Posts to come...

Our next trip we intend to take is to Sardinia.  This will be my first Mediterranean experience, so I hope it goes well.

I've had several questions about my container garden I'm attempting.  Since we rent our property, we can't have a garden like I'm used to...in the yard.  To compromise, I have resorted to using large flower pots with flower potting soil in combination with a few seed starter kits.  It's an ongoing project, but the goal is to see just how productive it can be, and whether we can still grow some of our own fresh produce.  I'm not being ambitious.  I'm going to start with just trying to grow a dinner salad: spinach, endives, and carrots as a year round thing.  For the summer growing season, we're trying tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, and beans. 

I can give pictures and more detail if people would like.  This is becoming my main hobby at home and my goal is to keep it as simply as humanly possible.

Oslo Day 4

Being a Sunday, we were forced to keep things low key...or so we thought.  We decided to go to take one of the mini-cruises.  We forgot to account for the change in transportation pattern, so we ran the last three blocks because we didn't want to miss the departure and be forced to wait another hour and a half.

That's my post-run face.

 

The fortress.

 

City Hall.

The Opera House.

 

 

There were, needless to say, lot of ships at port.  The city recently issued a mandate to most all port-related activity away from the opera house area of town in an effort to improve the costal look and view.  I don't know where it's all going, but thus far, it is certainly no longer by the Opera House.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Don't know many places where everywhere you look you get a postcard shot.

 

We decided we had time to check out the Oslo Maritime Museum, so we did.  Guess what this is?

 Dried fish without their heads!  In coastal Norway up north, they have multi-story drying racks of these that get filled almost daily.  All of these fish are at least 1 1/2 feet long!

 

The museum itself wasn't too bad.  It had a LOT of different modern boat designs and models on display.  They explained how oil platforms were transported and set up on the ocean (yep, they use a BIG boat for that).  They explained how different materials have their own advantages and disadvantages.  Blah, blah, blah.  The COOL part was the pseudo-OMNIMAX theater they had where they gave you a video tour, history, and industry snapshot of Norway's coasts.  That made the wander in worth the trip.  It also made you want to visit the coastal towns.

 

We took the bus back to the main station and got on a subway train that eventually became a regular metro train to Frognerseteren.  This was a Rick Steve's recommended place to eat (one of the few reasonably priced food joints) and was supposed to have a spectacular view.

Sparkly clean, but not a lot of people on this leg of the trip.

 

 

How many faces do you see?

 

 

Finally there!  The food was alright...standard bland Norwegian food.  The place was PACKED!  People were eating outdoors as well as indoors.  The view was pretty cool.

 

 

 

 

On our walk back, we got to see some Olympic Oslo love.  The Olypmic ski jump among other ski events located at this part of Oslo.

 

 

We finally got back and just had to take a picture of the Oslo Tiger.  Apparently, it was put there a few years ago to commemorate the 1000th birthday of Oslo.  The tiger references Oslo's older reputation of being a tiger city, or a wild and crazy city like New York city or something like that.

 

My hand is quite tasty, it would seem.

 

That's all she wrote.  We got to be early because we had to get up at 2:30am to catch a bus in order to catch the 4am bus to the airport so that we could catch our 6am flight.  Yeah, we slept when we got home.

Oslo Day 3

This day we planned on making maximum use of our Oslo passes.  Like the Chicago pass, you get free access to most things in Oslo, free public transportation, and discounts on several other places.  Of course, this is for only a few day stretch.  We opted for the four-day pass, so that we were covered for travel back to the airport and the differential in cost was negligible.

The museums on our hit list were: Viking Ship Museum, the Folk Museum, and the Castle if we had time.  Part of the motivation for this was that it was Saturday, and we figured most things would be closed on Sunday, but we figured we would do the mini-cruise that day.

We took the bus pretty much everywhere.  We got to the Viking Ship museum almost at opening.  I LOVED that museum!  The have three almost completely built Viking ships from 800 AD or so.  They were dug up after having been used as burial sites for 1000 years!  And the wood was all still good!  It was very impressive as you could see how they were built.  They also have LOTS of artifacts from the Viking era.  Incredibly detailed and well engineered works.  Vikings were clearly master carpenters and craftsman.  It made me wish I had Viking blood.

Yep, that's a real ship behind us!

 

 

 

 

 

That's Norwegian pride if I ever saw any!

 

Complete with original star board. (yep, I intended that space there)

 

For those interested in some light reading...

 

 

 

 

If you'd rather go small.

 

 

The only known Viking wagon in existence...

 

This is for those who would rather take a sled.

 

I was trying to give this serpent head a stare-down.  It won.

 

 

Next was the Folk museum.  It had a TON of 1700 and 1800 houses from around the country.  I'll show a few pictures.  It also had a lot of cultural history about Norway.  The Norwegian equivalent of the aboriginals are the Sami.  This was a new piece of knowledge for me.

 

 

I think this mud hut was a little too small for me.

 



Norwegian Hobbits?

 

 

 

Low ceilings with floors several feet off the ground make for warm homes.

 

 

 

 

How do you feel about your house standing on only 4 to 6 tree stumps?

The famed Gol stave church.  It's all wood, and completely lined with fire sprinklers in every nook and cranny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'd like to note that except for the church, these are all farm houses or sometimes caches, all hundreds of years old.  I got a real kick out of the detailed carve work.

 

 

This is a barn.  The right section is an indoor sheep barn.  The farmer was able to live in the lower section of the two story part.  I'm guessing hay and livestock food went into the upper section.

 

From here, we hustled to get to the Fortress/Castle.  Here is the opera house that we passed enroute.

 

Yeah, it was a little colder this day.

 

This is the main courtyard of the castle in Akershus Fortress.  The Fortress has never been taken in its entire existence, so as you can see, many renovations have occurred over time to keep the grounds as modern as was convenient.

 

While the furniture is not necessarily original, the paintings on the walls are.  Some of them date back older than the 1600's.

 

The royal crypt.

 

The fortress church, still used weekly by the soldiers stationed in Oslo.

 

The Royal dining hall, still used for major political functions.

 

The medieval hall.  The stained glass in the window was made by the sculpter Vigeland's brother.  The panels were blown in by a nearby WWII bomb.  The panels that could be salvaged were put back in place.

 

Guess what we saw outside?

Three German warships docked (one not pictured here)!  It looked like civilians were being allowed aboard, so J and I decided to check them out.

 

Here's the third one, which turned out to be a supply ship.  Imagine if this was your view of the city every day!

 

 

And aboard we went!



 

Here you can see all three of them.  The German sailors were quite polite and friendly.

 

Those are some guns...and missiles.

 

And off to the supply ship...

 

 

 

This sailor gave us a tour of the bridge.  Pretty neat!

 

Yeah, it's a big ship.

 

Ooh! Another surprise.  We get off the boats, and what do we see next?

BABY CARS!

 

A whole parking lot of them!  They were are electric cars getting recharged.  I had heard of this concept, but never realized it was actually being put into practice.

And that was the end of our action packed day!  The next day was more scenic.