The Oslo File: Declassified

Our trip to Oslo was top secret. Highly classified stuff. My friend wanted to surprise his mother with a post card from the Viking Museum there, so the three of us were on information lockdown. The only person I told who could possibly leak the information was my mother and I swore her to secrecy.
It was before I had gotten my blog up and running and I don’t really post on social media so I felt confident that there wouldn’t be a leak from my end. My buddy is a little more active on social media but can shut it down pretty easily. The weak link in the chain was his wife. The whole plan to keep our trip secret was her idea, but it was a much tougher task for her as she is far more active on the interwebs. She did an excellent job staying quiet though and our mission was a smashing success and now that the postcard has safely reached its destination I am free to share the contents of this blog with you.

We had three nights and two full days in Oslo taking the bus from Halmstad, Sweden on the first of the year and taking the bus back on the fourth. There is far more to do in Oslo than two days allows, but more than two days can be more than the wallet allows as Oslo is one of the more expensive cities in Europe.

We ended up spending most of our time in Oslo visiting museums. There were a lot of great museum options to choose from and not having seen the others I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure we chose four of the best. Now museums are great for visiting but I don’t feel that descriptions of museums make for the best reading so I’m just going to tell you what museums we visited, a very brief description of the theme of the museum and then the most ridiculous thing about each museum.

The Viking Ship Museum – a museum about the Vikings featuring three Viking ships. Ridiculousness: There were some audio recordings in a corner of the museum that you could listen to that were told by Ratatoskr (a squirrel from Norse mythology that runs all over the world tree Yggdrasil carrying messages), and brought to you by Ratatoskr Radio. It was weird.

The Fram Museum – a museum about polar exploration featuring two large polar ships. Ridiculousness: There was a room on the second floor you could enter that seemed to be some sort of haunted house but it wasn’t really scary at all. What it was, was cold. It was apparently a polar simulator, so it was freezing cold inside and left you shivering the rest of your time in the museum. Just mean.

Norway’s Resistance Museum – a museum about Norwegian resistance against Nazi occupation during WWII. Ridiculousness: About halfway through the museum they were talking about food rationing during the war and it said how it wasn’t all bad. People didn’t overeat so they kept trim and there was no sugar so tooth decay was at an all time low. Really?

The National Gallery – great art highlighted by Munch’s The Scream. Ridiculousness: I was beginning to think this museum was going to let me down in the ridiculousness department. I went all the way through without anything super silly and then I found my friends in the gift shop. There were a lot of typical gift shop items here that you would expect to find, but two items stood out as exceptionally odd. They were selling razors and toothbrushes. These would be weird enough items if they had pictures of some of the paintings on them or if they at least said National Gallery, but no. They were just plain razors and toothbrushes. Why?

After our first day of checking out museums we left the Fram Museum and went over to the bus stop and caught the bus that we thought would take us back towards the Airbnb that we were staying at. After a stop or two though my friend realized we were going in the wrong direction and directed us to get off the bus. We disembarked and crossed the street to catch the bus going the right way. We stood out in the cold for ten to fifteen minutes before a bus finally pulled up. We got on the bus and I looked around. What did I see? The same people as I had seen when we got off the bus. It had gone down to the end of the line, looped around and headed back in the direction we needed. So, we had stood out in the cold instead of staying on the nice warm bus for nothing. It was the polar simulator all over again. Fool me once unnecessary cold, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

We didn’t have much in the way of traditional food while in Oslo. The one thing that I had that was Norwegian in nature was an open-faced sandwich with scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, cucumber and lettuce. It was quite delicious. The rest of the food we had while there was in no way Norwegian fare but at least we did good things for the world with one of our meals. We went to a wok place that donated a meal for every meal you bought. So we got to eat some delicious, incredibly non-Norwegian food while giving ourselves a karma boost.

One thing I found really interesting while visiting Oslo was how busy the museums were. I mean they weren’t packed but they were much busier than many other tourist attractions that I have visited since my arrival in Europe back in November. Granted, it was during a lot of people’s Christmas break, but still it was pretty impressive how many people were visiting Oslo in January.

The final thing I have to say about Oslo is how beautiful the view from our Airbnb was. Look at that sunrise:

Damn.