"this greeting to old norway" hamlet: i, ii

An action-packed day here in Oslo, as it had to be -- today was our only full day in town. Oslo is a really beautiful town, and I've found the locals to be very friendly, helpful, and good-humored.

After a very good breakfast at the hotel, we headed down to the ferry to the Bygdoy Peninsula, an area to the south of central Oslo that houses a number of maritime-related museums. Here is a photo from the ferry; in the distance you can see the ski-jump from the 1952 Olympic Games (you can click on the photos to see them larger):



On Bygdoy, we first hit up the Vikingskipshuset, or Viking Ship Museum. Before entering, I discovered that Diet Coke is called "Coca-Cola Light" which tickled me for some reason. Also, it has a superior flavor.



The museum was great. It's essentially based on the findings of 3 Viking burial sites, each of which consisted of a giant fricking boat filled with treasure, rich silk fabrics, and the body of a dead nobleperson. They have each of the boats on display and then a bunch of artifacts as well.





One of the things that really stuck with me about seeing Viking artifacts was the similarities between the styles of Viking ornamentation and Celtic ornamentation.

After that, we hit up the Kon-Tiki museum, which is a museum dedicated to the memory and work of a world-famous scientist and explorer named Thor Heyerdahl. Basically, this guy would come up with a theory (for example, "ancient people crossed the Atlantic Ocean in boats, and exchanged ideas, which is why there are stepped pyramids in both South America and Egypt"), and critics would denigrate that theory ("no one knew how to make a boat that could get that far!!") and then he would say, well, I guess I'll just have to prove it (and he would basically build a boat made out of materials available in ancient times, such as reeds, and do exactly the thing critics said couldn't be done). The actual reed boat he built and sailed across the ocean was there on display:



He sounded like a badass guy.

Then, also on Bygdoy, we went to the Fram museum, dedicated to a fellow who crossed both the North and South poles. There was a giant boat inside this museum, too, which you could enter and poke around in. V. took some pictures of me dorkily pretending to cook in the ship's galley which he may or may not spare me from.

Last stop on Bygdoy was the Norsk Sjofartsmuseum or Maritime museum, which had some kind of cool stuff, like a collection of ships' figureheads



But the problem was that most of the museum's signage was only in Norwegian, and so we were unable to read any of it. It was really kind of a blessing, because at this point we had kind of looked at all the boats we could manage in one day.

All this was before 1pm!

We hopped back on the ferry to Central Oslo and stopped at the Nobel Peace Center. The Center had a really intense exhibit titled "The Places We Live," which was a multimedia piece about slum life. It was in some ways riveting but in other ways almost impossible to watch and listen to. Growing up in a first world country, my own mental picture conjured by the word "slum" comes nowhere near the true meaning of the word.

There was also an exhibit about Al Gore, who is a current Prize receipient, as well as a permanent display presenting all of the recipients in a very simple but very cool way.



From there we hopped on the subway up to the national football (or "soccer") stadium, which also houses a Football Museum! Now, to be completely honest, I was ready to go to this museum mostly because I knew that V. would enjoy it; however, I really enjoyed it as well! There was a lot of history of football stuff there, which I liked a lot, some great video of awesome goals (which is really the part of football I want to watch -- I know, I know, I'm missing the point of the Beautiful Game. Whatever. The goals are the, you know, goal of the whole thing). Also there was a section where they showed a video of the worst plays (like goal keepers managing to throw balls into their own nets), which was fun to watch. There was a replica of the stadium made out of Legos!!



At the end of the museum portion of the tour there was a room full of Sony Playstations where you could play a videogame soccer, which I thought was a pretty funny touch. Then, after that, we were led by our tour guide, a very sweet and enthusiastic young man named Per, out to the football pitch. We were able to go into the dugouts and also up into the royal seats. Then he also took us down to the dressing room where the team gets ready for all its games. It was a lot of fun and the kind of experience I don't think you'd be able to have at a stadium in the US.

That brought us to dinner. We changed up into some nicer clothes and headed over to a place called Engebret Cafe. Very nice food, great atmosphere, and excellent and friendly service. A great final evening in town.

Finally, after that, we headed up to the Vigelandsparken, a sculpture park that includes more than 200 sculptures that are the life's work of Gustav Vigeland. It is positively amazing. So much so, that we're planning on going back early tomorrow for a better look in the morning light...