I had to get up stupidly early to catch the 6 hour train to Oslo, where I walked the 15 minutes to Anker Hostel. Once again it is more of a “hotel” feel than a hostel, with a
large waiting room, no kitchen but a hotplate in the dorm room, and very busy
reception staff. The 'hotplate in the room' idea is okay until the other people
in the dorm decide to cook a sardine dish which then stinks out the entire
room. Not cool. I dumped my stuff and got out of there as soon as I could. I
headed back to the information centre near the train station (which is
surprisingly dodgy – on a par with Rome or Naples) and bought an “Oslo 24hr
card” which works out as good value if you are planning to visit more than
three museums (and there are at least 6 just on Museum Island) and includes
free travel on the buses, trams & the ferry. So if you can’t afford a fjord
cruise you could always take the ferry out to the furthest island in the main
fjord and do your own mini cruise.
One of the
drawbacks of staying in a hostel is that occasionally you get very
inconsiderate dorm mates and unfortunately the women in my dorm thought it was
acceptable to wake up at 4:30am and stomp around the room turning on lights and
packing their bags for an early departure. When I have to leave early I get
everything ready the night before and do my final pack in the hall outside the
room so as not to wake everyone else up. Sadly not everyone is as considerate.
Fortunately, years of being on call at night has trained me to be able to fall
back asleep easily when rudely woken up so I managed to get some more shut eye
once the annoying women had left.
I managed
to make it in time to catch the first ferry out to Bygdøy Island, where most of the city museums are located. I
visited the Fram Museum
first to see the polar ship used in the Arctic and Antarctic Expeditions (which
looked miserably cold), before heading to the Kontiki Museum
to see the rafts made by Thor Heyerdahl for his sea voyage proving that island people
were able to use rafts to cross the ocean. I then visited the Maritime Museum
where there are heaps of model ships and ferries on display which was quite
impressive. My fourth museum to visit was the Viking Ship
Museum where I now had to
fight my way through the crowds to check out the well-preserved Viking ships.
By now it was lunchtime (hence the crowds) so I stopped for lunch outside the
museum before heading down to the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History, a large open air museum and one of Norway's largest museums of cultural history. There I learnt more about the Norwegian way of life, got
caught in a rainstorm in which I sheltered in a little hut, and met a cute
Norwegian pony. I caught the 4pm ferry back and had enough time to visit the
Nobel Peace Centre, with its stories about refugees, peace prizes and Alfred
Nobel. After being inspired by what some people do for others, I walked down to
the waterfront and followed the piers around to the ferry that heads out to the
other islands, but after looking at the timetable decided it as probably a bit
late for a fjord mini-tour. Instead I headed out for a lovely steak dinner at
TGI Fridays, where you get a 20% discount with the Oslo card (though still expensive).
After my
massive museum effort the previous day I didn’t have much left to do, so decided
to spent the day visiting the Castle and National Gallery. But before hitting
the gallery I walked over to the Opera House, where I climbed the roof, built
to resemble the glaciers for which the country is so famous. Apparently you
need to wear sunglasses to block out the glare off the white walls, but I
didn’t have to worry about that as it was another cloudy day. I then visited Akershus slott (Oslo Castle),
where I wandered through the halls with an audio-guide listening to a pretty
interesting history with a few ghost stories thrown in for good measure. By the
time I emerged from the castle the sun had managed to break through the clouds,
so I was able to have a picnic lunch on the castle walls while watching people
erecting a concert stage for the “Oslo Festival” that unfortunately was set to
start the day I left. After lunch I headed over to the National Gallery where
the famous “Scream” painting by Edward Munch is kept. I also really like Johan
Christian Dohl’s work as he is a landscape painter, which is my favourite
subject for photography. I took advantage of the short break in the weather to
walk out to Vigeland
Park, which has the
world’s largest collection of sculptures by one sculptor. There are around 250
sculptures of people depicting “life”. It was absolutely incredible and
definitely my favourite attraction in Oslo.
I just loved the emotions that were clearly depicted through these relatively
simple statues and the monolith of intertwined human figure is awesome. I came
home to find my room full of Brazilians cooking dinner together. They were a
lovely group and insisted that I join them for dinner (despite my protestations
that I’d already eaten), and a couple of them entertained us with an impromptu
salsa lesson. I ended up heading out to the pub with them around 11:30pm for
one very expensive drink, which was about the extent of our budget!
