Good morning Oslo!  Oh my gosh – what a shock to the system!  Where we were just sitting in the sun in short sleeves 2 days ago. Today, we are bundled up in puffy coats, sweaters, scarves and gloves.  Phew!  It is wicked cold – about 40 with a wind.  Yep, puffy coats are coming in handy for this leg of our Ping-Pong tour!

After a very nice rest, and a light breakfast, we decide to hoof it over to the botanical gardens and the Natural history museum.  It’s about a half an hour walk and we are more than ready to start stretching our legs again. We love the tours, just not the sedentary aspect of most of them.  Now we’re ready to go!

And go we do – past the train station and through the city center (I think) up and out to the botanical gardens. It is a lovely, if not bracing, walk through the city streets and beautifully empty tree lined walkways of the garden.  We tried to time our walk to the opening of the greenhouses, but we were a little aggressive (surprise! Us aggressive?) and we are about 20 minutes too early.   It’s a garden though, so we just wander around getting our bearings and watching all the school groups – from high school age to kindergarten (like little ducks walking in a row, with the yellow safety vests on so they don’t get lost and can be seen in a distance) – mill about.  We were hoping for some coffee to waste a few minutes, but the café isn’t open.

We are contemplating what to do at the coffee shop when disaster strikes!! Ed’s phone gets loose and drops to ground – and even with all the protective covers – the glass cracks and virtually shatters in one corner.  Nightmare!  And there is absolutely nothing we can do about it until we get home.  It so stinks.  Fortunately, everything on the phone still works, just a little challenging to see certain things- but at least it is functional. And we will be sure to gently coax it along for the rest of the trip.  Bummer.

On that note…well…we try to just ignore it – things happen – and we move on down to the first greenhouse, the Palmehuset, where the high school students are all filing in.  Oh well – we’ll just skirt around them with our masks on! True to its name, this greenhouse has a huge palm tree garden in the central room, and lots of lovely flowers in the side rooms. 

One of which even has an obligatory bee pollenating the flowers (I think it’s real, it looked like it moved, but it sat on that flower so long, that in hindsight, maybe it was just a plastic display?  Who knows?).  Doesn’t matter, as we wander through enjoying the heat and the beauty.

The next greenhouse is filled to the brim with a younger class of children, all surrounding the big lily pond in the main room.   We skirt around them as well, going to one of the side rooms where various plants are flowering there.  Then we move through the back side of the main room to take pictures of the lily pond as well as the nice little displays of rice plants, pepper plants and the like. 

Alas, while it is wonderfully warm in here, it is WAY to peopley (and children peopley at that!), so we boogie out of there, heading to the café for coffee.  The sign says they café is open, but the door is locked.  We can see people in there, so we are a bit perplexed.  But, what can you do? And we still have half an hour before the museum opens.  As we turn and walk away, a guy comes and opens the door and tells us they are open – he just forgot to unlock the door!  Good deal.

Cappuccinos in hand, we also buy this monstrous sweet almond roll thing for breakfast in the morning.  It looks and smells heavenly, we’ll be lucky if we manage to save it for tomorrow!  Warmed up, caffeined up and restroomed, we head back out into the cold to wander some more little gardens, just being planted with spring greenery and onto the museum with the weirdly decorated moose out front.

There are a ton of kids around, so we want to make sure we are first in to avoid the masses.  We make it, but unfortunately only the natural history museum is open, the other side of the museum, the geological exhibition isn’t open yet, so we only have the natural history side and the climate museum.  Oh well, we’re here. 

The natural history part is cute – many animals in life like settings.  Many educational displays.  Many kids.  While sweet, it is definitely not our thing, so we make fast work of the displays and avoid as many sniffling, coughing children as possible.

The climate museum, on the other hand, is an excellent exhibit of climate change, how Norway is positioned and what we can all do about the impending challenges.  It’s not really photo worthy, but it is an extremely interesting museum with a very important story to tell.

Our visit went entirely more quickly than we anticipated, and now we have the whole rest of the day to wander about.  Heading back toward the apartment, we begin to look for lunch places and stumble upon a Turkish-Iranian area where there are tons of shwarma and kebob places.  We sort of pick one at random, a little corner place called Mardin.  We are a little concerned as we are the only customers there, but the owner is so welcoming and sweet that we can’t walk out now.

As it turns out, one of the best meals and experiences we could have.  First of all, it is sort of an open kitchen and we can watch the chef (an older Iranian man) making everything, including the awesome pita bread! We order a shwarma pita (the last one!!!) and a kebob platter – both come with soup (which is surprisingly good chickpea soup, I think – and if I say its good, then you know it is – because I’m not a chickpea fan) and these huge pita breads.  Oh my gosh.  It is wonderful. As we sit there happily eating, people start to wander in – and every one of them is Iranian or least Persian of some sort, which makes us feel much better about our choice.

Walking back we take a detour to find the big grocery store in the train station and then the wine store, where I close my eyes and buy a 3 liter box of Chilean wine (because the single bottle prices are crazy – as are all the other prices!) and we lug our purchases back to our homey little Oslo home.