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.

Oslo Free Walking Tour (05.02.)

At last, here comes the separate article about the Oslo Free Walking Tour I promised you on Monday.

As already mentioned, this tour takes place at 10 a.m. everyday. However, my friend and me thought it would be good idea to do this tour at the beginning of her stay in Oslo. It just turned out to be the coldest day ever since I arrived here - which might be the reason why none of my fellow students wanted to join for the tour. :D Anyway, we did the tour and survived, although it was cold and slippery which caused the tour to be even longer than usual, I guess.

I'll try and tell you as much about Oslo as I remember in the following. (I tried taking notes on my phone and taking photos with my camera simultaneously, but since you have to take your gloves off for both activities, my documentation is somewhat incomplete...)

The tour started at The Tiger, which is a tiger statue at Oslo central station.

It's actually huge!

Background info: Oslo's nickname is Tigerstaden, i.e. The Tiger City. The name goes back to Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, who called Oslo like this in a poem, basically saying Oslo is dangerous.

From The Tiger, we made our slippery way to Operahuset.

It's supposed to be a glacier, and the people on it represent penguins. :D

The view of the Oslofjord you have next to / behind the opera actually inspired Edvard Munch to his nowadays best known work, Skrik - The Scream. When the sky turned red (at sunset, I assume), he heard "the scream of nature" there.

Bonus info: the business area around the opera, with PwC and the like, is called Barcode Area. That's because the buildings alternate in being tall and short. There's currently construction works going on, so there was no point in taking a photo.

Then we went to the "new" city centre. The old one had burnt down in fires, so the Danish king Christian IV decided to start a new city in an area that's today called Kvadraturen. Like this:

Pointer: "The new city will be HERE!"

The orange thing in the background is the old town hall. Today, it it a restaurant. According to our tour guide, "everything turns into restaurants in Oslo!" Not sure why though, as eating out is not exactly cheap in Norway...

Speaking of colours: there's a code to the colours of buildings in Oslo - or at least, there was in former times. Red was cheap, yellow was medium, and white was expensive. So the fact that the palace (for photos, go to my first city exploration) is yellow instead of white is actually a political statement!

After briefly talking about Akershus Festning (fortress), we made our unsteady way to Rådhuset, Oslo's city hall.

It was seriously too cold to take another (better) photo.

Once inside to get warm again, our tour guide told us about this quite impressive building. She called it church-like, which is quite accurate, and explained that it's partly about worshipping the government (religion/church is not so much of a thing in Norway).

There's also a lot of wall-painting upstairs (we actually came back for this the other day, because the upper floor was closed on Monday due to some event):

However, what made the city hall most church-like was probably the instrument!

No, they don't have a regular organ there like churches - they have something like a bell organ! I looked it up, and it's actually called carillon. The carillonist of the city hall plays a melody every full hour. They even have a schedule online, so you can choose which melody you like most and go to Rådhuset accordingly!

The current schedule:

Anyway, we had to leave the warm city hall again at some point to cover Nationaltheatret (the National Theatre) ...

... the Grand Hotel from 1874, when nobody believed a hotel at this place could be a success ...

(Michael Jackson, Madonna and a bunch of other stars have stayed here.)

... and, last but not least, Stortinget, the Parliament:

(The high number of windows stands for transparency in politics.)

Let me end with a piece of information I have no photo for: 30% of the cars in Oslo are electric - basically every third car you see on the streets! You can recognise them by their licence plate: it says "EL" at the beginning, for electric. However, they ran out of EL at some point, so it's also EK now. :D

Akershus festning & ferry-cruising in the Oslofjord

Although it was quite cold today, again something like -10°, we pretty much spent all day outside today (or at least the part of the day where there was daylight, as sunset is still just past 4:30 p.m. these days...).

We started with the Free Walking Tour Oslo that takes place at 10 a.m. everyday. I don't really have the time to do the tour justice, so there's going to be separate article about the tour at some later point - I promise!

In the afternoon (we obviously had to go back to my place in between to warm up again), we first went to Akershus festning, which had been a "and over here, you can see..."-part of the tour. If you dare going up to the medieval fortress/castle - it is icy and slippery, like everywhere in Oslo these days -, you are rewarded with a very nice view of the Oslofjord.

Just a bit icy...

Hi seagull!

However, we didn't have a lot of time, because we had to catch the last ferry from Aker Brygge, or rather its pier. The ferry to where, you might be wondering? To a bunch of islands in the Oslofjord and back to Aker Brygge. There are different ferry lines which are part of Oslo's public transport system. So if you have a 24 hour, 7 day, or 30 day ticket, you can just hop on board.

We took the ferry line B1, as this seems to be the only one that's running all year. The other lines often only run in summer, which makes sense, since the islands seem to be popular local recreation destinations - and you can't really swim and barbecue at this time of the year (the perks of only visiting Oslo for a week in February :D).

So we got on the last ferry at 4 p.m. and started our round trip looking like this: Aker Brygge > Hovedøya > Bleikøya > Gressholmen > Lindøya øst > Lindøya vest > Nakholmen > Hovedøya > Aker Brygge (don't ask me to tell which island is which on the photos)

That's Akershus festning, by the way.

Just a bit of ice...

If you're wondering what was dirty, my camera lens or the window of the ferry, then the answer is quite simple: both. But hey, we got a tiny bit of sunset glow while we spent "sunset" on the ferry!