Norway by the Numbers

I thought I would conclude this series of posts on traveling in Norway with the notes I took on my phone as the trip wrapped up.

4 cars: 2 cars to airport, 2 cars home
5 planes: 2 planes from Pittsburgh to Oslo, 1 from Bergen, 2 home
6 trains: 1 train from Oslo Airport, 1 to Myrdal, 1 to Flåm, 1 to Bergen, 1 train from Oslo Airport to town, 1 train to hostel, and 1 back to Oslo airport
3 trams: 1 to Geilo (odd for a long-distance route), 1 to university, 1 to museum
5 subways (T-Metro): 1 to university, 1 to dinner, 1 to hostel, 1 to university, 1 toward airport
1 ferry boat
2 buses at Reykjavik Airport, 1 bus to Voss, 1 to dinner and 1 to drinks in Oslo
1 gondola
1 funicular
1 taxi to the Bergen Airport after we missed the bus
2 walks, 1 hike
Countless waterfalls for me, +1 for E.R. (took a walk while I read a book by the lake in Voss)
4 museums (3 art, 1 history)
2 saunas
3 cups hot chocolate
2 scoops gelato, 1 scoop ice cream
1 huldra
0 trolls
1 pat down in the Reykjavik airport

Lost items: 1 sleep mask (E.R.'s)
Left items: 1 blouse (in the Pittsburgh Airport because the armpit seam had torn), 1 umbrella (in Oslo when it was needed in Bergen), 1 large bottle of shampoo (in Bergen Airport because it couldn't come through airport security), 1 pair of khakis (at my Oslo AirBnB because they were at the end of their life)

Gained items: second-hand Norwegian sweater, new Norwegian gloves, 3 kinds of dried sausage (whale, reindeer, moose), 2 jars cloudberry jam, 2 magnets, 1 postcard

Useful purchases: waterproof jacket to go with the waterproof ski pants I already owned, fast track at the Bergen Airport to get through security

Tried for the first time: Norwegian brown cheese, Bergen soup, reindeer and whale meat, whale/reindeer/moose sausage, cloudberry jam, lefsa, Norwegian pancakes, Dubai chocolate, Tupla chocolate bar (Finnish), ayran (Turkish milk drink), honey mead, and pretty much all of this Iceland Air lunch box

Thursday in Oslo, Part II: City of History

 After I looked through the Vigeland statuary, I treated myself to some local history, since the Bymuseet [City Museum] is open late on Thursdays.

Getting lost on my way to the Oslo Museum, I found a bridge over the lake covered in padlocks. Couples do this on Pittsburgh bridges as well.

Because I was trying to avoid a handful of larger groups touring in Norwegian, I chose to walk the museum backwards, starting with an architectural history of the city of Oslo (the tryptic below depicts the last of many catastrophic medieval or early modern fires, in 1624), then Norwegian culture in the roaring 1920s, historical kitchens (naturally my favorite!), followed by an exhibit on life during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s, and finally a history of the people who have lived in Oslo through the centuries, going back to the 1000s.

Oslo was large enough to be considered a city from ~1000 CE and peaked ~1300 when Hakon Magnusson was the first king crowned there.* However, for most of the medieval and early modern period, when Norway was part of Denmark, Bergen and Trondheim were bigger. (*His son became king of Norway-Sweden, which were together until 1905).

After the 1624 fire, the city was relocated across the river Alna and rebuilt around the Akershus fortress.

My, how it has grown! When Norway achieved independence, Oslo was named its capital in 1814.

Did you know Oslo was called Christiania from 1625-1876, and Kristiania from 1877-1925?

Almost forgot they had a theater exhibit as well with newer (above) and older (below) imaginings of Renaissance clothing.

Singer Anne Brown (1912-2009) grew up in Baltimore, MD, and moved to Oslo in 1947. She married ski jumper and journalist Thorleif Schjeldrup.

This "remembrance room" has furniture and objects from the 1950s-1908s to help people with dementia.

At the end the exhibits pay more attention to current demographics. Like post-war Germany, Norway solved its labor shortage in the 1960s with guest workers from Pakistan, Morocco, India, and Turkey. Immigration was halted in 1975 except for family reunification, refugees, and asylum seekers. In 2014, 31% of Oslo's inhabitants were from outside Norway (9.6% from Europe and 21.5% from non-European countries). The next day, I visited a clinic that serves undocumented individuals who have fallen through the cracks in the system.

This was the view from my window as I went to bed at 10 o'clock at night! The black-out curtains came in handy.

Friday: more art in Oslo

Thursday in Oslo, Part I: Garden Art

 

Thursday morning I landed at the Oslo Airport, took the train to the main station, changed to a tram out to the university, and met with a colleague in history of medicine. He let me have lunch with his department, I admired his new book on the history of tuberculosis in Tanzania that had just arrived, and then I set out for my Air BnB in the Majorstuen neighborhood. For the 24 hours until my conference started, I had rented a bedroom with a full bathroom in an apartment in an old building from the turn of the previous century, with use of the kitchen and living room. She even let me wash a load of laundry.

My goal for the afternoon was the Vigelandsparken at the center of Frognerparken. This is a large, open-air sculpture park with more than 200 pieces set among flower beds and water features. It was the brainchild and life's work of Gustav Vigeland (1869-1943), who spent four decades creating a variety of mostly life-sized, unclothed human forms alone and in family groups. After entering through a semi-circular gate, you walk down a long, tree-lined alley to the bridge lined with 58 bronze figures.

Beyond the bridge is a rose garden.

Next comes the Fountain with its life cycle.

More gardens before the very phallic "Monolith" at the top of the hill.

Around its column of striving bodies are granite couples and families.

Beyond another set of gardens and a grassy slope is "The Wheel of Life."

Above: peeking over the last wall, a fountain greets park-goers from the north.

Below: looking south back down the slope toward the monolith.

Next: Thursday in Oslo, part II

Wednesday: destination Bergen, Norway

Moosing around in Bergen's Hanseatic old town

Wednesday we ate breakfast in our little motel in Voss, packed and cleaned up, and walked across the street to the train station at the back of the hotel to catch the train, which was waiting for us. (No meddling tourists this time!)

We had a short, pleasant trip into Bergen through a moody landscape.

Bergen (pop. ~300,000) is reportedly the rainiest city in Europe. We had come prepared with rain gear, but that's no good for getting buena vistas if the clouds cover everything on the heights.

While the weather was iffy, we scoped out a couple of used-clothing stores for authentic Norwegian sweaters. Below is the famous blue stone on Kong Olav Vs Plass by Hotel Norg that Bergens use as a meeting place (it's actually a sculpture covered in Brazilian stone by artist Asbjørn Andresen). 

Beginning the 1300s, Bergen was a Hanseatic city, trading dried cod with the rest of Europe. It was larger than the capital of Oslo for centuries. We wandered through the old town, with its preserved and/or reconstructed buildings and narrow wooden passageways, seeking shelter from the rain.

We walked to one end of the harbor, found a bathroom (in a submarine museum), and then made our way back for lunch. Here is the glass-enclosed, all-weather New Fish Market, but our destination was the open-air Old Fish Market nearby.

RE had whale, and I tried the iconic "Bergen fish soup" with a fish cake. We also picked up cloudberry jam (watch out: can be mistaken for explosives by airport security!, said the handsome salesman), and I invested in a package of dried whale, elk, and reindeer sausages that made its appearance later on a family vacation.

When the weather improved slightly (look: blue skies!) we hurried to join the queue at the Fløibanen funicular up the mountain. It takes 5-8 minutes to traverse 320m above sea level.

Bergen Cathedral with Ulriken cable cars; the funicular runs on tracks.

At the top we admired the view, stopped to pet the goats, and took a short, level walk to a pond. On the way back, we detoured through the Trollskogen, a garden of carved wooden gnomes.

I spy, with my little eye, the fountain in a park from an earlier photo!

Walking back to the hotel, we stopped into a free contemporary art exhibition at the Bergen Kunsthall that had a very large textile installation, as well as some sound pieces with headphones, and a series of blue on white prints about the interconnectedness of everything that photographed poorly behind the protective plastic but that I think would have made interesting teaching illustrations.

RE took a break for the rest of the afternoon while I took myself to the West Norway Museum of Decorative Art, also referred to as KODE 1 (Permanenten), a more traditional art museum. I was looking for a doll exhibit that a free audioguide to the city had mentioned but was willing to see whatever arts and design objects they had.

First I learned about Harriet Backer (1845-1932), a masterful painter of traditional Norwegian scenes known for her treatment of light. Her sister's music is also featured in "Every Atom is Color."

When I mentioned the dolls, the docents pointed me to another exhibit called Normands Dalen, which told a fascinating history about how empires--such as Denmark-Norway in the 1700s--collect knowledge and turn it into material artefacts to solidify their power.

Postman Jørgen C. Garnaas (1723-1798) had the habit of making these little wooden dolls of different people in traditional dress from the various places he visited on his routes.

They attracted the attention of someone in the government, who ordered more durable / portable versions to be made out of ivory. Below is a sea captain looking through his telescope.

Those were turned into porcelain figurines that were painted and sold to raise money. 

(The colors and patterns are not authentic.)

And THOSE were made into life-sized sandstone statues by King Frederik V and his wife Queen Juliana for a garden at Fredensborg Palace in Copenhagen that was supposed to showcase all of the different peoples and lands over which they ruled!

After all that walking and looking it was time for a short rest before we headed out to dinner. We had decided on the basement Keller (Frk. Schmidt) of a hip new restaurant (Pingvinen) that promised to serve the same food but with fewer hassles getting a table. (It was still a hassle to have a screaming baby next to us.) I had mead and reindeer "casserole" (really a stew).

Unbelievably, the day was not over yet, because we still had an evening reservation for a wood-fired sauna right on Bergen's harbor! Hoping the water would be a little cleaner, we took public transit out of the city center to Heit Måseskjæret. (The current homepage image is of the sauna we visited.) We joined an open sauna with an athletic couple from Texas, two young women from the UK in town for a wedding, and four Norwegian men who spoke enough English to keep the conversation going. (Dress code: bathing suit.) We got into a routine of getting hot and steamy inside, then going outside to jump into the water. Somehow, every time I was surprised at just how frigid it was! Then we rinsed the salt off in an outdoor shower and went inside again. For obvious reasons we don't have many photos of the experience, but it was awesome to look out over the harbor and watch the late-setting sun. It sprinkled a little and even hailed on us at one point. The one bottleneck at the end of the time slot in a co-ed group was drying off and changing out of our wet suits with only a single curtained stall. Nevertheless, we managed, caught the tram, and had lovely showers back at the hotel before falling into bed.

The next morning's meal was almost as important, as RE and I are both breakfast gourmands, and the Scandic Byparken in Bergen is famous for its spread. It did not disappoint. Below is just one station of the many available; the red casserole pot has a traditional egg dish in it.

YUM! Then it was off to the airport. Unfortunately, we missed the little sign and then the airport flyer bus and had to splurge on a taxi to get us to the airport in time. She flew back to Germany, and I returned to Oslo, where I continued my touristing.

Thursday: a park and a museum in Oslo