One week, three museums, and a bunch of weather conditions

So what else did we do this week?

Well, as already mentioned, I had classes from time to time - on three days, one of them being Friday, to be precise... Since my friend didn't feel like joining for management classes, she went to explore Oslo on her own during these times. That means, she did not only visit places I had been to before, like Sognsvann, but also places I haven't yet managed to visit (need to catch up on these places at some point!).

However, we also managed to do some stuff together - which wasn't limited to free movies and quizzes in the university context! We went to three different museums as well:

Nobel Fredssenter (Nobel Peace Center)

You might remember from my Stockholm article, the Nobel Peace Prize is the only Nobel Prize that is not awarded in Stockholm, but in Oslo! Clearly, Oslo needs to have a museum on this topic, too!

When we went there on Wednesday and wanted to buy tickets, the lady at the reception told us that it's a bit of a mess at the moment: they are renovating the souvenir store and getting a new exhibition on the ground floor ready (opening next week). That is why only the first floor is currently accessible. However, the upside of this mess was: we didn't have to pay the admission fee, but were able to visit the accessible part of the museum free of charge!

A quite big part of the first floor is dedicated to the current Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In 2017, the prize was awarded to ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, a coalition of NGOs in many countries.

The ICAN logo

The "heart of the museum" is The Nobel Field. It's a field of screens representing all laureates:

On each screen, you find information about one laureate. I just "happened" to take a picture of the screen showing Amnesty International, who were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977:

(The prize was awarded to organizations quite often, by the way. For example, UNICEF received it in 1965 and Doctors Without Borders in 1999.)

22. juli-senteret (22 July Information Center)

Basically directly after finishing the Nobel Peace Center, we continued with 22. juli-senteret (FYI: their website is in Norwegian only, but the center itself contains information in Norwegian and English).

If you're confused by the name: do you remember the two terror attacks in Oslo and Utøya carried out by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011? You might not remember the exact date, but here, everybody does. In Norway, the attacks are actually referred to as "22 July".

22. juli-senteret is a governmental information center in the government building - where the first part of the attack, the bomb detonation, took place.

I did not really take photos in there, as I felt it would have been inappropriate. (In the first of the five rooms, where the photos of the 77 victims are shown - mostly teenage members of Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking, the youth organization of Norway's Labour Party - photographing was obviously forbidden anyway.) But I'd like to end this section with this statement:

Nasjonalgalleriet (The National Gallery)

As I only had class on Thursday afternoon and did not feel like going to school earlier in order to deal with my readings, we managed to go to the National Gallery on Thursday morning (or rather before noon: our journey was slightly delayed, since for the first time ever since I arrived in Oslo, the metro wasn't running - and that was due to technical issues, not the weather, I have to mention!).

Why did it have to be Thursday anyway, you're wondering? Because on Thursdays, Nasjonalgalleriet is free for everybody!

The National Gallery is part of Nasjonalmuseet, Norway's national and largest museum for art. In there, you can find paintings, drawings and sculptures from ancient times to the 1950s. Especially fans of Edvard Munch will probably like it there (although there's a separate Munch Museum in Oslo, too).

You can probably imagine in front of which picture people were standing all the time? Of course, The Scream:

I guess you can take the "funniest" photos in front of this one (or at least think you're funny when you imitate the figure's facial expression while posing in front of the painting), but hey, Munch did some other interesting paintings as well!

For everybody's general education:

Madonna

The Sick Child

The Dance of Life

And finally one that's less famous but quite entertaining:

The Day After

Meanwhile, I still like landscape paintings more - fortunately, there are also quite a few of them in the National Gallery:

And the obligatory comment on the weather:

After almost freezing and/or slipping to death at the beginning of the week (the conditions of the paths seriously become a health hazard if there's freezing temperatures without snow for a while), it finally started snowing again on Thursday. I think, this week was the only one when I was actually looking forward to snow - and finally being able to walk again without being constantly afraid of falling. However, the temperatures briefly exceeded the freezing point, causing part of the snow to melt, and then went back to below zero soon afterwards - which made the paths icy yet again... (You know it's slippery when you can watch locals struggling to not fall!) But since there has been more snow yesterday as well as today, it's quite ok again at the moment.