Street Art Tour with ESN Oslo

Or: stuff you do instead of catching up with your readings...

Yay, ESN Oslo actually does stuff except for showing cliché US movies like Easy A on Wednesday! (Yes, we did go to the movie screening anyway, because it was free...)

So for today (with a glance at the time: yesterday), ESN Oslo offered a free street art tour. And as you can imagine, since it was Sunday - and a free tour - around 50 people showed up. Or something like this, I'm not extremely good at estimating. The meeting point was at the University of Oslo's Faculty of Law, which is somehow special and therefore not on Blindern campus, but close to the National Theatre.

The meeting point led to a bit of confusion at the beginning: "This is a street - but where is the art?" It turned out that the actual tour did not start there. Instead, we had to walk for about 20 minutes. Which made people wonder why we had met at the Faculty of Law in the first place. Probably because it made a nice scenery for the group picture...

Anyway, so we made our way to Grünerløkka. That was not the biggest surprise to me, since I had been there exactly three weeks before and had seen a bit of street art already.

However, the bit of background info I remember: only a few years ago, in 2014/15, the Green Party made the plan to turn Oslo into Norway's street art capital. Since then, graffitis have been allowed/tolerated. Most street art can be found in Grünerløkka - surprise, surprise! - and Tøyen. The latter one was not covered by the tour, unfortunately, so I might have to go there on my own at some point.

The tour itself was a bit confusing, which might have been due to the fact that only one of the ESN people functioned as tour guide. Splitting up the group might have been better than having a bunch of exchange students follow this one guy...

But yeah, I managed to take some photos of street art I hadn't seen before.

"Strange Cats"and our tour guide

Norway's milk chocolate brand...

Art hidden behind a wall...

"Fish"

Something by Alice Pasquini

Alice Pasquini actually seems to be famous (I have no clue about graffiti artists) and had deals with Canon, Nike, Microsoft and some more companies. Not sure I like her "feminine mentality" artwork though - that's at least what our (male) tour guide called it...

If you want to check out Oslo's street art yourself, there's even an interactive map on it.

Oh, and I saved my personal highlight of the tour until last. At the (actual) beginning of the tour, we had a bit of time to check out the Sunday market around Blå. And today, there was a stand with vegan cake!

 

I got a piece of chocolate cake immediately and returned for a chia muffin after the tour, I must admit. But hey, it was a one-time event, so I had to! :D