Oslo, capital of Norway, country of only 5 million and the land of expensive food and accommodation. For dinner in Oslo, we’ve had cuppa soup, cuppa couscous and fruit/bread. To eat out would cost between 250 – 500 NOK ($45 – $86AUD) per night whereas I can spend about 300NOK at the supermarket and get food for several days worth of meals.
Oslo has been interesting, it’s quite different to Iceland, London and Australia. It seems that people are late starters here as no-one appears to be up and about before about 9:30 – 10ish. Everyone is really nice and most have good English skills which has been really helpful as I’ve tried pronouncing some Norwegian phrases but they don’t sound right and are difficult to say. Google Translate has been very helpful. Oslo is noticeable different to Bergen and Reykjavik in one main way, anywhere outside the main transport hubs/tourist areas, the city seems very quiet and lonely. Not sure if this is because of the time of year?? Also most of the buildings are quite modern and office-like, where as Bergen/Reykjavik had older style buildings with bright colours and lots of people wandering around.
Anyway, we finally found a place in Oslo that offers Self Service Laundry as we were running out of clean clothes, so spent one morning in here for a couple of hours (There was another family in here whilst we were waiting, Freya suspects they were Irish gypsies, and they used 5 wash machines and 3 dryers all at the same time. It was like they were washing their entire households worth of clothing, towels, tablecloths, sheets, quilts etc and their kids were so noisy.)
We visited the Royal Palace gardens, Akershus Fortress, the Museum of Cultural History and Viking Ship Museum, where there is a complete Viking ship that was excuvated from a viking burial mound and is probably from around 800AD. The ship is enourmous (as you’ll see from the picture) and would have taken weeks to bury (and excuvate).
Akershus Fortress is a medieval castle that was built to protect Oslo and is still used by the Norwegian Military today, as well as for Royal and official state visits/events. It is also where all the Norwegian Royalty are buried. It was an interesting place to wander around and was different to most other castles I’ve seen so far.
Here’s a 360 I took from the castle walls –
Lastly we visited a sculpture park just outside Oslo called Vigeland Sculpture Park which is a park full of sculptures designed by Gustav Vigeland –
There was a funny picture I took of a lady and her dog in this park which copied every move she made. In the picture I’ve included the lady was looking out over the railing, so the dog decided it wanted to do the same thing.
On our last night before flying out to Tromso, we decided to visit the Oslo IceBar, which is a bar made completly of Ice. Yes, even the cups are made of Ice. I’ve included a couple of pictures below.
Farvel
P.S. For those wondering what the picture of Oslo SpareBank is, when we first arrived in Oslo, I saw a sign on a building saying Oslo SpareBank, and I thought – I know the Norwegians have had issues with buildings and fires in the past, but building a ‘spare’ bank is a bit weird. Turns out ‘spare’ in Norwegian translates as ‘save’ which means it’s actually saying “Oslo Savings Bank” 🙂
