Oscillating round Oslo
The Guinness
I had my Guinness in the Dubliner Pub in Oslo. A nice pub indeed. The only shock comes when you pay for the beer. The Guinness was £8 a pint. I think we only had the one round!
Our drinks which were poured by Jemma from Birmingham. That’s the second place running where the barmaid has originated from Birmingham. So what used to be the engineering export capital of the UK is now exporting barmaids.
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| My goodness, my Guinness ........how much????? |
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| Jemma - having a laugh at someone else paying £8/pint |
My cousin kindly did the honours and picked out my next destination which was Copenhagen. Was she trying to get rid of us I wonder?
Getting There and around
We flew with Ryanair to Oslo Torp airport, and straight onto a bus to take us into Oslo and the driver told us in perfect English that our ticket would be 900 Kroner (£100). Our flights only cost £130 for the three of us. He wasn’t joking – that was my first question too. There were some mitigating factors. Firstly, Norway is probably the most expensive country in Europe, now that Iceland has gone down the pan. Secondly, Ryanair were being their usual cheeky self in calling this Oslo airport and 110 km into the city and takes 2 hours. That’s like calling Manchester, London-Manchester airport. Thirdly, it was a return ticket and it was for three of us etc, etc,
We travelled by train from Oslo to Bergen on one of the most scenic routes in Europe. The train takes six hours and goes from sea level all the way up to 4000 feet where glaciers can be seen from the train. We looked out on lakes, tumbling rivers and wild scenery.
We took the Norway in a Nutshell tour that includes a train from Bergen to Flåm. The Myrdal to Flåm section of this journey is famous for its steepness and sheer feat of engineering. The line was only completed in 1940. The following day the trip continued with a boat ride around the fjord and then a coach journey around the winding roads back to Vos. The boat journey was an excellent few hours. The scenery was spectacular.
Team Makeup
A family holiday with my wife and youngest son.
Accommodation
We stayed with a relative of mine in Høvik, just outside Oslo. In Bergen we stayed in a YMCA hostel. I think this was a bit of an unnerving experience for my son who had never experienced mixed- sex dorms before. Most of the other occupants seemed to be there to attend the farewell Ah-Ha tour. Next to the fjord in Aurland we stayed in a hotel – now there’s an unusually extravagant occurrence for us!
Food
Cheese: For some reason the cheese in Norway seems to be brown. I never did understand why. It looked very much like mislabelled peanut butter to me.
We struggled a bit with the food when away from our hosts as the choice of where to eat was somewhat challenging. At one end of the scale there was take away pizza slices were readily available and at the other end there were expensive restaurants but nothing much in between. One evening in Bergen we ended up eating in a kebab shop which was perfectly adequate and authentic judging by the proprietors.
Sightseeing highlights
Bygdøy, the museum area on a peninsular to the west of the city. There was a whole host of museums out there and it was a case of choosing which one to visit. We sat outside the Kon-Tiki museum in the sunshine and looked at the inuksuk which was a gift of friendship from Canada to Norway on the occasion of the centennial celebrations in Norway. An inuksuk is a stone statue and ancient symbols of Inuit culture traditionally used as landmarks and navigation aids. We looked in through the window at Fram, the wooden ship used by Norway’s Polar explorers including Roald Amundsen when he was the first man to the South Pole.
The Viking museum was very good, not huge and exhausting but light and airy and just the large enough to get around in an hour or two. It had about four actual Viking boats that had been found over the past hundred years and a good range of other archaeological finds. The ships have been found in royal burial mounds in the Oslo fjord. The burial ships, carrying the dead over to “the Other World” were discovered packed full of treasures such as wagons, horses and especially textiles.
In another direction out of the centre of Oslo was the Vigeland Sculpture Park. I’d imagined this was a park with sculptures by different artists but instead all the works were by the one artist, Gustav Vigeland, hundreds of them, none with any clothes on. The park is almost 1km long and divided into various sections such as the bridge, lined with sculptures, the Fountain and the Wheel of Life. The most imposing is the Monolith, a column of interwoven figures all struggling to reach the top. Transferring of the figures from Vigeland’s design began in 1929 and took 3 stone carvers 14 years to accomplish.
The coastal city of Bergen with its historic houses, fish market and Nautical Museum.
Quirky moments
One evening we took a trip out to Café Seterstua at the top of a hill outside Oslo. It’s an imposing wooden cabin called Frognerseteren, erected in 1867, where there was a meeting of the Morgan car owners club. We enjoyed a coffee with views over Oslo and the traditional grass roofed buildings in the foreground. On the way down the hill we stopped off at the new Holmenkollen ski jump,
