Ruh’roh! Overnight, my buddy Ole texts me that he’s not going to be able to make it to Oslo today. Although that sucks, I do hope he can make it tomorrow to NONOG because somebody has to answer all of those VPP questions and it surely isn’t going to be me! OK, change of plans: instead of doing a light breakfast and a lunch together with Ole, we do a big breakfast and hit the town. Our plans now become: visit the Nobel Peace center and the National Art museum just next to it.
The walk over to Râdhuusplass (English: Townhall Square) and arrive there at just before 11:00. Whoops, the Nobel Peace center opens on… Tuesday. And a double whammy, as the National Museum also does not want us around on Mondays. I feel like I understand why Garfield does not like Mondays, there goes our morning plans!
Marina makes a Plan C on the spot - let’s go to the Opera house and the Munch museum. I channel my inner Scream and follow along. Right back whence we came, past the hotel and the train station we walk along the waterfront to the white operahouse. It’s a stunningly beautiful building and it has people crawling all over its rooftop. I convince Marins to accompany me to the top of the building, which is a sloped walk up “I don’t like uphill!”. The views from up here are pretty nice. There’s a [DFDS] ship in the harbor and juxtaposes the hazy autumn day which is trying to paint a serene picture of the city. From the rooftop though, we can see the [Edvart Munch] museum. And we make this our next $dest.
As we walk down the roof of the Opera house, we take a quick look inside as well. This building is really clever, and grandiose wooden structures line the insides. But, we’re off to the place where Munch’s art is on display. I really want to know how to pronounce this name, so the first thing I do in the museumm is find an audio guide in Norwegian which teaches me: [ˈɛ̀dvɑɖ ˈmʊŋk] (simplified English, think of “Ed-vart Moon-ck”). Although not all of his work speaks to me, I did like the audio-visual presentation with [Arif] did work well for me, as did the interactive display in a darkened room consisting of 10 ror so sections each with one red object in them. Interact with the red object, and something audio-visual would happen. We also found a bunch of mice hiding out. A+ for that exhibition.
In the main hall we find Munch’s masterpiece The Sun, which was commissioned for Oslo university. There’s also - in my opinion - a very powerful display of his work The Scream, of which not one but three originals are shown, except: only one is shown at a time. Each thirty minutes, one window closes and another opens. There’s the black and white litho which was open when I walked by here, and there’s also two paintings which other visitors will get to enjoy.
At 14:00 we exit the museum, having had our fill of art for the day. I suggest that we go have our spaghetti now at the Spaghetti hall across the street, but FML, it’s closed on Mondays. I sense a theme here. But Marina knows that the place we were originally going to have lunch at - the Cathedral Cafe - is both open and has pasta. Off we go, and we do enjoy a Carbonara and a Marinara.
We’re now ready for plan D. Marina found a river North of here, the Akerselva which bares the same name as the fortress. We debate for a while how far along this river we want to walk. For me, starting at the lake (Maridalsvannet, 11km) is good. For her, Nedre Foss (4km) is a better choice. Compromise! We take the train to Nydalen (7km) and start our little walk along the banks of this river and see a few waterfalls, lots of people out and about. There are some old buildings, a few statues and parks, and absolutely gorgeous weather. About one hundred minutes and 7.3km later, we arrive at the Oslo trainstation. That was a great walk!
We make our way to the hotel and I take a nap until 17:30 or so, after which we watch some TV together. I get to eat noodles tonight, and at 19:00 we walk around the corner to Genji, a japanese restaurant. The food here is great - we start with sashimi and a special “Japan meets Norway” with an A5 Wagyu strip topped with salmon tartare, which was very nice. Then we both have a noodle soup; I take Tonkatsu and Marina has a Tantanmen. I am content with my noodle-fix!
We finish the evening watching [Atomic Blonde] on TV with Charlize Theron alongside John Goodman. It’s a nice watch, not too complicated which is good for our brains as we’re both tired. Tomorrow at 08:30 I will go to NONOG which will be at the [Domus Bibliotheca] which is about 1km from here. I should turn in, and thanks to all that activity and good noodle action today, I am expecting a really good night’s sleep!
Pictures of the Day
