Oslo: Too Cold to be Naked

November 3, 2010:

In the morning we had a "typical" Norwegian breakfast of brown cheese on toast with jam. Yes... brown cheese.

It's not peanut butter...

To my astonishment it actually tasted good, especially with jam. We even used the Norwegian cheese scraper things (that is the technical term) to cut it.

We start off our day at the Opera House which is listed as one of the top things to see and the architecture of it was pretty cool. You're able to walk up the roof which is legit. Danielle coined Oslo as a "city under construction" and I feel like that's true. A travel website had said that it's emerging as a cultural city, so I guess that means it's not quite there yet, but it's still nice. It seems as though a lot of Oslo is undergoing a facelift, which is fair, since it wasn't the capital of Norway until "recently" in European terms (it burned in a fire in 1624).

After approximately 10 days wearing the same jeans (and considering all of the walking we'd done), I wore holes into them. I opted to wear leggings underneath my holy jeans, because it was too cold to have my bare skin in the wind...

Speaking of bare skin, Oslo has a penchant for an interesting architect named Gustav Vigeland and Frogner Park is full of his sculptures. All of his sculptures are of naked people.

We really didn't get his artistic vision...

We guess that he might have some issues of a certain nature. But anyway, it was a lovely walk in the misting rain through a kind of creepy sculpture park concluding with a phallic symbol to rival church steeples. I can't be the only one that finds it strange that there are naked statues in nordic countries. I mean, Greece and around the Mediterranean I can understand. It's warm there... but in Norway?

After some street yoga for aching backs, we pushed on. Further wanderings brought us to a public yard sale on a basketball court with lots of expensive but interesting things we would never need, past the American Embassy which is a terrifying and intimidating building (Why exactly do they need a fortress in Norway?), and a Lyonnais bouchon (I was tempted to speak French, but didn't for fear of having totally lost my language skillz). We opted in the end to spend some time out of the rain at a Scottish pub, called the Scotsman. One of my "Bingo" tasks is to kiss a Scotsman. I'm so clever:

I didn't just kiss any Scotsman. I kissed the Scotsman par excellence. Unfortunately, they had Norwegian prices. What I found most amusing about our time there, was that I was asked for identification. That hasn't happened to me at a bar since I left Canada. I asked what the age restrictions were just out of curiosity. At a bar, the age is 18 for beer and 21 for liquor. So essentially, I still look like I'm in high school. We spent quite a bit of time there, exchanging stories and showing family pictures stored on our phones. Afterward, we went to H&M just to pass the time. At some point or another, we stumbled across this beauty:

We headed back to Einar's, stopping to pick up groceries so that we Danielle could make him a "thank you" dinner of her magic pasta. It was delicious. We played Labyrinth, a strategic board game, and despite her affirmations that she was terrible at strategy games and didn't understand what she was doing, she beat both Einar and I soundly. At Einar's request (and for our own rapprochement to our Canadian heritage) we did a Canadian photo shoot:

Before bed, we watched Mighty Ducks (classic!) and packed our bags for the morning, so that we would have plenty of time to walk to the train station and to get to the airport in time. ;)