Nor-way??

Get ready for information and picture overload! It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, and there’s a LOT to share. First off, I got to have the experience of a lifetime!! Mom and Dad took Bridget and I on our senior trip (2 years late…) to the beautiful land of Scandinavia, specifically Norway and Sweden! We had originally planned England and France, but things just kept not working out so we changed our plans. Dad’s side of the family immigrated from Norway, so we have some family ties there, though we didn’t meet any family there and weren’t able to see the exact place they were from. It will be really hard to not make this post super long so I think I’ll break it up between different places and have mostly pictures so it’s more fun.

First: OSLO, NORWAY.

            We got to fly business class from Seattle to Iceland to Oslo, which was super nice! We got fancy meals, movies, and even these cute little overnight bags. 

Overnight bag: lip balm, skin balm, eye mask, ear plugs, toothbrush and mini toothpaste.

Reykjavik, Iceland from the air

Day 1: City Hall, which is said to be more ornate on the inside than the royal palace because it is the place of the people. It was ornate, but we didn’t have the chance to go to the royal palace so I wasn’t able to compare.  

Outside Central Station

City Hall

Then the rest of the days filled with museum, museums, and more museums.  First, we went to the Folk Museum: over 35 acres of old log cabins from the 1600s-1800s, and employees who dress up and do daily tasks like how they used to.

The garden entrance

So many little huts had the cute huts had grass roofs. Love.

so much ivy! 

Then we went to a Viking museum, with a bunch of old, original Viking ships, obvi, and that was neat. These ships weren’t very deep, but they sure were long! 

Next was the Holocaust museum.  This was very different from what I was expecting: it didn’t have normal and stereotypical pictures and displays you would expect from a Holocaust museum, but rather it was just walls of information about the history of the war and the occupation of Norway. Still very interesting and sobering, but just different

The Holocaust museum

After that was the Kon-Tiki museum. The Kon-Tiki was a raft made to sail the Pacific to prove a theory that the Polynesians occupied the Pacific Islands before the settlers came. No one believed the theory so this guy made a raft out of materials they might have used, a good size, and sailed, and was successful.  It was pretty neat. They’re making a new movie about it that I’m going to see when it comes out; check out the trailer here

The Kon-Tiki Raft

Easter Island stone

Our last museum was the Fram museum. The Fram ship was used in the first expedition to the Arctics. It was the original ship, but it was resotred/preserved in a way that the visitors were able to walk around on the ship and see all the levels of it, which was pretty neat. 

   Here's a few pictures from the pier while we waited for the ferry back to the city.

Once we got back to the city, traffic was crazy, so we started walking. Once we got to central station, there was a mob of people, mainly young teenage girls, outside the hotel there, most of them wearing ‘I heart Justin Bieber’ t-shirts. Um, what?? Yes, that’s right, Justin freaking Bieber was giving a free concert on the roof of the Opera House that night, in Oslo freaking Norway! Seriously, what are the odds that he would be here, of all people and in of all places, while we’re here, giving a free concert???? Needless to say, Bridget and I wanted to go. We wanted to just hang out there in the square with the crazy teenage girls and then just follow the mob to the Opera House but we went back to the apartment and decided we’d come back at the time of the concert. 

9:30pm. We go back to go to the concert. Only we find mobs in the streets half way there, screaming and running around every where. We take our time getting to the central station area because these mobs were crazy- there were cops on horses yelling at us in Norwegian: please, watch this video to catch a glimpse of what it was like.  

So we make our way to the Opera House, super excited, only to find it like this:

Empty. Completely empty.  Best and worst day of my life. Haha We were pretty bummed that we had missed a chance like that, cause let’s be honest, when am I ever going to be that close to going to a Justin Bieber concert again? Never. While it was a bummer, we got over it quickly and just thought it was cool to have had that experience. Oh, and I saw him wave out of this window. No big deal.

Day 2:  We travelled out to the Holmenkollmen Olympic Ski Jump, and that was awesome. We stopped at this restaurant first where I tried reindeer. Quite good.

On our way to the restaurant

View from the outdoor cafe

Their famous apple cake. Nom nom nom

The restaurant

At the ski jump, you can take an elevator to the very top and get a 360 view, and that was really neat.  It was really cool to be at a place like that, that I don’t imagine a whole lot of tourists think of going to. 

The Ski Jump

Panoramic view from the top

A view down the jump

We got new winter jackets there. Yes! Hooray for early Christmas

Then we went back to the city and went to the Norwegian National Gallery, and THAT was cool. Can you name these artists? 

Yup, that's Rodin, Van Gogh, Manet, Edvard Munch, Degas, Monet, and Picasso. 

There were obviously a lot more, but those were the most famous I figure most people would recognize.  They also had an exhibit room for Edvard Munch that featured ‘The Scream’, but we weren’t allowed to take pictures.  It was super cool to be there and see so many originals of these famous artists that I’ve looked up to and admired and imitated within my personal art career.  Neato!

After the Gallery, we went to the Vigeland Sculpture park: a park dedicated to Gustav Vigeland, the artist, that has over 200 sculptures he did throughout his life to represent human relations. It was simply beautiful.  Take a look yourself

Day 3: We headed out of Oslo on the Norway in a Nutshell train ride, one of the most scenic train rides in the world. This train took us to Flam, where we caught a boat to Aurland where we would be staying. There’s not much to describe the train ride other than it was beautiful, and it reminded me a lot of home.  Check it out. 

We had to wait in the snow to switch trains. 

There was a LOT of snow is some places. 

That about sums up this post, I’m going to move on to the next places in my next post. Note to anyone who might be going to Norway, if you go to Oslo, get the Oslo Pass: it will get you in for free into most museums and you get free public transportation-pays for itself almost instantly!