Oslo – Oslo Fjords

We visited Aker Brygge, right behind City Hall, on the harbor.  The water was busy with cruise ships, private yachts, and barges.  We took a cruise through the Oslo Fjord where we admired the tiny summer-residences, colorful houses that resembled huts, which populate the islands that make up the Fjord.

In Bygdoy, across Aker Brygge and on the other side of the Oslo Fjords, we visited a few of Oslo’s museums: the Kon-Tiki Museum; Norwegian Folk Museum, Europe’s largest open-air museum; and the Viking Ship Museum.  One can’t visit Scandinavia without being bombarded with Viking history.  At the VSM we learned about how powerful political figures were once burried with household goods, servants (!), tapestries, and even ships, much like the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. The upshot of many of Oslo’s museums is the notion that the world was globalized as long as one thousand years ago.

In Holmenkollen, we climbed the ski jump’s tower. From the ski jump we could admire the whole of Oslo and its fjords in the distance before making our way back to Vigeland Park, the highlight of our visit to Oslo.

Oslo, Norway- Vigeland Park

Upon landing in Scandinavia, on our way to Oslo via Copenhagen, we were greeted not by a Nordic accent but one of the American South: “You’re not Danish, are you?” an elderly American woman asked M while pressing her left over Danish Krones into his hand moments before stepping into a plane headed for the States. At Cafe Blixen, a chain restaurant that has commercialized one of Denmark’s most famous citizens and writers, we dined on some of the best smoked salmon with tartar sauce I’d ever tasted. Like everywhere else in Europe we’ve traveled, famous sites and people are usually adopted as market ploys for chain restaurants and corporations.

In Oslo, we made our way north west to Vigelandsparken, a sculpture garden designed by Gustav V. The park’s scultpures depicts all the stages of life from birth through old age. The park alone made Oslo worth the trip. In fact, we returned to the park the following early evening.

On our walk through downtown Oslo, we visited the Royal Palace whose 19th-century Nordic architecture left us unimpressed. Istanbul’s Dolmabache Palace is now my benchmark for judging European palaces, and Oslo’s Royal Palace seemed plain and unmajestic. We passed by the National Theater which is staging many of Henrik I.’s plays this week as well as Norwegian Parliament. Quaint and small, Oslo’s downtown was a marked contrast to Vigeland Park’s sweeping lawns, imposing water fountain, perfectly-manicured gardens, and, of course, thought-provoking depictions of aging and the cycle of life.

For our first dinner in Oslo we ate at the appropriately-named restaurant, Dinner. Whereas the restaurant advertises itself as serving fusion Norwegian-Cantonese food, although the delicious, I couldn’t find a bit of Norwegian flavoring in the sweetened duck or spicy chicken cooked in chili-pepper sauce with cashews and vegetables on the side after an appetizer of steamed spinach, sugar-coated walnuts, and fish-flavored cakes. For desert we had the fried bananas topped with vanilla ice cream accompanied with diced-plum and oranges soaked in Mandarin sauce. Not quite New York City Chinese take out.