Something of a washout of a day. Finally arriving in Oslo in streaming rain wasn't good for any soul I may have had left.
All the hideously expensive train tickets had been sold, so I took the bus, earning a withering look of contempt from the ticket seller when I asked if he spoke English. When all's said and done, this is Scandinavia...
It's seven and a half hours from Stockholm to Oslo, much of it on two-lane roads. The steady journey through Sweden was pleasant in a tedious kind of way, pine forests interrupted occasionally by bored looking provincial towns. Over the frontier, there was a just-perceptible descent- as ever I was immaturely rapt with the advent of another new country to my experience- "so, this is a Norwegian wood," I thought, before trying to dutifully read some Jane Austen I had brought along.
Oslo in the rain looked grim. I made a brief foray out to find something to eat, and spied a building looking like the Stormont government offices in Belfast at the end of the main drag. Perhaps Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley et al had all been forcibly removed here in order to sort their differences out.
A quick glance over local TV ( reassuring repeats of Morse, Midsomer Murders,
Monarch of the Glen, and the kind of terrible variety shows that got outlawed in England twenty years ago), and then some much-needed sleep.
The Stormont building I saw last night turned out to be the Royal Palace-not hugely inpressive, but adequate enough for the local monarch and his family to store their bicycles in.
I didn't spend that long in the centre of Oslo- to be frank, it doesn't seem to have a huge amount to offer. Someone might, (although maybe Norwegians wouldn't) forgive me for saying that it feels almost provincial. Maybe as Norway was part of the Swedish-Norwegian state for a century up to 1905, this isn't totally surprising.
I took a ferry over to where several museums have coalesced further down the Oslofjord. The harbour too isn't really that exciting- there is a dull, twin-towered town hall, and a prison-resembling castle guarding one of the approaches.
Nonetheless, I spent a couple of hours wandering around the Norwegian Folk Museum, feeling a little middle-aged before my time. It's all reconstructed buildings brought over from elsewhere in Norway and slightly self-conscious looking museum staff lolling around the place in traditional period garments. There were any number of buildings insulated with what appeared to be weed-infested lawns, but the best exhibit was an allegedly 13th century stave church, which looked decidely over-restored to me, but I'm no judge.
Off then to the Viking boat museum, which left me feeling a little oddly disappointed- doubtless I was felling hung over from the spectacle of the Vasa, then I eventually found Thor Heyerdal's Kon-Tiki museum, where the aforementioned craft and Ra II were on display. Kon-Tiki looked a little like the Raft of the Medusa, if you were to ask me, but it was all interesting enough. Out of respect to Captains Scott and Oates, I decide to pass on the museum josting the Fram, on which Amundsen had sailed to Antarctica, and sailed back to the main harbour, thoroughly boated out.
My final expedition of the day was to the extraordinary Vigeland Sculpture Park, set in a large, elegant area of city greenery in one of the more affluent arts of town. I was quite won over by it, and it's a shame that England is unlikely to have anything remotely resembling it- we're stuck with an avant-garde fountain, that doesn't even work, in memory of a dead princess.
The hundreds of statues were granite representations of Joe and Joanne average doing day to day things, going through day-to day emotions. The fountain was another marvel, although I felt myself absolved for thinking that all the figures seemed to be holding large pieces of broccoli in the air. The central obelisk is spectacular- a seething mass of bodies, trying to reach the top: I had to stop myself thinking that it was a Concentration Camp memorial, such is the power of its imagery, but I guess we're all depicted in its struggle, even Council Tax officers.
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