First, I want to share (partager, if you will) some facts about Norway that I have researched upon my return that I think will put some aspects of my visit in perspective. The cost of life in Norway is 30% more expensive than in the US, and 25% more expensive than in the UK. The minimum wage per hour is the equivalent of $18, the unemployment rate is 1.7%, and 99% of the population can read and write (as President Bartlet would say, either that or they could also just be really bad at math).
Now, my personal experience there. I left the evening of Friday the fourth with my friend Alison from l’Institut. It took us several vehicles to finally arrive in Oslo (Bus for me into centre ville, train that we very nearly missed because it was at a hidden platform to Marseille, bus to the Marseille airport, plane to Norway, bus to central Oslo). I was very excited to see snow on the bus ride to central Oslo, since I hadn’t seen any since I left the US in January—very odd, considering I usually see several feet appear from January to April. In Oslo, we were staying at a place I found advertised on a B&B website, but it was essentially just a room in his apartment that a guy (Terje) was renting out. It has a fantastic location and fantastic view of Oslo, plus he lets you share the kitchen, which is an excellent way to save money. We were a little worried about whether or not he’d try to kill us, but he showed up at the bus terminal to direct us to his house and was in general quite nice. The best part was that since we were splitting the 300 krone cost between us, it came out to approximately $28 a night. Beautiful.
Saturday morning we got up pretty early, giving ourselves plenty of time to get lost as we attempted to find our plans for the day (we’d blocked out almost our entire week). Our first search was for breakfast, and we decided to stop at the first familiar place we saw: a 7-11! We thought it was hysterical that they existed in Norway. We bought the cheapest muffins they had, which were 18 krone, or about $4. They were disgusting. I couldn’t finish mine, it was so gross. Also, since when does anything at 7-11 cost $4? Norway is expensive. This is going to be a recurring theme in my analysis. We then set off for Karl Johannsgate, the main street in Oslo. We were hoping to find the Storting, the house of Parliament there, with plenty of time to make their 9:30am tour, and we actually arrived early after getting sworn at in English by a creepy guy on a creepy street. Since we had a half hour to kill, we went down to see the Palace, which is where their king lives. Their king is only the third king that Norway has had since becoming an independent country in 1905, and he was actually elected to power. However, his number is VII or something even though there have only been three kings (whose rule was split up by the Nazi invasion) because the kings took the names of Norwegian kings from the Middle Ages (This is your warning: the following paragraph is going to consist of essentially a Norwegian history lesson).
After watching the guards marching around to keep out any invading tribes, he headed back to the Storting, where there was a free tour of the building by an art historian. She was able to give a lot of really interesting information about the history of the portraits, murals, mosaics, and architecture of the building, as well as a brief history of Norway which I will now share with you just to show how much they educated me in the span of 40 minutes. After the Middle Ages, Norway spent almost 1000 years under the power of other countries. They were in a variety of unions against their will, the most important of which was a union with Denmark. This union greatly shaped the dominant Norwegian language so that it is in fact written exactly the same as Danish, with just a different pronunciation. During the Napoleonic wars, Denmark sided with Napoleon, and as he lost, Denmark was forced to give up Norway to Sweden (who was on the winning side) in 1815. Though Norway became its own country in 1905, it was this change in 1815 that really changed the way of life for Norwegians, who became almost autonomous. The union with Sweden was much friendlier, and it was finally dissolved formally in 1905, though Sweden hadn’t had any real power over Norway for some time. One important means of establishing their own independent rule was the declaring of Nynorsk as the second official language of the country (the first is Bykmal or something like that). Nynorsk is a combination of various regional dialects, but it is also a language that wasn’t shaped so much by Danish, so that was an important step for Norway. Anyway, the tour of the Storting was fascinating, and I really enjoyed seeing the inside of it. And yay for it being free!
After our trip to learn about the history of Norwegian politics, we started off for the Henrik Ibsen Museum. Ibsen was a Norwegian who wrote, among other things, a play called The Doll’s House which I read in AP Lit and absolutely adored. Unfortunately, it turns out that our tour guides had lied to us and the museum was not in fact open at 11, and it rather opened at 12. Thus, we headed off in search of lunch to occupy ourselves for an hour in the area. Finding lunch proved to be difficult, and we finally found a place that resembled a grocery store (we were in the downtown area, so they were sparse), where we bought ourselves some sort of potato tortillas (called lomper), a cheese spread to have with that, and some grapes. This came out to 67 krone total, which is about $13. Ouch. It was better tasting than breakfast, though, so that was something. After we finished eating, we went back to the Ibsen Museum, which was a really good time. In honor of his 100th birthday, they refurbished the apartment where he used to live to the way it was when he was there. That was interesting to see, though also rather morbid—“This is the bed where he died! This is the chair where Susannah died!” I much preferred the rest of the exhibition, which was a fantastic analysis of his works. It really was almost at the level of literary criticism, analyzing the societal trends and reactions to his work. My English-majory self very much appreciated that.
Upon leaving the Ibsen Museum, we set off for Akershus fortress, a fortress and castle in Oslo that dates back to the 1300s, when it was strategically placed on a hill facing the Oslo harbor. They have lots of guards there that march around dramatically, which is pretty entertaining, and it’s really neat to walk around and see all the old walls and buildings. They offer tours of the castle on Thursdays, but alas, we were not going to be there on a Thursday, so that was out of the question (plus you had to pay for those). It was really nice out, probably about 55, and still sunny. Because the fortress was on top of a hill, you got a gorgeous view of the Oslofjord, which is not a real fjord (according to Alison and I). It’s just where water meets land. The real fjords are out west. After walking around there for a while, we started walking back to our apartment for the night. We were on the lookout for food that we could prepare, so we bought some spaghetti, tomatoes, zucchini, and apples to eat for dinner. We stopped at another grocery store on our way back since we hadn’t found anything we could eat at breakfast the next morning at the first store (which was more like a market). There we stumbled across a 1 kilogram bag of granola for only 12 krone (a bit over $2), which was an excellent find, and we also (after lots of staring blankly at the windows of the refrigerated section) found skim milk, or rather, ‘skummelk’. I was excited to see that it was both refrigerated and skim, and eagerly awaited breakfast the next morning. Dinner was nothing special as I’m sure you can tell from the products we bought, but it was at least food.
Breakfast the next morning revealed that Norwegian skim milk, while a significant improvement over the French UHT stuff, is not quite on the level of American/British skim milk. Our second day in Oslo was significantly less productive than the first: we simply went to the National Gallery, an art museum. However, this is a pretty darn impressive art museum. It has Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”, which I was excited to see since I’d recreated it in art class as a child. It also had a lot of his other works, including two pictures painted eight years apart of his sister Inger. I had a lot of fun comparing those, given that I have an obsession with all things time-related, largely due to another obsession with post-colonialist literature. They had a fantastic display of Norwegian landscapes that were absolutely incredible. I adore landscapes (they were the only things I was ever able to draw well), and I adore anything with mountains in it, so I really liked those. They also had a random room of impressionist paintings, which took me by surprise. They had some early Paul Gauguin’s and Degas’, as well as a few very cool Picassos. The first floor of the museum was a little harder to get into since it was entirely in Norwegian (it was a lot more landscapes), but that was also interesting.
We had hoped to go to the Vigesland Sculpture Park afterwards, but it was pouring, so instead we stopped in the National Gallery of Design for about an hour until it closed, hoping that the rain would let up. It didn’t. We decided to brave the Sculpture Park anyway, but we only made it about a half a block before turning around. We decided to just return to the apartment for the rest of the day. It was after 4pm, we still hadn’t eaten lunch, and we were far too exhausted to deal with the pouring rain. We still managed to profiter by stopping at a café on our way out and buying three Norwegian pastries called boller for 10 krone (an excellent deal). Boller are hard to describe—they aren’t all that sweet, and they’re very dense. They’re spiced with either cinnamon or cardamom, and you can get them plain, with chocolate chips, and with raisins. Our favorites were the plain or with chocolate chips, and our goal for the trip quickly became trying to eat them as often as possible. We had trouble finding an open grocery store (we needed sauce) given that it was a Sunday, and in general in Europe, nothing is open on Sunday. When I get back to the US I’m going to go grocery shopping at 11pm on a Sunday night just because I can! However, we did eventually find it, and we spent our evening watching Norwegian television.
Since we’d skipped the Vigesland Sculpture Park on Sunday, we added it to our long agenda for Monday and made it our first stop. Our two days in Oslo had taught us that the rain tends to get heavier as the day goes on, so we set off pretty early. We also walked over there, despite the fact that it was quite a hike. I really, really liked the park. The sculptures were really, really neat, and the design was incredible. I would love to live near there and be able to go running in a place like that regularly, but alas, that is not the case. We spent a lot of time there walking around and looking at all the sculptures, and I think we easily could’ve spent a whole day there were it not for the fact that we had lots of other places to get to.
There exists in Oslo a separate peninsula called Bygdøy where they have a lot of the museums that attract tourists. Normal people take a ferry that costs 30 krone each way to get over there from Central Oslo. Alison and I are not normal people. We walked. It was a fairly long walk, but I liked getting to see more of residential Oslo, and as it wasn’t yet raining too hard, we didn’t mind the walk. Our first stop over in that area was the Viking Ship Museum, where they house three ships that were buried with Vikings from the 800s to the 1200s. Those were really cool to see, and I was impressed with how well the carvings on the side of them had held up. They also had sleds, statues, cloth, and other artifacts that were buried with the ships on display. Our next stop, keeping with the ship theme, was the Fram Museum, a large part of which is taken up by the Fram, a very large ship that has been the furthest south and the furthest north of any ship in the world. They had a lot of history of both Arctic and Antarctic explorations there, which was really interesting to read about. Outside the museum they also have a ship called Gjøa, which was the first ship to successfully navigate the Northwest Passage (when captained by Amundsen). After visiting ships that had been to cold places, we moved on to the Kon-Tiki museum, which contains one ship made out of papyrus (Ra II) and a raft called the Kon-Tiki. These ships had both made explorations to warm places under the control of some guy named Thor Ican’trememberhislastname. This guy spent about a year of his life on a Pacific island with his wife, and the indigenous people there told him their ancestors had come from the East, not the West, as most archeologists always suspected. Since the archeologists told Thor this was impossible given the technology the people had at the time, Thor decided to prove him wrong by building a raft using that technology and sailing across the Pacific! A very straight-forward way of proving other people wrong. That was the Kon-Tiki. The Ra II came about when he wanted to prove that boats made out of papyrus would not, in fact, sink after 14 days of sailing, and thus the Egyptians could’ve traveled significantly further than archeologists believed. However, it is worth noting that the Ra II is the second because Ra I was dashed to pieces against some rocks. Thus, while papyrus will not necessarily sink after 14 days, it still does not make the sturdiest of boat materials.
Having departed from all of our boat-learning experiences, we decided to take the boat back to central Oslo instead of walking as it was pouring by that point. We then had some errands to run: bought some food for dinner, as well as buying as much of the food as we could manage for our trip to Flåm. We unfortunately did not have access to a kitchen there, so we were trying to save as much money as possible by living off of grocery store food. We thus bought a lot of bread, some nutella, more granola, some bananas, and some apples. We also bought tuna, but that turned out to be a terrible bust. More on that later.
Tuesday we got up early to catch our train to Flåm, which we did successfully. It was a very touristy route, largely because so many tourists go to Bergen, but also because there’s a tour called “Norway in a Nutshell” where you take a train to Myrdal, then a train to Flåm, then a boat to Bergen, then a bus back to Oslo from there. We were only going part of that route (to Flåm, only not with the tour), but we were accompanied by many people going the whole way, some of whom were sitting just across from us on the train. Within about five minutes of sitting down, there was a guy who was eagerly talking about his life for the whole world to hear, and I learned that he was not only an American, but from a Chicago suburb. He started ranting about our governor, which had me cracking up since our governor is apparently doing such a bad job that I can be on a train in Norway and hear people complaining about him. Unfortunately for me, I’d made the mistake of wearing a Chicago Skates shirt that day, and sure enough, the guy noticed and started talking to me. Figures. If I’d been wearing my Michigan Figure Skating shirt, he would’ve been a UofM alum. The countryside was absolutely gorgeous, and I loved getting to see so much of it. A lot of the train ride took us up into the mountains, and the highest point (Finse) is 1,222 meters above sea level. We changed trains before taking the Flåmsbana railroad to Flåm, which was a beautiful journey in the Flåmsdalen Valley.
We found our pension without too many problems, but unfortunately we had a hard time finding out about hikes in the region, given that the tourist office was closed. As nice as it was to be in Norway during the off season, with fewer tourists and a lot more peace, there was the slight problem of everything under the sun being closed constantly. Typical hours for anything we wanted to see were between 11am and 4pm, sometimes shorter. Grocery stores are typically closed by 5 or 6, and some banks are only open 3 days a week. Ai ya! The woman at the pension gave us a good idea for a two hour hike that we decided to do for that afternoon. There’s a bike path that goes along the fjord that you follow for 4 kilometers, and then you climb up to this old farm called Ottesen, which has been a farm for over a thousand years. From what we saw, it’s quite the tourist attraction in the summer, but given that we were there in winter, there were only some newly-sheared sheep to greet us. It had a fantastic view of the valley, and we enjoyed staying there for a bit. We then went back for our gourmet dinner of tuna and pita. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the tuna. It was gelled. Who gels tuna? To what purpose? YUCK. We were not fans. I ended up eating an apple, a banana, and nutella after choking down some tuna. Alison and I found it a bit ironic that we got fantastic fruit the whole time we were in Norway, but the one time we bought fish, it was a disaster.
Wednesday was long. We got up early to walk to the next town over, Aurland, where supposedly there was another tourist office. We followed the bike path for the first 4 kilometers, and there was another path for the last 1 kilometer, we had to walk on the shoulder of the road, which was quite nerve-wracking. We were quite pleased that we didn’t get hit, as that would’ve been a downer for the trip. There is a ferry that goes between the two towns, but it only goes twice a day, and it’s 310 krone round trip ($60). Thus, as was the theme for the trip, we walked! It was a gorgeous walk, and it turned out to be quite successful, since the tourist office in Aurland was open, and the lady there gave us lots of information about hikes. We decided to set off on a 6-hour one, which was described as “fairly easy, some hills”. Just for the record, if you’re ever translating Norwegian into Midwestern English, “some hills” translates as “scaling the side of a mountain”. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad, but we were definitely going straight uphill for the first 4 hours, and that, for me, is not what “some hills” signifies. Nevertheless, we were both in pretty good shape, so we were able to enjoy it. The path went along a waterfall, so there was a lot of stream-hopping going on (Don’t worry, Anna, Nicole, and Gayle, I’m sure there’ll be streams left for us to hop when I return). We stopped for lunch around 1 o’clock, then kept ascending. We were very excited at the first site of snow we had, but as we kept getting further and further up, more and more of it appeared, and it was definitely not a novelty by the end of the hike. The path linked up with a road for a little while, which we followed. Eventually the lady had told us that it would split off again to another path that goes up to Mount Prest, but she warned us that there might still be snow there. Ha. We actually paused just at that point to take a picture of me with snow—snow that went over my head. Ergo, no summiting Mount Prest, but we kept following the road up through some cute towns. I told Alison I wanted to interview the people and write a book about them, so “if they could appear now speaking fluent English and dressed in traditional Norwegian regalia, that would be fantastic.” Unfortunately, it was not to be—I think that the towns might’ve been mostly for summer houses, which is disappointing. We finally turned around at 3 and headed straight down the road back to Aurland instead of retracing our steps, which allowed us to get a really good view of the fjord. We stopped and bought ourselves yogurt to have for dinner (yay! Food that had been refrigerated!), then walked another 8 kilometers back to Flåm. It’s worth noting that the 16 kilometers just from Flåm to Aurland comes out to just under ten miles, and that was only about 3 hours of our ten hour day. I have no idea what we walked the rest of the time, but I think it’s safe to say we got in over 20 miles that day. Exhausting. We slept ten hours that night.
Thursday we decided to hike back into the Flåmsdalen Valley instead of into the fjord, which turned out to be a really nice hike, as well. We walked through some really cute little towns, saw some adorable Norwegian preschoolers, and then found the path for the hike. This was once again all uphill, but it was along a dirt road, as opposed to a very overgrown path, so it was a little easier. However, we once more ran into the problem of snow. They kept the snow plowed up to a certain point, but after going for about three hours, we hit solid snow on the path. We kept walking on it for a while, but it was pretty steep and we only had gym shoes on, so we were not well equipped for climbing it. We paused for a bit to admire the view before beginning our descent—on our way down, we saw a woman doing the same path we’d come up on, only she had cross country skis. I told Alison that if we’d had skis instead of gym shoes, we definitely could’ve kept going. Once we got back down to sea level, we followed the river further back into the valley for about an hour and a half, just taking in some more beautiful sights. We returned that evening after only 8 hours of hiking (not much compared to the day before), and we ate ramen for dinner. It was actually really exciting to have warm food after eating so much bread. Slept another ten hours Thursday night.
We didn’t have to leave Flåm until 5pm on Friday, so we set out hiking again that morning. One of the suggested paths took us up to Ottesen Farm again, and then went from there to Aurland. We decided to do that hike and then pair it with a short two-hour hike that started and ended in Aurland. Unfortunately, our plans were foiled when the path from Ottesen Farm turned out to be not one path, but rather a good dozen that intersected and veered off regularly. Apparently at one of the many intersections, we took the wrong path, and our path eventually faded into nothingness. We were never lost, since we could always hear the road we were walking parallel to, but we definitely did not know where to descend. We ended up forging our own path down a very steep slope, essentially skiing/sledding, minus the ski, the sleds, and with moss replacing the snow. It was insanity. We finally made it down to the road to discover that we hadn’t even made it the 4 kilometers from Ottesen to Aurland—we still had another kilometer to go, and we’d been hiking for almost three hours (it was supposed to be a 1.5 hour hike). Thus, we decided we’d have to cancel the second hike, and instead we ate lunch in Aurland, bought more yogurt that we could eat for dinner, and then walked back to Flåm on the side of the road again since we were not feeling up to another wilderness adventure. In total, only 5 hours of hiking on Friday, so that was a very light day. We spent our time in Flåm browsing through the gift shops that are open two whole hours a day, which were ridiculously out of our price range—I thought it might be nice to bring a Norway deck of cards home. Ha. It was the equivalent of $12. Love Nerts though I do, no deck of cards is worth that much. We also browsed through the Flåm grocery store (we’d been frequenting the Aurland store) and found it entertaining, though inferior to Aurland’s stores. We caught our trains back to Oslo okay, did not meet anyone complaining about either of our governor’s on the ride home, and found our hostel quite quickly. We crashed as soon as we got there—we’d been going to sleep around 9:30 in Flåm, and given that it was 11:30 when we got into Oslo, it was way past our bedtime.
Our last day in Oslo it was alternating between snow and rain. Not super fantastic weather. We went to City Hall in the morning, which is where they give out the Nobel Prizes. They have some fantastic murals on all the walls that I really liked seeing. The murals were all very touched by the WWII experience in Norway, since the contest to paint the murals was initiated in 1936, then canceled when the Nazis took power and imprisoned many of the top artists in the country. It wasn’t until after the end of WWII that the decoration of the city hall was able to continue as planned. After going outside and discovering that no, the rain had not stopped, and yes, it was definitely snow by this point, we walked over to the Modern Art museum. I didn’t like the museum as much as the National Gallery, but they did have some really interesting things there. However, our general conclusion was that modern art was exhausting, and we were wiped out after our trip there. We left there to get our stuff together to leave, which was insanity in and of itself, but we made it out of there.
So that was Norway! Last week was a bit crazy with all the papers, but thankfully that has ended. This weekend we went on an excursion to Carpentras where we got to see an artisan candy producer make berlingots, which was pretty cool. We also went to a wine tasting, and I tried a specialty wine called Muscat that was de-licious. It was a bit pricey, so I didn’t buy any, but if you find yourself in Provence any time, you should definitely try this. Saturday evening one of the girls from school threw a party in her hosts’ theater, which was fun. There were essentially two groups: one group smoking and drinking, and one group drinking a little and mostly just dancing around to the Frank Sinatra music. I was in the second group—we had an excellent time.
Today (Sunday) I went on a picnic with some friends at Jardin de Doms, a garden that has a gorgeous view of the region. We walked around there for a bit after eating, then split up when rain started to threaten. I have to walk in and out of the city center on Sundays or if it’s after 7:30pm, which is a pain, and I definitely got caught in the rain during my 40-minute walk back home. It is still raining as I write this, but I’m really hoping the rain chills out, because a bunch of people are getting together to play cards and make crepes tonight, and it would be so much easier to walk there as opposed to taking a taxi there and back. I miss having public transportation 24/7. No Euchre players (sadly), but supposedly everyone is a really big fan of a game called Jungle Speed, which is apparently in the Spoons family of card games. I’m hoping that it’s something like Stresser, but we will see.
No big plans for the following week. Some friends and I are hoping to climb Mount Ventoux, the largest mountain in the region next weekend, but we have to find someone to drive us to the base of the mountain since there aren’t any buses that go there. It’s the last week of classes, which is good, because I’m sick of pretty much every class I’m in, but it’s also sad because I don’t feel like going home. Finals are the week after next—I’m not too worried about them. After that, my mom and grandma are flying into Barcelona, and I’m taking a bus over there to meet up with them. We’ll work our way back to Avignon, and then I have approximately a day and a half to myself the 11th and 12th of May before I leave to get back to the States. *sniff* I don't want to go back to the real world!
