Well, here I am, on the other side of this trip, packing once again. Going home feels pretty much like traveling to Oslo felt: unreal. I can't believe that in less than 24 hours I'll be back in the US. I have more stuff (how is it all going to fit?!?), certainly, but more importantly I also have lots of awesome memories. Thanks everyone who I've met on this trip, you're all amazing people, and good luck to you in your future!
Without further ado, I present final sightseeing pictures!
The first museum was the Kulterhistorisk museum, which had a very cool exhibit showing Norwegian prehistory from the Stone to Viking ages. It's a moose!
Most of the signs were in Norwegian, but who cares when there are soft sculptures of Odin and the Norns?
There were lots of other cool exhibits, too, such as the Egyptian mummies. This is looking inside an empty coffin layer: it's painted inside, which I did not know was done. Usually, they're full of, you know, mummy.
Next, on Saturday I went to the Stortinget, the Norwegian Parliament house, for a tour. Here is the inside of the main parliamentary chambers:
Then, the Mini Bottle Gallery! Lots of small glass bottles in all shapes and sizes, including this one:
That's right, a version of the "Dogs Playing Poker" bottle.
Oh, and a slide down into the basement, which I definitely used:
The Hjemmefrontmuseum, about Norway during WWII:
The Kunstindustrimuseet (museum of design):
Ah, the 60's. I want an egg chair!
The Botanic gardens, specifically in Victoriahuset, is a great place to visit in the winter, if you miss the sun:
In the same park are the Geologisk museum and Zoologisk museum (both part of the Natural History museum).
Glacial skurring and a pothole, from centuries of passing ice and water.
Ida, the oldest complete fossilized primate:
Look, it's the littoral zone!
...and a walrus:
Then, of course, I went to see The Hobbit (Hobbiten, in Norwegian). Contrary to most European countries, in Norway most imported films are shown in their original language, with Norwegian subtitles (unless they're kid's movies, which are dubbed). I loved it!
That was yet another excuse to put another letter in my titles.
Anyway, I went to Sweden on Wednesday, and after figuring out where my hostel was, I went to the Vasamuseet!
Here's me in front of the ship:
What, it's blurry, you say? Tough luck, it was cold and snowy outside, and this is what my camera decided to do. Eventually, though, it unfogged:
It's BIG-especially when you first come in, when you're on a lower level.
The ship was commissioned by King Gustav II Adolf, the king of Sweden, in the 1600's in his fight against Poland in the 30 Year's War (ah, Western Civ., good times). It was supposed to sail off and fight, like this:
But instead, it did this...
...on August 10, 1628.
Why? Because of this:
There was not enough ballast, and the ship was designed with towering beautiful carvings and 2 gun decks that had to stay above water, so the ship tipped and sank in the harbor. Approximately 30 people died. The Vasa was forgotten for 333 years...
Until the 1960's, when researcher Anders Franzén rediscovered her, and it was brought to the surface again.
This was an awesome museum, with neat sections on the conservation process, how the Vasa was recovered, the symbolism of the carvings, and the people onboard. Also, a section on daily life, which brings me to backgammon, or brädspel in Swedish.
Swedish, as far as I could tell, has three more letters than the English alphabet: å, ä (don't know how this is pronounced-like æ?), and ö (like ø). Also, I saw é, but that wasn't used very often.
Anyway, next I to Free Tour Stockholm, for a tour of the Old Town. This, by the way, is what the snow situation was:
This was a very fun tour, with all the blood and treachery inherent in history. Also, some very pretty sights, including the narrowest alley in Old Town (they're waiting for the lamp in one building's wall to touch the other side):
Also, the tiniest public statue, called Järnpojken, or the Iron Boy. You're supposed to rub his head for good luck.
Next, to the T-bane! In Stockholm they're decorated, including the one at Rådhuset St., with fake archaeology:
I did more museums in Oslo this weekend, but this post is quite long already, so that will come later!
Well, it's December, and you know what that means: time to break out those Christmas decorations! Also, it's chilly here now: today it is -11°C (about 12°F). Good stuff.
So, in a break from the studying, I went and made Christmas decorations yesterday:
I spent some time last week checking out a couple more museums here in Oslo. First, the Fram museum!
The museum space is pretty much filled by this ship, which makes it look enormous, though if you imagine it out on the ice, it probably seemed quite fragile (aka "the Christmas tree effect").
The Fram was used in both North and South pole exploration; first by Fridtjof Nansen, who in 1893 set out to deliberately freeze this ship into the pack ice and drift along. Nansen was a scientist, and wanted to prove that there was an E-W current. Everyone thought he was nuts.
The Fram was specifically designed to survive-it's kind of hard to see in this picture, but it's really round, so that when the ice squeezed, the ship would pop up rather than be crushed-and it worked!
There was a 2nd Fram expedition that set out to do more scientific measurements.
Now, we come to my favorite part-the race to the South Pole-I've read before about this, but always from an English-speaking perspective: so, Shackleton and Scott, who both failed (one more spectacularly). The museum currently has a temporary exhibit about Scott's expedition, which relied on ponies and motorized sledges, both of which died. The horrible end revealed in their diaries contrasts sharply with Amundsen.
Roald Amundsen, after finding out that someone has allegedly reached the North Pole, decided to stick the Fram in the ice again for a drift across the North Pole. However, sometime between that point and leaving, he decided to try for the South Pole. Get this, though-he didn't tell anyone on board! Now, you may rightly wonder-wouldn't people notice when they started going south? The original plan was to go south, though, past the tip of South America and get stuck in the ice on the other side of the Americas, so no one noticed. Here's a photo of the Fram before leaving:
Recognize that fun little building? Anyway, Amundsen told everyone of the change of plans (Hey guys, yeah, since we're down here, do you mind if we take a side trip to the South Pole....?) and they set up camp at the Bay of Whales.
They had a steam bath, too. This guy's really happy about it.
Also, funny pictures:
Anyway, Amundsen's group made it to the Pole a month ahead of Scott, probably because they relied more on sled dogs who were used to these types of conditions. Also, less reliance on new technology and a greater ability to adapt to conditions (for example, shaving down the sleds so they were lighter).
Like any great museum, the Fram Polar Museum has a mummy, and an indoor snow cave-impressively chilly in there:
Next, to the tropics: the Kon-Tiki museum!
This is museum dedicated to the projects of Thor Heyerdahl- a Norwegian anthropologist His most famous project was his voyage across the Pacific on the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, trying to show that it was possible for South Americans to colonize the Polynesian islands. Of course, since the 1940's, genetic studies have show that the Polynesians came from East Asia, but I wouldn't say that too loudly! Heyerdahl also rode another raft, the Ra I and II across the Atlantic to show a possible connection between the Mediterranean and Central America (there were 2 because the first one sank). This museum was built back when he was still alive, so it's very Heyerdahl-positive. It also smells nice-like sweet lumber.
Here's the Kon-Tiki:
In other news, I learned how to make Austrian knödel (knodel-pronounced like canoodle). Basically, fruit-filled potato dumplings-these have strawberries or peaches in them. See how I snuck a new letter into that title there-yeah!
This post will be short; I just wanted to mark the day when I only have one month left in Oslo, Norway. So, I've been here 4 months, already. This seems very surreal to me: I don't feel like I've been here that long. In my mind, the first week of wandering confusedly around campus and trying to figure out labels in the grocery store was just a few weeks ago, and then I have only foggy memories of all the intervening months.
On holidays: Halloween is beginning to be more widely celebrated in Norway (example: the Nille stores-think dollar stores for my friends back home-sold Halloween candy, buckets, and costumes), but is still not as huge a deal as it is in the U.S. On the downside of no Halloween, I started getting Chrismas (Jul) ads in the mail back in October, so no more complaints from my family about Christmas ads starting too early ever again! This coming week is Thanksgiving in the U.S., which means that I would be seeing both sides of my family if I were back home. This means it's time to think about buying some more phone credits so I can say hi to everyone.
One thing that I don't have to miss about Thanksgiving break is the "break" from school work, since 2 out of 3 of my classes has finished already. The biology class continues for 3 more weeks, but now I'll have a lot more free time! As I noticed at the beginning of the school year, university classes in Norway don't start and stop at the same time (unlike in the US, where we get one magical stress week of exams). I start my first exam next week: a take-home essay question for Objects and Identities in the Viking Age. Then the next week is my first written exam-4 hours! I've already written and passed both of my qualifying essays for those classes.
Anyway, I plan on checking out some new museums in Oslo, and to all my family and friends back home: Happy Thanksgiving!
So, I have always wanted to see the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights (actually, for that matter, I've probably also wanted to see the Sourthern Lights-Aurora Australis, but am much less likely to see those). So, I think I've gone out 4 or 5 times to try and spot them in the furthest place from city lights that I can reach by walking (since the T-bane system stops at midnight, and there are few night busses on weeknights)-Sognsvann. So, let it be known that on November 12, 2012 (awww, cute number coordination) I may have "seen" the Northern Lights for the first time. I say "seen" because someone else took a picture the same time that I was there, and it definitely shows the lights, although they must have been faint, since all I saw on the horizon was greenish haze.
This was fairly unimpressive, so I went out again on Wednesday night, since the Kp index (which predicts the strength of the aurora) was high. Unfortunately, it was foggy/cloudy, so these are pictures of the northern horizon:
So, that might be Northern Lights! The sky on the left side was also pretty reddish, which I couldn't get a good picture of, and it wasn't the sunset, because the sun sets at 4pm by this point. Anyway, checking on my aurora-monitoring sites, I find out that Michigan (!) got really rare red auroras (http://spaceweather.com/). Meanwhile, I'm stuck here where it is resolutely cloudy, when I know cool stuff is going on up in the atmosphere. GAAAHHHHH!!!!!
Anyway, when the weather is clear you have to get outside and enjoy it-I'm beginning to appreciate the wonderful weather during the summer and the Norwegian compulsion to be outside as much as possible when it's nice.
So, here's the lake:
Fun fact: I finally took the time to translate some of the green signs along the trail. Apparently, there used to be a croft farm by the lake, where in 1865 they kept a horse (en hest), four cows (fire kuer), two sheep (to faar), and poultry (fjærkre). It was shut down due to water restrictions in about 1914: now only these foundations are left:
Basically, I listed off those animals so I could add fjærkre to this post title-I was looking through my posts, and I noticed that I had used every extra letter except "æ", which I thought needed fixing. Now, I'm no expert at bird identification (as my ornithology professor can attest to-I tended to call anything small and brownish a sparrow), but I think this is a Common Goldeneye:
This should be a fun weekend: I plan on going to buy tickets to see The Hobbit on December 12th tomorrow-yes, you read that right, the movie comes out 2 days earlier than in the US! Ha!
Also, this:
Lord of the Rings marathon-this was the original way that I first watched the films, and I've been told that this will be the extended versions-I'll let you all know how to shout "You shall not pass" and my personal favorite quote: "Until at last, I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin upon the mountainside!"
Last weekend I went to the main library branch, and got a library card: yay, books! This is a statue of Deichman, the founder of the library system:
In case you're wondering: I think that's his goatee, though it does look an awful lot like this statue is a cannibal who hasn't quite finished off that thumb.
On the way to the library, I passed the square where bombs set off on July 22, 2011, destroyed government buildings and killed 7 people. In the same terrorist attack, over 80 people were killed at a political-party based summer camp. This stand holding those day's papers has been left up, and the surrounding buildings are still being repaired:
The attacker, Anders Behring Breivik, was a right-wing extremist who believed that Norway was threatened by an influx of Muslim immigrants. This summer was the one-year memorial of the tragedy. After 9/11, American security and cultural climate changed drastically-I don't know how much has changed in Norway, only having experienced the after-effects. People do awful things in the name of "right".
That day, I got a package from home: peanut butter, popcorn, and Reese's-joy!
It's very surreal seeing all these things telling/reminding people to go vote-mostly because I voted weeks ago. In fact, I had to prepare for voting back in August (wow, it's November already, how long have I been here?), because I had to fill out my absentee ballot request form. Then, I was sent the ballot, and then I had to send it in 2 weeks ago, at the latest. I think it's actually a bit easier to vote when you can send in an absentee ballot-there's no need to get time off from work or school when the polling places are open to go vote (and, for my international friends, polling places are only open until 6pm-not that late!). Plus, my district's voting station is in a left-turn only retirement community, making for interesting traffic jams. Finally, I don't have to deal with the political mudslinging ads on the tv, or constant robot calls. At home, the week before an election you don't answer the phone before the answering machine picks up. Stop trying to foist your opinions on me-repetition will not make me vote for someone. It's much more relaxing voting from home. There is one drawback, though: no stickers.
This was my first chance to vote in a presidential election; very exciting! Lots of other students here are interested in the outcome of the election-one person today asked me if I knew when the results would be known-probably very early morning/middle of the night. However, several of my friends say that they've never voted in their political elections, even though they could-different systems/expectations, I suppose.
Anyway-Chocolate! Today I went on a tour of the Freia chocolate factory. No Oompa-Loompas, though we did have to wear some stylish coats and head gear:
But, I'm getting ahead of myself-first, we went through Freia-Land, a tour through the origins and history of chocolate and the Freia brand. It was originally named after the owner's wife, though now the company is owned by Kraft. When the company wanted to sell in Sweden, they found that the name was already used for a different brand, so in Sweden it's called Marabou.
Also, there was a time machine. And a series of hilarious commercials for Japp, one type of candy bar-sort of like a 3 Musketeer's with a layer of caramel:
Is that song stuck in your head yet?
You also get to see a series of Munch paintings (not as depressed as the Scream): according to the tour guide, the workers were not pleased with the paintings, complaining about, for instance, the lack of eyes:
You can sort of see their point: I mean, there's 4 people, but only 1 eye.
Anyway, as part of the tour, you also get to make your own chocolate bar. Here's mine:
In case you can't tell, that stick figure is definitely a skier, something which I hope to do before I leave. This hope is looking promising, especially since it looked like this today:
I spent most of the way back home cradeling a pumpkin, but I still saw this nice sunset:
