It was so good - Norwegian Wood

My favorite thing about Europe:

If you bump into an acquaintance Monday morning and say, "hey, man! What did you do this weekend?" they may perfectly well respond with, "oh, nothing special... just went to [insert fabulous country here]."

You: "how was your weekend, Franni?'

Me: "Pretty good... just went to Norway. nbd."

Steven, Emily (herendeen), Caitlin and I decided to leave the Copenhagen shuffle for two nights and see the rest of Scandinavia. Both Steven and Caitlin are 1/4 Norwegian, so they were very interested in 'getting  back to their roots.' Off we went to Oslo.

Now, my family believes in very long car trips. Basically, if there is no ocean, we will drive there. Before 2008, I think I had only been on a plane 4 times. This whole "get to another country in under 2 hours" thing is crazy to me. But the plane ride from Copenhagen to Oslo was only about 55 minutes - I didn't even finish the episode of "Degrassi" I was watching on my iPod!

From my experiences with hostel culture, they are very very rarely in nice neighborhoods. For instance, when asking for directions at 'Le Village' in Paris, I received the following information: "take a right, and you will be at Sacre Coeur. Take a left... actually, just don't go left."

Well, our hostel was in Oslo's red light district. Right smack in the middle of it. (You didn't know Oslo had a red light district? Neither did we.) The place was nice, though; we had a private room with ridiculously comfy beds and a TV/DVD player. But when we tried to go out and explore on Friday night, all we found was hookers and falafel. We only tried the latter, but it was delicious.

The next morning, after dragging Steven out of bed (which took more effort than you would imagine), we went to the museums at Bygdøy. The Vikingskiphuset (Viking Ship House) was really baller. They had a fully-intact Viking boat, along with 2 burial boats and lots of crazy Viking paraphernalia, such as axes, sleds, statues and the like. There were even scraps of textiles from the Eastern villages that they plundered. It was amazing how much remained after over 1000 years.

Viking museum

Ship
Tools
Leather boots. How are they still intact???

After that, I dragged the group to the Norse Folkmuseum, which was described in the guidebooks as "a living textbook of Norwegian culture." I cajoled my friends into "at least an hour" there. 3 hours later, we decided we had finally seen it all.

The Folkmuseum is like a Scandinavian Old Sturbridge Village, with replicas of old farmhouses and people in costume doing old fashioned-y things, like milking cows or brewing beer. Since it is so close to Christmas, the place was all decked out with vendors and music and dancing Santas. It had snowed the night before and the entire place was a true Winter Wonderland. Take a look:

We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the Oslo theater district, taking lots of pictures. It was pitch black outside, and we were hungry and found a cute Indian restaurant awkwardly located on top of a Burger King. It seemed kind of dead for dinnertime. Then we looked at the clock. It was 4PM. Oh right, we are in the friggin' Arctic. No matter, afternoon snack/dinner was really tasty and we wound up staying inside the toasty restaurant for several hours.

Forgot to mention that:

Norway is COLD. Like, colder than Boston. By a lot. Its not a windy, blustery cold; its a bone-chilling thing. Under the scarves and the turtlenecks and the leggins and the jeans and fur-lined boots and hat and mittens cold. I don't know how that works, but it does. Brr. Denmark felt tropical compared to that nonsense.

But the landscape is gorgeous. We kept finding children's books to compare it to. "Noway looks like Narnia!" "These woods are like the Secret Garden!" Personally, it reminded me of what I imaged the universe in "The Golden Compass" looked like when I read those books as a kid. Cigaze. right? Wasn't that the name? With all the snow and polar bears...

Sunday we went to the Gustave Vigeland sculpture park to frolic and giggle at the overly-sexual nature of the sculptures. Then we got hot chocolate. Next the National Museum, which has an amazing Edvard Munch collection and saw his most famous work, "The Scream." I liked the Munch-s more than I had anticipated, especially his self-portrait. Then we got hot chocolate. Afterwards, we visited the Akershus fortress and got a spectacular panorama of Oslo. Then - guess what? - we got hot chocolate. (What did you expect? It was balls cold!) We did a little shopping, had supper, and caught our flight back to Copenhagen.

Vigeland
See what I mean? That shit was weird!
...Weird, but beautiful...

Busy weekend. I would like to go back to Norway in the summertime, particularly the fjords up in Bergen. That would be beautiful. But I'm really glad we saw it around Christmas. This was exactly what I had hoped Scandinavia would look and feel like!