Natural History Museum - for free!

As you might remember from my "1 week, 3 museums"-post, Nasjonalgalleriet is free on Thursdays. But The National Gallery is not the only museum for which you don't have to pay any admission fee once per week. (And don't ask me why it's Thursday.) When googling free things in Oslo - which is a quite relevant search request in a city like Oslo -, you'll find out that there are actually at least three museums you get into for free if you go there on a Thursday.

One of them is the Naturhistorisk Museum, the Natural History Museum. As you might have guessed from the name, it's Norway's largest and oldest museum for natural history. It consists of a geological exhibition (stones), a zoological exhibition (animals - no living ones though, since it's not a zoo!), and a botanical garden (plants).

You can probably imagine when we went there: yesterday!

After finally having found the entrance, which was a bit tricky due to the fact that the museum buildings were in the middle of the botanical garden which was surrounded by a fence, we focused on the zoological exhibition building. The geological exhibition is currently closed, and as for the botanical gardens - well, there's not a lot to see at the moment...

So I have yet another item for my "to do in spring"-list. Which might turn out to be a "only to start with in April"-list, since you can't be sure when spring will come to Oslo. Not anytime soon, I guess. :D

(On my way to the T-Bane this week.)

Anyway, so we checked out the zoological exhibition until the museum closed, which unfortunately was at 4 p.m. already. As I don't really have anything relevant to comment (I dropped out of biology class when I was 16 and only continued with chemistry and physics), I'll mainly add a bunch of photos here.

A (tiny) T-rex, like everywhere!

In the middle of zoological stuff: a few stones, supposedly the "highlights of the geological exhibition".

Looks like lemon candy, doesn't it? :D

Funny idea - sadly, they messed up "whose" and "who's"...

The signs say "valid in the whole of Svalbard" and "DANGEROUS! Don't touch!"

Just in case you're wondering: yes, there's a lot of plastic in the exhibition habitats. That's because there's a lot of plastic in the real wildlife habitats, and the museum wants to draw people's attention to this growing problem (click here for Google images to illustrate the scope of plastic in the ocean).

In the Naturhistorisk Museum, a separate part of the exhibition was dedicated to the topic of plastic. Unfortunately, this belonged to the minor part of the museum that was mainly in Norwegian. Here's the only sign with information in English that I could find:

And something funny to end this post with: we found a Trump bird! xD

Debrief: it's a golden pheasant - but that's way less funny.

Tiny hike around Kragstøtten/Voksenkollen

First of all, this excursion did not exactly turn out as planned. But this way, I'm able to present some new "winter wonderland" photos to you!

So the original idea was to walk up to Kragstøtten, which refers to a statue of the engineer and road commissioner Hans Hagerup Krag as well as the location. The location is supposed to offer a really nice view over Oslo, so it is mostly about the viewpoint.

If you're interested about the location of this weekend's (de)tour, there you go:

Since Kragstøtten is quite far up in the Holmenkollen hills (which makes sense, because Krag constructed the roads in Holmenkollen and Voksenkollen), you get to take the T-bane line 1 in the direction of Frognerseteren for quite a while. All the way up to Voksenkollen T-bane station, the second last stop, to be precise. But since the view over the hills is quite nice, that's not really a problem.

The issue was just that the view was a bit too "wintry" today. "Wintry" as in: it had been snowing all morning in Oslo city. It think it stopped while we were on the way to Voksenkollen, but at the same time, the further up we travelled, the foggier it got. So when we finally got off, the metro station looked like this:

Yes, this is an actual metro station in Oslo!

We had to wait at the station for a bit, so I took some more photos there:

I really liked the atmosphere the fog created, but you've probably figured out the issue by now: under these circumstances, there was not much of a view over Oslo... We still made our way to Kragstøtten, since it's less than 2 kilometres away from Voksenkollen station (there's a reason why I called it "tiny hike"). It was kind of interesting having the statue appear in the fog at some point, but yeah, we definitely need to come back there for the view - preferably in spring.

To be honest, I didn't even take a photo of the sculpture (just ask Google for help), because I got distracted at this point. You wonder why? Well, it was about how we would walk down again from Kragstøtten. Not the way we had come from, just following the street, obviously!

Instead, we went downhill off-path, basically right into the snow. But don't worry, there was kind of a path already, showing that somebody had taken this way before us.

You just had to pass this snow barricade...

... and then, the winter wonderland began!

We ended up in a quite expensive residential area - which you could tell from the fact that we did not only have to get out of the way of Tesla cars (that's pretty standard here), but also Porsche... From there, we made our way to Voksenlia, the closest metro station.

Random photos from the way:

What might happen to your vehicle in Norway's winter. :D

Having made back our way to the city centre, I introduced the others the others to Kulturhuset, where this month's Vegankaketreff happened to be going on. ;) This time, I had actually taken the time to bake something myself.

I think my muesli banana cookies were more or less the healthiest contribution to the buffet - except for the grapes one person brought. xD

Photo from Vegankaketreff

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