2009 - Scandinavia - Day 5 - Oslo, Norway

We started our day with a city tour of Oslo on the bus with a local guide. Our first stop was at the new opera house built in 2008. It was an interesting building, built right in the harbor. It reminded me of an iceberg, in fact I think most of the building is underwater. What was cool about it is that we were able to walk all over the roof of it and get nice views of the city. We then went to a somewhat new city park. It was really nice, you can tell a lot of thought and money was put into it. There were so many nude statues, all along the walkways, that weren’t very pretty to say the least, they were actually rather disturbing, and I tried not to look at them. They were not beautiful like other statues I have seen in Italy and Greece, where the human body is made to look beautiful. These were plain and rather fat and ugly. The center column looked like a pile of dead naked bodies to me---ick! I did enjoy the flowers and the roses, and there was a gorgeous fountain and ponds. The layout of the park was beautiful. Then we went to an outdoor folk museum. It was like a little Norwegian village and what the homes and buildings were like a few hundred years ago. In fact, they were all authentic buildings that had been restored and brought to this museum. The neatest building was the Old Stave Church, built in the 1200’s and decorated in the Viking style. At first it didn’t look like it belonged here in Norway, it looked Asian to me, something I would see in China. But it made sense when she said it was Viking. There were old paintings, or actually, you could still see the painting on the walls of the last supper. It was really dark inside and everything was faded. All the farmhouses and guest houses were really cool, with the turf roofs and tiny doorways and beds. People must have been smaller back then. We saw some local people dress up in the traditional clothing and play the violin and dance for us. Our next stop was the Viking museum. In it were housed 3 Viking ships that were excavated, dating back to the 800-900’s. The best preserved and fanciest of the 3 was found buried, it was a funeral ship with 2 royal women inside with their treasures and clothing and even snow sleds. There was also a little wagon with real cats found inside, so they believe one of the women was also a priestess, because the cats represented the fertility god. Wow they were beautiful carvings on the ship and sleds and wagon. They only used knives back then for their carvings. Then we drove into Sweden. We stopped at the border so some of our group could get tax back on purchases and use the restroom. I was able to get a picture of the sign showing we were crossing into Sweden, yay! The total trip was around 4 hours. Along the way, Jim told us about the death of his 30 year old daughter, Nicole this past spring, and Mike talked to us about Norwegian mythology. We got to our hotel in Karlstad around 5:30 pm. It was pouring rain though, so we didn’t wander the city as I would have liked. I’m hoping we will have time for that tomorrow. We went to the restaurant in the hotel, along with almost everyone else from our group, so it took quite awhile to get our food. I just got a club sandwich, and mom had some potato with crawfish gravy. It feels so great to be here in Sweden. After doing so much family history and taking Swedish names through the temple, it’s nice to be here in the country of my ancestors.