We woke at 5am on Saturday morning to get to the airport outside London (Stansted). When we got to Norway we had to get a 2hour bus ride to Oslo, that almost cost the same price of the flight, eventually getting to the hotel about 5pm. Good old Ryanair for flying to and from airports in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t the best start to the weekend, a lack of sleep and a long transit time. On the way up to Oslo we did get to see a bit of the country side. The landscape reminds me of scenes off MacGyver, with the rocky woodlands. The country side is littered with barns of the same dark red colour and design (like children’s story books about farmyards), and the roads seem to have plenty of tunnels going through rocky hills.
When we arrived into Oslo we thought we’d check out some markets near the bus station, but when we got closer they looked dodgy as, and there was even a guy that eyed us up on the way there looking like he was going to mug us….not a good start. We then scooted quickly out of there and wandered into town to find our hotel, and being cheap it wasn’t in the best area. So this didn’t leave us a very good impression to start off with either.
We grabbed a cheap Kebab for dinner (£6, in London £4) from a place that made their own pita bread - yum. Then we went for an evening walk to check out the harbour. We had a walk around to have a look at the stylish new Opera house on the water front, Oslo Castle, checked out some, old sailing ships, and Noble peace centre. It then got dark and our impression of Oslo got a lot better. We walked to the Royal palace, which we quite cool because it over looked the main street, and it looked just like Buckingham palace …and funnily enough the guards looked the same too (who copied who??). Old buildings were lit up at night which made the place look really cool. We found an awesome sweet shop that sold Gelato and some of the most amazing looking cake (the cake reminded me of Café Cuba) and we took in the awesome atmosphere of the street at night. There was one amazing busker who had drawn a crowd of us, he added to the atmosphere.
Nobel peace centre
The Royal Palace - Looks like Buckingham palace Day 2
We sleep-in the next morning to catch up on some much needed sleep. Breakfast was a part of the hotel deal so we took advantage of this and sneaked in some sammies for lunch! The Norwegians love their fish, and have fish for breakfast, along with a sandwich filling type breakfast…handy for our lunch. With a surprising amount of things to do in Oslo, we did debate whether to go on a cruise to see the fjords, but that meant we would have had to give up our day on Saturday, and also it wasn’t the proper fjords, but more of a touristy tour around the harbour – the good ones were further west and would have required an extra couple of days to see. We were glad we didn’t when we spoke to some of the kiwis on our flight back. They said they had mates go and pretty much fell asleep.
Being in Norway made me think how similar to Japanese they are; they love eating fish (whales too), the announcements on public transport sound Japanese, and some houses even look like Japanese architecture. But in reality we found them to be similar to the Dutch, in terms of their food and language (how they can switch from Norweigian to perfect English without blinking an eyelash), however we did find them to be less friendly than the Dutch, with most of their customer sales people adopting a bored disinterested attitude. We bought a 24 hour Oslo pass that got us free entry in to the endless amounts of museums and transport on offer, so we headed out to the outdoor folk museum first (glad we didn’t have to pay for transport I saw a lady pay with a 200NK (Norweigan Kroner) note (£20) for a family of 4 and didn’t get much change at all!). This museum was basically a couple of hundred buildings to recreate how the Norwegian people use to live throughout the ages….we found this got tiresome quick and were off to the next museum, the Viking ship museum. This was impressive, they had three actual Viking ships on display that they had dug up and put back together, and was well worth the anticipation. The Vikings were incredibly clever seamen.
Next we decided to check out the sculpture park. It was a very cool park with many sculptures showing many human emotions. The park reminded us of how much it was like the rest of Europe, when the suns out, people congregate to the park and the disposable bbqs come out. We then debated with the wallet on what to have for tea, finding out the cheapest restaurant that our guidebook recommended us was going to cost us a minimum of £15 per main, the equivalent in London of a £7 dish!.....cough! So we eventually decided to go have pizza from the place we went to the night before.
The Gol Stave Church - Outdoor Folk museum
Grassy roof
Old Viking ship
Vigeland Park - SculpturesDay 3
Same again with breakfast - A nice sneaky packed lunch! The next day we checked out the Castle. This was a 16th century castle, but it was unlike all other castles we’ve seen, this one is made of brick! Before our bus to the airport, we checked out a few shops. Good old Ryanair, no allocated seats, so we had to make a run to get our seats!
Although we moaned about how expensive it was, all in all it was a good trip, especially going in with low expectations! And Jam like it lots because they thought she was Norwegian! The weather was great, a little colder than London – when we left London on Saturday it was heating to be a scorcher, but when we got back it was a lot colder than Norway…so we were quite pleased we didn’t miss out on too much!
The centre of Oslo
The harbour
Oslo Town hall
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