvings, which were impressive.

In the museum, I learned why the design of the Viking ship was ideal for its purpose. Using its many oars, it could move directly into the wind. Most ships that could go into the wind had deep keels. The Viking ship did not. It could therefore go into shallow waters like rivers and beach itself on shore. In addition to that, the Viking ships could go really fast. The usual ship of that era would go from two to five knots (nautical miles per hour) on average; the maximum was seven. The Viking ships went five to ten knots on average. The maximum for most Viking ships was around twelve but the record is fifteen. By comparison, Sila's average speed is six knots, with the maximum of nine. 

There were also lots of old Viking artifacts in a separate part of the museum. There were carts, weapons and other random household things. The carts had intricate designs on them just like the bottom of the ships. Vikings were buried with their belongings, and there were many items on display, dug up from Viking graves. There where decaying clothes, shoes, old buckets, and bits from tapestries. But among these ancient items, something was missing. There was no money or riches in the graves. Grave robbers must have stolen anything of value and left the rest. It is sort of sad, but it was still fun to examine the household objects. Seeing something a thousand years old is pretty amazing. I really enjoyed visiting the Viking Ship Museum, and seeing the things it held.

The first Viking ship.

 

The first ship. (notice how thin it is and the bow post)

This Viking Ship's mast fell off.

The intricate carvings along the hull.

This is a figure head from a ship.

This is a cart covered in carvings.

Porter: In the 1940's, a Norwegian named Thor Heyerdahl had a theory about Polynesian ancestry. His theory was that a Peruvian fleet of rafts had sailed across the Pacific to the islands from South America. Since nobody would listen to him, he set out to prove his theory. He gathered five more Scandinavians for his crew. The six of them and a parrot were told dozens of times that they were going to die in the attempt. Even so, they sailed on their handmade raft, named Kon-Tiki, with six months of food. After four months, the raft was forced onto a South Pacific reef. With the help of about a hundred Polynesian islanders, they rescued the raft and successfully proved that their theory was possible.

When Heyerdahl returned to Oslo, he built a museum about his adventures, including the actual Kon-Tiki, and the Ra II from another of his open ocean rafting adventures. The museum was well done and I learned much more than I had from reading his book, Kon-Tiki, which I highly recommend. 

 The actual Kon-Tiki can be seen behind us.

JackRabbit: Next we walked to the Polar Ship Fram Museum which was an enormous A-framed building. Inside it, the ship itself dominated the scene. It was placed in the center of the building with three levels of displays around it. 

My favorite part of the museum was learning about the construction of the Fram. The Fram was a ship designed to sail in polar regions. Most ships that dared the extremely high latitudes never made it home, but the Fram was constructed to survive the harsh arctic seas. It was 39 meters long had a main mast of 34 meters, and weighed 800 tons when loaded. Most ships that sailed the polar regions tried to race the forming ice but if caught, were crushed in it. The Fram's hull shape was designed so that the whole boat would be pushed up when the ice pinched it, rather than being crushed. The rudder and propeller retracted into the ship to avoid being damaged. 

After getting frozen in the ice, the Fram stayed stuck for three years, as planned, while its crew did research on the arctic. During this time, the pack ice drifted, taking the Fram across the arctic with it. The Fram, after being used for nineteen years, was put in Oslo where they built the museum around it. It was cool to visit.

Here we are on the deck of the Fram.

Porter: After a few maritime museums, it was nice to switch over to an art gallery when we went to the Astrup Fearnley, one of two art museums we visited while in Oslo. There were about twenty pieces by Damien Hirst and a dozen more by other artists. 

A bunch of butterflies pinned to a board, by Damien Hirst

My favorite was a cow and her calf cut in half from head to tail. They were preserved in alcohol in glass boxes so you could walk between the four pieces and look at the cows' insides. Mother and Child (Divided), for that was its name, was weird but interesting to study. The central piece of the exhibit was called For the Love of God. There was a long line to enter a dark passageway into a room with no lights except for a spotlight on the sculpture. It was an exact copy of Damien Hirst's own skull covered in diamonds. I remember it shining brightly, sending little speckles of light around the room. It was strange to see a skull, a symbol of death, and diamonds, a symbol of wealth, combined in such a way. All of Hirst's art was as strange as Mother and Child (Divided), and For the Love of God, though those two were the most memorable. 

Our second art museum, the National Gallery, was among my favorite places in Oslo. It had a collection of art arranged in chronological order, including Edvard Munch's famous piece, The Scream. 

There were 25 rooms each representing a specific era on the art timeline. What I liked about the museum was that it highlighted the change in style of art over time. Rooms that I usually would have found boring were interesting because I could appreciate the overall style, not just the individual pieces. I particularly noticed how much more literal the art became during the Renaissance. It was also a smooth build up to Edvard Munch's section which included his famous works: The Scream, The Madonna, and The Sick Child. Although I am glad that I have seen these well-known pieces, they were not the highlight of the museum. Without a doubt, the highlight was watching art evolve through thousands of years in just one amazing hour.

The Scream, by Edvard Munch

After leaving the National Gallery on an otherwise ideal sunny day, I felt a warm splat on the top of my head. Upon further inspection, I realized that it was some pigeon dropping. The bathroom in the Natural History Museum and a wet rag were my next stop.

JackRabbit: The Natural History Museum is comprised of dozens of large dioramas. Each diorama represented an area or showed a habitat with all its animals in the foreground. We especially enjoyed looking at the dioramas of the places we have visited on Sila. Our favorite was probably the cliffy coast habitat. It had auks (birds like puffins and guillemots) and gulls we had seen in Ireland and Scotland. The diorama represented the cliffy coast exactly as we remember it.

The only reason to think that this not real life and a diorama instead is that the puffins' wings are not blurred.

 An Andean Condor from Chile.

On our last day in Oslo, we took the tram to Holmenkollen, home of a famous ski jump. Although we had seen ski jumping on television during the Winter Olympics, seeing the structure in person made me realize the enormity of the jumps. Even though I like heights, when I looked down from the top of the jump, I could not imagine going down it, even if I was a pro. At the top of the ski jump was an exemplary view of the area around the city, including Oslo Fjord.

A statue of a ski jumper near the ski jump.

The Holmenkollen Ski Jump

 

A view from the landing area. You can just barely see us at the bottom.

Can you imagine going down this?

The view from on top with Oslo Fjord in the background.

Porter: (ed. note: This Oslo blog would be incomplete without some food commentary from our resident expert.) In Oslo we had a couple of great food experiences. The first was an afternoon snack. A man, presumably named Harald, serves waffles out of his window. Harald's Vaffel is an iconic place. Mama chose a blue cheese and bacon waffle while Rabbit and I enjoyed chocolate with whipped cream. It was a classic Norwegian waffle, flower shaped, not square like the Belgian type. The chocolate-waffle ratio, was, in my opinion, perfect, creating a fabulous snack.

The pair of us in front of Harald's stand (Vaffel is Norwegian for waffle).

Jack and I impatiently wait for Mama to take this picture.

For dinner the last night, we went to a restaurant. We ordered three different entrées to share. The first was pork chops with green peppercorns in a typical Norwegian fashion. The flavors were well combined and made for a succulent meal. The second was a reindeer stew in a brown cheese sauce, my favorite of the three. The last was fresh halibut from Oslo fjord. It was melt-in-your-mouth good. For dessert, we ordered Trollkruff and blackcurrant crumble. Trollkruff is a really sweet cream mixed with lingeberry juice on a biscuit. I am told that it is a classic Norwegian dessert. The crumble was exactly what it sounds like. It was a delicious end to the meal and the meal made a delicious ending to our time in Oslo. After three days of eating crackers with cheese and baconost, it felt like a luxurious treat.

The porkchops was the first entrée that I tried.

Jack with the reindeer stew.

The halibut cools on Mama's plate.

Trollkruff

Black Currant Crumble-yum

JackRabbit: Although we described many highlights in great detail, we enjoyed a number of other places in Oslo. We explored the Science and Technology Museum, the Folk Museum, Akershus Fortress, the Royal Palace and its gardens, the Vigeland Sculpture Park, and the Maritime Museum.

There were two of these Satellite dishes about thirty feet apart.If you talked into one ring, the person next to the other ring could hear you. This was really cool.

The stave church at the Norwegian Folk Museum

An old storehouse near the Folk Museum.

The center of the Sculpture Park A cannon in the Akershus Fortress

A straight-faced guard at the fortress.

Just riding the tram and walking around Oslo together was highly enjoyable. We don't usually spend so much time in big cities, so this was an especially fun way to spend three days. -Porter and JackRabbit