Oslo

Pictures to come later. My computer is being fussy.

Saturday
The flight there: The motto of Ryanair is “Pure Dead Brilliant,” a phrase that pissed the linguist/grammatist in me off. First of all, you can not have three adjectives. At least two of them have to be adverbs. However, S and I decided that Dead Brilliant could be a phrase on it’s own, so to make it acceptable it could be “Purely Dead Brilliant.” Still... Ryanair is literally a bus that flies. There were no assigned seats, so S and I snagged some emergency exit row ones with tons of leg room. Returning we were not so lucky.

Sunday
The first stop was the Viking museum, where we saw lots of ships. It was a nice building and very interesting. However, they did a lot of restoration to the ships – involving putting in new wood and such, techniques I disagree with. The Vikings were the first settlers in North America.

After the Viking Museum we continued onto the outdoor Folk Museum. Since it wasn’t the summer season, there was really nothing to see, other than a building that had been moved from the mainland onto the paene insula. Sorry, that was Latin, Peninsula.

Then it was off to the Sculpture Garden. The Kyss was by far my favorite sculpture. Most of Vinegard’s pieces were about relations between women and men and families. Inside the museum the pieces were larger than life, but the bronzer versions in the park were just part of a whole. One of the center pieces was an obelisk carved with swirling human forms. It was a development of the theme of resurrection, but all the statues surrounding it were about family and facing away. Glasgow doesn’t have these types of public spaces.

Post Sculpture Garden, it was off to the Resistance Museum and the Akershus Fortress. The Resistance Museum was very powerful. It spent only a small amount of time talking about how evil the Nazis were compared to the amount of time spent discussing the heroism of the Norwegians. During WWII, the Norwegian government moved to England and using the BBC, broadcast messages to the resistance movement. The German’s dared not interfere with the BBC. It is no longer a Schloss, but it is still used for State functions. There was a guard a la Buckingham Palace, except he looked around.

After the Resistance Museum, we attempted to go to the Munch Museum, but we didn’t understand Norwegian and missed our bus stop, and by the time we figured it out, the museum had closed. Oh well, an excuse to go back!

While we were waiting for the tram to take us back to our hostel, we found this community space. Opposite the cool see-saw was thousands upon thousands of white legos. With them, people had built elaborate buildings. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a picture because my camera died.

The only Norwegian word I took note of was Returpunkt. If you can tell me what that means, you get a cookie! Or not. I’ll send you a postcard.

Monday:
On Monday we took the tram down to the center of the city and just walked around. It was nice. There was an United Colors of Benetton, and I started to laugh. S was like, "why are you laughing" and i responded that they have these ads in the US where it is a line of diverse people all wearing the teeshirts and i had this joke with my friend since he was really tan and i am really pale. We'd put our arms together and say quickly "Buy our t-shirts! we're diverse"

General Observations:
The men in Norway are just better looking than everywhere else. It is like they congregate there.
There is no way for them to check whether or not you have a ticket on the bus, the tram or the subway (called the T-bane) so there is an expectation of obedience. Also, I didn’t see any policemen.
It was nice to be in a place where they drove on the correct (left) side of the road.