Today we hike. Ok, it’s a city-street hike, but a hike nonetheless. It’s a 45 minute, 3.2k walk to Frogner Park where we are going to explore the Vigeland sculpture park – which means more walking – but we’re ready. We’re getting our exercise in before the next relatively sedentary tour in the Baltics! 

Actually, it is a decent walk – cold, but we’re prepared. Oslo is a beautiful city with tons and tons of green space, a lot of which we were able to walk through on our way to Vigeland. Our route also took us right past the Royal Palace (which sadly isn’t open to visitors until June). But we did get a bonus! The changing of the guards – or at least the guards standing at attention because some dignitary (the King?) was leaving the palace. Who knows, but it was quite unexpected and fun to watch!

Onward ho we march (pun intended). Another 20 minutes brings us to the gates of the Park, where we happily find a cafe for some well deserved cappuccino. Oh, and the best buy in all of Oslo – Shirts that converted to only $10USD. And they are cool – with the outline of Oslo along the bottom and Oslo written on the sleeve. We got a matching pair, one black, one turquoise. Our big splurge of the trip.

After finishing up our caffeine, we wander into the park and glimpse the beginning of the Vigeland Sculptures. There are over 200 massive granite, bronze and wrought-iron statues in the park that Vigeland created over 40 years. They begin stretched out along a bridge that leads to the main exhibit – we have a choice to go into the park or head to the City Museum, or bymuseet, and we decide to hit the museum first. It is housed in the old Frogner Manor, a huge stately building, most of which isn’t open to the public – at least not that we could figure out.

We enter through the courtyard and find our way to the ticket desk, purchase our senior tickets (yes, we did – you can save TONS with senior tickets if the country your are visiting allows foreigners to buy them) and enter the art exhibit area which has a collection of cityscapes. All quite lovely and interesting, documenting the development of Oslo over time, but quite small and easily visited in, oh, 5 minutes?

Nice, but this is the only room we can see in the museum. And while the tickets weren’t that pricey, it wasn’t worth it for just this. Leaving this exhibit, we meander through the gift shop, walk outside to see if we are missing an entrance, come back inside and end up asking the gift shop clerk who points us to the opposite corner for a little opening with a sign that points us to the OsLove (The story of Oslo) exhibit. Aha! There is more.

And while fascinating, and very informative, there is a large school group down here…and well…you know our Peopley challenges. Thus we make fast work of the little we can see and access and happily escape back up into the fresh air to begin our Vigeland Park explorations.

Ok. So. I don’t know anything about Gustav Vigeland except what you can find on the Internet, some of which stated his work had Fascist and Nazi “aesthetics,” others said he depicted family life from birth to death. All I know is it seemed like a lot of naked statues – Statue porn – to us. (It started with those Rhinos in Kruger, and well, on it continues!) We just kept laughing, thinking how this would never be acceptable in the States!

But, seriously though, the sculptures are amazing in their size, their detail and the sheer number of them. Whatever the guy was trying to do – he did it in volume! It was easy to spend a ton of time here wandering all over the park, finding new and different concepts perched among nature.

Okie dokie – back to hiking! We reverse our course and head back out of the park, stopping to admire the beautiful architecture, carved doors and also stumbling upon bullet holes from the Nazi occupation days, protected by a plexiglass sheet that has been tagged – so the pictures don’t do it justice.

On the way through the Royal Palace grounds we realized we were very close to the historical Museum, so we diverted there. Fabulous collection of exhibits ranging from Egyptian relics to an excellent Viking exhibit with Chain Mail and helmets and coins.

Plus, a display all about how the Norwegians moved their gold reserves during WWII. They loaded 26 trucks with the coins and moved it up through the countryside, then eventually on all sorts of different ships to Britain, the US and Canada. A total of 50 tons of gold were transported out of the country…and they didn’t get it all back until 1987. That’s a crazy story!

Finished with the museums, we headed back tot he apartment, passing the Oslo Cathedral …

… then settling in for the afternoon to focus on traveling chores – last load of laundry, packing strategy, etc. Oh, and of course also working on figuring out just how we are going to fly from Krakow to London in 9 days. Yes, British Airways strikes again! They canceled our flight and don’t have any options on that day – we either have to leave a day early (and miss the last day of our Baltic tour) or a day late (and miss one night in the apartment we rented in Belfast) – neither option is acceptable. Sigh. They are the pits.

After that excitement (and paying 3x the cost of the original flights for Lufthansa flights), we go out to Mamma’s pizza to grab a pie to bring home to the balcony. Excellent meal (but oh dear me, the prices! The pizza and a little, teensy, weensy salad – and no alcohol! – were almost $50 USD. Wow – expensive place to live!).

After dinner and some reading and TV watching, we were ready for bed, and our next adventure in the Baltics.