Week 6 Oslo

6/21

Our last morning in Stockholm had arrived and we needed to catch a 2pm flight to Oslo. Enough time for us to enjoy breakfast and then make our way to the Tunnelbana station around the corner, from there one station to Centralstationen to hop on the Arlanda Express train. Arlanda is the name/location of Stockholm's large international airport. At this point I really have to praise the Scandinavian transportation systems. Every city we've been in had bullet trains from the central station to the airport that run every 10 or 20 minutes and get you there in no time. Germany and the US could use a slice of that ;-)

The flight was a quick hour as most inner-European flights are and we quickly figured out how to buy return tickets for Flytoget, the Oslo bullet train to and from the airport.

Once we arrived at Sentralstajon, the Norwegian way of spelling Central Station, we had about a 1km walk ahead of us to the hotel. It was fun to decipher Norwegian (as well as Danish in Copenhagen). I took several semsters of Swedish in college, and even though I don't actually speak much, it was enough to understand ticket regulations, instructions, restaurant menus and other general directions. So far, the only country where I had been as helpless as Matt was the Czech Republic as Slavic languages have nothing in common with either Romanic or Germanic languages.

Anyway, we walked about 15min from the train station to our hotel and quickly realized there was no AC. Yikes. Luckily, I saw on the service sheet that you could rent  fan from the reception which we did, and it improved our sleep immensely after a first night that was way too hot or too loud when we opened the windows.

As usual, we soon made our way to explore our new home for the next three nights and walked around town.

We first passed through obvious shopping streets, such as the popular Karl Johan's gata  and from there you could already see Det Kungelige Slott (The Royal Palace).

We walked past the palace and through the small garden into what I would call the Embassy District. Most cities in Europe, just like in the US, have a part of town that hosts most of the foreign consulates and embassies. It's usually a nice part of town. From there we proceeded down to the waterfront that we spotted nearby and then walked into a very modern part of town called Aker Brygge. Similar to the area we saw in Malmö, Aker Brygge features modern architecture, waterfront dining and great views.

This area is right next to the harbor, city hall and the old fortress which we'd be exploring first thing the next morning.

We finished off our arrival day with dinner and beers at a local pub.

6/22

The next morning we headed back down to the waterfront first thing and walked around the fortress.

As we exited the fortress we realized we were close to where you can buy tickets for the dinner/evening cruise so we grabbed two tickets for next night's tour and then proceeded back East towards the famous opera house.

We continued to walk East from the opera house past a medieval garden (a bit of an exaggeration) and then headed into what is called Old Town.

Unfortunately it wasn't like Old Towns in other European cities and we ended up having to crash at a weird pub due to the rain where we ate the worst food of the entire trip.

As it kept on raining, we decided to jump on the tram and then a bus near city hall that would take us to the Bygdøy island (actually a peninsula) where we could visit a bunch of museums while the weather was against us.

We chose the KonTiki Museum, which chronicles the truly incredible explorations in the South Pacific by Norwegian explorer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl during the 1940s. He wanted to prove that it would've been possible for the Polynesian islands to have been populated by people from South America who sailed across the Pacific on a balsa raft and used the currents and winds to get there.
He also later spent a significant amount of time on the famous Easter Island and in his findings demonstrated how the Rapa Nui people transported the giant stone statues, the moai,  all over the island.

This was only one of Norway's famous explorer and we'd encounter the other one on the next day. We exited the museum and walked around at the shore a bit while waiting for a shuttle boat to take us back to the mainland.

6/23

Today the weather had cleared up a bit and I had planned a full day for us. We started out by taking the subway, also Tunnelbana in Norwegian, to the only lake accessible by subway. It was far up the hill (Norway is not as flat as Denmark or Sweden but rather hilly) and took about 25min to get there. Lake Sognsvann was beautiful and we enjoyed our 2.2 miles walk around it a lot.

Once back in the city, we took the bus and tram to Vigelandsparken, a public park in the Western part of Oslo that is full of interesting statues.

After a quick round through the park we took the bus out to Bygsdøy island again for more museums. This time we picked the Viking Ship Museum. It features two largely intact Viking ships that were found in ship burial mounds from Oseberg and Gokstad, outside of Oslo. The Oseberg ship is from the largest known ship burial in the world, and the museum also featured a lot of items that they found in the burials.

It was more of a smaller museum so we didn't take too long to finish it and then hopped on the bus to the other end of the island to visit the Fram Museet. The Fram is a ship that was used by Roald Amundsen and other explorers for their Arctic and Antartic epeditions between 1893 and 1912. It still holds the world record for any wooden ship sailing both the furthest North and South. It was the Fram that enabled Fridtjof Nansen to float within the Arctic ice sheet to the North Pole and it was also the Fram that Roald Amundsen used for his successful race to the South Pole.

After the Fram Museum we hopped back on the bus that would drop us off right at the harbor where our evening dinner cruise would take off. We boarded the Helena and spent a wonderful 3 hours driving through the fjords of Oslo, peeling and eating freshly caught shrimp and drinking wine.

We disembarked the Helena around 10pm and then quickly jumped on a tram to our hotel where a prepared bag of dirty laundry was waiting for us. Our plan was to take a tram to the Cafe Laundromat, a bar and laundromat that was open until 1AM. We found the place alright and already got excited about the beer selection when we realized that the tripadvisor note of "no need to buy detergent, plenty of people left theirs for others to use" was wrong and we had no detergent. At 11pm everything in the vicinity was closed so we gave up and took the tram back to the hotel, coming to terms with our fate of having only hand-washed laundry for the rest of the trip.

6/24

As our flight to Edinburgh wasn't until 8pm we spent the day visiting the art museums in Oslo. We started off with a private museum of contemporary art that was part weird part amazing.

The sun was out so we had a great time just strolling around Aker Brygge and the harbor area again.

After a quick lunch we made our way across town on foot to the Edward Munch Museum. The museum came to fame a few years ago when two armed robbers walked into it and, at gunpoint, stole Munch's The Scream (the version that was there, two other versions are at the Oslo National Gallery and one in a private collection) and another one of his paintings. They found the paintings a few years later but security was beefed up at the museum after the incident. It felt like Fort Knox going in.

The museum was a bit short for the price but at least we got to enjoy a great selection of Munch's artworks as well as some Van Goghs as they were running a special exhibition about the two.

We then spent some time walking through the adjacent botanical garden before heading out to the airport for our flight to Edinburg.

Week 5 Stockholm

6/17
We departed Malmö just before noon via the Snabbtåget (express train) to Stockholm. The ride took us about 4 hours across the VERY green Swedish countryside from Southern Sweden to Stockholm which is located kind of in the middle of the country and on the Eastern shore. The thing about Sweden is that everyone always pictures it as this beautiful countryside with little red houses in it, and that is precisely what it looks like between cities, at least here in the South.

Once we got to Stockholm's Centralstation, we had to take the subway, or as they call it Tunnelbana (tunneltrain), one stop to the neighborhood of Östermalm where our hotel was. "Weather" was ready to move in so we packed our umbrella and went on a first exploration of the neighborhood or district as we did in every city upon arrival.
We walked by nice tree lined avenues and eventually reached an area that features the stadium for the 1912 Olympics.

After walking around for about 1.5 hours, it started to pour down so we squeezed under the one umbrella we had and headed back to the hotel. Luckily, Yelp said there was a great restaurant just across from our hotel, and Yelp was right. We had one of the best dinners of the entire trip there. It definitely wasn't the cheapest but they made up for it by serving beer in wine glasses ;-)

6/18
This was our only day in Stockholm where everything was open. Friday (6/19) would be midsommarafton (midsummer evening) and Saturday (6/20) midsommardagen (midsummer day) and most shops, restaurants, bars, museums etc would be closed or at least only partially open. Therefore we tried to squeeze as much stuff that would be affected into our day as possible.
We started out by walking down to the shore and alongside the water to the island called Djurgården, which roughly translates as wild game garden. It used to the be the royal hunting grounds and was eventually transformed into an island with a giant park, an outdoor museum, an amusement park as well as several indoor museums.

Our plan was to start at the Vasamuseet, the museum featuring the giant 18th century shipwreck, but when we got to the entrance, a bus had just unloaded a giant tourist group that formed a huge line. We immediately didn't feel like waiting in that line, especially since it was starting to rain again a little, so we decided to walk back and explore Gamla Stan (old town) instead.
Stockholm is basically the Venice of the North, built on dozens of little islands and with an archipelago of more than 1,000 islands and islets between there and the open sea of the North.
So we walked back along the waterfront, crossing a few bridges here and there, passing the Swedish Parliament before we reached Gamla Stan and the Stockholm Palace at its center.

As the rain was getting heavier and we both didn't feel like paying to see the inside of the palace, we opted for the nearby Nobel Museum instead.

We walked around Gamla Stan some more and then across the next bridge into Södermalm where we eventually grabbed a tunnelbana back towards Centralstationen, and the plan was to grab a tram from there back to Djurgården so we could give the Vasamuseet another try. Once we exited the central station and had followed all the signs for the tram station but just couldn't located it. Luckily, we stumbled upon a food truck gathering and filled our stomachs with interesting Polish food.

 We eventually found that tram stop and made our way to the museum. I think we both had zero expectations for the museum but since it was on all the highlight lists we figured we should do it. It turned out to be a really cool experience that we can only highly recommend to anyone visiting Stockholm.
The Vasa is the oldest intact shipwreck in the world. It sank during its maiden voyage in 1629 less than a mile from where it left the harbor and was then mostly forgotten for more than 333 years. In the 1950s then it was located again and eventually salvaged in the 1960s. The wreck was then and restored for more than 17 years and finally put in the museum built for it in the 1980s.
Here's more info for anyone interested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

6/19
Midsummer's eve was off to a good weather start that only deteriorated from there on, unfortunately. All the highlight lists for Midsommar say you should go to Skansen, the outdoor museum in Djurgården, so we did. Everything else was closed anyway so we had little choice and just put on ponchos, packed the umbrella and braced the Swedish "summer" that was 50s and rain.
Skansen was still a great experience even though our version of children dancing around the midsummer maypole was more like a bunch of umbrellas dancing in the mud.

 Skansen features historic farmsteads from all over Sweden that were brought here so people can learn how their ancestors lived and how people in other parts of the country (e.g. the Sami people in the North) lived.

It rained a LOT. But to make up for it Skansen also featured a few zoo enclosures with Scandinavian animals, such as wolves, wolverines, brown bears, moose, otters, seals and what I call the leopard pigs.

We had originally wanted to stay at Skansen longer but after about 4 hours there we were soaked and tired, so we only made one last stop before heading back to the hotel - the city hall, or Stadshuset as they call it.

6/20
After the ultra rainy Friday we were delighted to see that Saturday was supposed to be slightly better. We procrastinated after breakfast, essentially waiting for it to stop raining so we could walk down to the waterfront and rent bicycles for the day.
The rain stopped around 11:30am, the sun came out , we ditched the umbrella and ponchos and walked to the bike rental.

As soon as we sat on our bikes, it started to rain again. At first we thought we could just ride it out but both of our not waterproof jackets were soon soaked so we turned around and went back to the hotel to grab the ponchos.

Of course, 15min into our ride, it stopped raining altogether and we never needed them again for the rest of the day.....
We started our bike tour with the rest of Djurgården that we hadn't seen yet.

When we reached the entrance bridge again and had come full circle we decided to embark on a rote I had cooked up.....riding all the way out to Drottningholm Slott (the Royal Palace), the private residence of the King and Queen of Sweden. It was a 15km (just under 10 miles) ride out and despite the fact that we were pretty sore afterwards because we both hadn't ridden a bike in so long it was a great tour.

After a delicious lunch at the resident cafe we embarked on our journey back. 15km one way would prove to get both of us pretty sore and not riding more bikes any time soon.
We were so exhausted upon our return back to the hotel that we didn't have the energy to find a restaurant open on this bank holiday so we just ate at the hotel and fell into bed.