Spring mood: Oslo at sunset and night (14.04.)

Today, the weather was cloudy, greyish and a bit drizzly. Considering the smell of the air when I came home in the evening, it probably rained at some point during the day. Not that I cared much as I spent the day at school, mostly in the library. (Speaking of, they will change the access code to the super exclusive master area tomorrow - still need to check the new code online.)

However, on Saturday and Sunday, we got the first real spring weekend. Since I was planning on being out all day on Sunday (once again, there's gonna be a separate blog post about that), I kind of felt I should (try to) be productive on Saturday. Which was a bit sad because the sky was blue - and you could actually leave the house without a jacket without immediately freezing to death. It was basically a Norwegian summer's day, I guess. :P

Anyway, I decided to at least make use of such a nice day in the evening and once again went to Operahuset. Nope, no modern ballet performance this time. I went there to see the sunset from the opera rooftop another time. The last time I went up there, the rooftop was icy and walking on there was a bit of an adventure - remember my slippery path to sunset in early February? It's actually been more than two months already, I just realised. Time flies!

Also, I feel like I should mention the difference in the time of day! When I went to see the sunset in February, it was around 16:30. Now, it was around 20:30!

This time, the rooftop of Operahuset as well as the area around the building were ice-free. And there were so many people walking around or sitting, relaxing, talking, enjoying the view! It seriously felt as if the whole city had just come out of hibernation to enjoy the spring. :)

I had some time before meeting my friends to walk around in a spring night (just strolling around at night would have been unimaginable in January, February and basically also the whole of March - way too cold!). Therefore, I took a lot of photos again and will not refrain from spamming a bit at this point:

Hi swans! ;)

Ice-free rooftop & a lot of people

More people!

People everywhere!

And you know what? For once, all the people in my photos don't bother me. I actually really liked the fact that there were so many people, more than I'd ever seen in the city centre (I'm not talking about crowded T-banes on the way to the skiing and sledging places :P). Oslo suddenly felt so alive. :)

Afterwards, I met up with two friends and we wandered from the central station through the centre (people everywhere!) to Aker brygge and a bit further along the water to Tjuvholmen:

I had actually never continued walking past Aker brygge - I only went there to take the ferry twice. But it's really nice there, so I guess I'll come back during the daytime at some point...

That's Rådhuset, the city hall, in the background.

That's probably Akershus festning, the fortress, in the background?

Ballet performance at Operahuset (09.04.)

Here's the article about the "bit of culture" I promised you in my Bergen trip blog post. And hey, not even delayed by a full week! (I'm not gonna repeat my school issues, you find them in the Bergen article. Plus, I spent most of the Saturday in the library - until they kicked me out due to shit weekend opening hours that are not in any way adapted to the fact that exam time basically has already started.)

So I only came back from Bergen in the afternoon and obviously hadn't been productive (in the academic sense) the whole weekend. Still, I abandoned the plan to be productive on Monday - or at least relax and catch some sleep before the beginning of a block seminar week - when I got the opportunity to go to a ballet performance at Operahuset.

I mean, I had obviously been to the building before, and that more than once - remember my first city explorations, the bus tour BI paid for and my slippery sunset experience at the rooftop? However, going to an actual performance at the Opera House had still been on my to do list.

Going to an opera performance was not really an option: opera in Norwegian? Opera in Italian with Norwegian subtitles? Not sure what would have been worse. Therefore, going to the ballet was kind of our only option. And that's how I ended up experiencing the very first live ballet performance of my life in Oslo! :D

If you're a student, you can get tickets in the lowest price category (standing or possibly limited view) for 100 NOK. That's more or less the same price as getting last minute tickets for the opera in Stuttgart, so a really good deal for Oslo!

And the view from the standing balcony was actually really good:

Obviously, it was not permitted to take photos during the performance. If you're interested: we went to "An evening with Kylián, Forsythe and Øyen". The evening consisted, as you might be able to tell, of three pieces, created by Jiří Kylián, William Forsythe and Alan Lucien Øyen, respectively. If you now picture something like Swan Lake in your mind: nope, that was not it. We're talking about modern ballet - which I really liked, especially the middle part by Forsythe!

If you read the description I linked in which it says "3 hours 10 minutes": it took even longer because at the end of the first part, some part of the stage construction crashed and they had to drop the curtain a bit earlier than planned. Nobody was hurt, but it took forever to bring everything back in order. That gave us the time to enjoy our break with a free drink. (The opera is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, so all guests got a voucher for a drink at the beginning and a cotton bag at the end.)

We also managed to move to the only seats that had remained empty during the first part:

Almost sold out, I'd say.

Unfortunately, the angle for actually seeing the stage was worse there, so I went back to the standing balcony for the last part. Because if I go to a ballet performance, I prefer to be able to see everything that's going on on stage to sitting comfortably. :P

Anyway, overall, it was a really good experience! :)

Bergen weekend trip

Yup, me and this blog are still alive. I just had a bit of a crowded week: I returned from my Bergen trip on Monday afternoon, enjoyed a bit of culture on Monday evening (there's gonna be a separate article about it) - and then, I basically spent the rest of the week at school. And no, I didn't even set a toe into the library! I was at school as in: I had class all week, because I had signed up for a course that was taught as a block seminar by a visiting teacher from the US. Fortunately, it was a course on managing creativity, so we did a bunch of creative and interactive stuff - I heard the course content ended up in multiple stories on Instagram - which kept us from falling asleep at any point between 9:00 and 17:00 from Tuesday to Friday.

Anyway, so on April 6th, I took the plane (I might end up doing more plane trips in this one semester than I've done in the rest of my life so far, will have to count at the end...) to spend a weekend in Bergen. I went there on my own, but unlike my Trondheim Easter break trip, it was not a solo trip again: I visited a Mannheim fellow student of mine who is currently studying at NHH Bergen, BI Oslo's rival school, as I was told by multiple Norwegians in my first week at BI.

Yes, we selfie!

Bergen is more or less on the same latitude as Oslo but at the other side of the Norway in terms of east/west:

Had to use the train station, otherwise Google keeps annoying me by showing hotels...

You probably know it already if you followed my blog, but: Bergen is the second biggest city in Norway. However, "second biggest" in this case means: 278.000 inhabitants - that's still smaller than Mannheim! xD While it's less than half the size of Oslo today (672.000 inhabitants, something between Frankfurt and Stuttgart in terms of Germany), the trading city served as Norway's capital in the 13th century, when Oslo was still insignificant, and was bigger than the now-capital even until the 19th century.

So far for my Wikipedia-based knowledge. Let's move on to my actual trip. My flight was rather uneventful, except for the fact that it was a bit delayed because an earlier flight that day had been cancelled and Norwegian airline had to fit the passengers from that flight into other planes, causing all remaining flights to be fully booked, I think. As I had brought "Harry Potter og de vises stein" with me, that wasn't too bad. (Yup, I'm trying to read Harry Potter in Norwegian, and it's - interesting due to the fact that they changed at least 90% of the names. Dumbledore is called Humlesnurr, like, seriously!)

The actual flight took less than hour and since I was assigned an aisle seat, there was not much to see. I tried to take a few photos when approaching Bergen anyway, because the view was quite nice!

I also got excited when taking "Bybanen", Bergen's "light rail" (their only tram line or something like this) from the airport to the city centre. Since Bergen is known as the city between the seven mountains - stating the obvious: the city centre is surrounded by seven mountains: Lyderhorn, Damsgårdsfjellet, Løvstakken, Ulriken, Fløyen, Rundemannen, and Sandviksfjellet - you can basically see at least one mountain wherever you are:

Meanwhile, I did not get excited by Skyss, the public transport provider in Bergen. Let me list a few bullet points explaining why:

• the Skyss Billett app for buying tickets only seems to work with a Norwegian phone number. At least it refused to send an activation code to my German number - and I tried several times!
• you can only get paper tickets for single tickets or day tickets
• for the week ticket (which is better value for money), you need a travel card, like in Oslo
• but you can buy the travel card only at the customer service center in the city with limited opening hours, not at every single Narvesen or 7-Eleven kiosk at basically any time of the day, like in Oslo
• this is very annoying if you arrive at the airport in the evening

I ended up getting the Bergen Card which serves as a public transport ticket and gives you free entry or discount for a lot of museums and attractions in Bergen. Remarks:

• stupidly, you cannot buy the Bergen Card at the info point at Bergen airport, only pick up a Card you bought online in advance
• officially, you have to purchase the Card at least a day before pick-up
• that's bullshit - I literally purchased mine 2.5 hours before picking it up, and nobody bat an eye

Anyway, that's all the problems I had with Bergen's public transport. As soon as you have a valid ticket, it works quite well. And unlike in Oslo, the airport is in the city centre zone, so you don't have to pay extra to get to/from the airport.

My weekend mostly consisted of Bergen city centre, a tiny hike up Fløyen (Norwegians do their Sunday afternoon walk or daily jogging there...) and some museums. I'm not gonna bother with chronology or dozens of photos of landscape paintings, as I got "spaaam!" as a reaction to my blog posts already several times...

Bryggen

"the dock", the old Hanseatic commercial buildings in the city centre which are on basically every postcard of Bergen. They are actually a Unesco World Heritage sight.

The harbour area

Wtf?

You might be able to identify a vegan topic here. ;)

Hi bird!

The fjord

The bit that's actually publicly accessible. The rest is private property - not the fjord itself, of course, but there's houses directly at the water, so you cannot get there...

Universitet i Bergen

Botanical garden...

... with actual flowers!!!

As usual, the law faculty has the fanciest location.

City centre (misc.)

Wouldn't want to live there when it gets icy in winter. :P

Slightly foggy...

Fløyen

This mountain offers the convenience of a funicular called Fløibanen. And until the end of April, a return ticket for the funicular is included in the Bergen Card (in the touristy season in summer, you only get a discount). However, my host claimed the view feels much better if you earn it by walking up. So that's what we did...

Well, I have to say, the view on the (almost ice-free!!) way up was already quite nice...

... and I got to cuddle with a troll on top of the mountain:

Prepare for a bit of view spam. :P

Another photo of proof

I decided to take Fløibanen down, by the way. Not because I would have died walking down, but mainly for the experience (and because it was included in the Bergen Card).

And now: an overview of the museums I covered during my weekend in Bergen. The weather was typically Bergen* on Sunday, so I did some more then.

Troldhaugen

The place where Edvard Grieg, basically Norway's national composer, lived. It's a bit outside the city centre: you first take Bybanen halfway to the airport and then continue walking for 20 more minutes. Troldhaugen is a museum with an exhibition on Grieg as well the actual villa of the Griegs, the gardens etc. - including the "composer's cabin" directly by the water.

Just follow the street until the veeery end.

Norwegian Hardanger fiddle: 8 strings instead of 4!

Grieg's villa

The grand piano (concerts only in summer)

To the composer's cabin. :D

And a bit of inspirational landscape:

Bryggens Museum

Archeological remains of the beginning of the city and temporary exhibitions, currently Frithjof Sælen (writer, illustrator and member of the resistance in WW2) and West Norwegian paintings.

Pretty landscape - 

- vs. oil rig

And the stave church I didn't visit (it's locked in winter anyway)

KODE

The art museums in Bergen. They are creatively called KODE 1 to KODE 4. I went to KODE 3 and KODE 4. (2 doesn't have any exhibitions at the moment and 1 has silver cutlery and stuff like this, which didn't strike me as particularly exciting.)

KODE 3 is great if you like Edvard Munch ("one of the largest collections of Munch paintings worldwide" - probably right after Oslo :P) or Johan Christian Dahl. Or landscape paintings in general. (KODE 4 also has some.) If you have any idea of my excitement for landscape, no matter if photos or paintings, you can probably imagine what my museum highlight was! (Ok, except for the actual landscape at Troldhaugen, I guess.)

That's Dresden in Germany! :)

Fascinated with sunsets? Yes, I am!

Except for landscape paintings, also places I knew, especially Oslo, got me a bit excited. Don't know why. :D

That's Karl Johan's street, painted by Munch!

Bergenhus festning

Ok, admittedly, the fortress itself is not a museum. But I think it's the best preserved fortress in Norway. And it has several museums and the like.

1. Bergenhus fortress museum

First of all, it's free for everybody! And it has a quite interesting exhibition on the resistance in the Bergen area during WW2.

2. Håkonshallen (Haakon's Hall)

Built and named after Håkon IV of Norway, this was the most important building of the royal residency. The admission was included in the Bergen Card, so I thought I might just as well go there.

3. Rosenkrantztårnet (Rosenkrantz Tower)

Most important renaissance building in Bergen or something like this. Well, currently, it looks like this:

Again, as the admission was included in the Bergen Card, I went there anyway, walked through the exhibitions and made my way to the top. I'm not sure if the rooftop was officially open, but the door wasn't locked, so I just went there.

Narrow staircase

#hashtagsareeverywhere :D

Train journey back to Oslo

So, again, the train journey takes longer, almost 7 hours in this case, and costs more - but, you know, the view. Although it was still quite foggy when I took the train back to Oslo on Monday morning. Still, it was quite impressive to see how much snow there still was/is in the interior of the country compared to the ice-free Bergen (maritime climate) and the almost ice-free Oslo (because, yes, spring is coming!).

Very foggy...

___

* If you're still wondering what kind of grammatical construction that is or what it means: I used Bergen as an adjective, meaning: the weather Bergen is famous for. It has the reputation to be the rainiest city of Europe.