| Oslo was our first port of call. We had a half-day tour which
started at the Viking Ship Museum. The museum houses three Viking ships
and other artifacts which were found buried along the Oslo fjord. The ships
are all around 1200 years old. |
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I don't remember what this is anymore, but I liked it so I took a
picture of it. I must have thought its head looked a little bit feline! |
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Also known as "Longships", these things were....long! It
was impossible to get a picture of an entire ship, even from above. |
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| Next we visited the Kon-Tiki Museum. This museum houses two
of Thor Heyerdahl's rafts, the Kon-Tiki and the Ra II, as well as photos
and other items from his expeditions. |
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This is the Kon-Tiki, which Heyedahl sailed from Peru to Polynesia.
It is made of balsa wood and although I didn't get any pictures of it, the
raft is displayed so that one can go down a couple of flights of stairs
and see the bottom of it. I don't think the bat was original. |
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This is Ra II, a papyrus boat he built to sail from Morocco to the
Caribbean in the late '60s. I didn't get a good picture of the sail but
it has a giant sun on it, Ra being the Egyptian sun god. There was a "Ra
I" but...it sank. |
| Our final stop was the beautiful Vigeland Park. Sculptor Gustav
Vigeland designed this public park on land given to him for this purpose
by the city. It has nearly 200 sculptures containing over 600 separate figures.
The theme is the cycle of life, even though from the looks of my photos,
I was most interested in the babies! |
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Mom bein' a Mom! |
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In the center of the park is a monolith on a plateau. This is the
view looking down from there at the fountain and the iron gate, and the
city and mountains in the distance. |
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Mom and Dad posing for me...hellooooooo down there! |
| There was so much to see in that park that I barely scratched
the surface, photo-wise. There is a museum on the premises that we did not
visit, and a gift shop that we also did not visit. I wish we had because
I would have liked a book of pictures from here. But, the next best thing
(or maybe better) is a web search! These two sites looked good:
www.griegforlag.no/touristmagazine/portraits/Vigeland.html and go.to/Vigeland/
After the tour, Mom and Dad went back to the ship, while Rory and I did
a little browsing in the shops at the pier, and then walked around the
city. Our original plan was to walk to the National Gallery so that Rory
could see one of her favorite paintings, "The Scream", but we decided
not to venture quite that far.
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I had seen the tigers from the bus and wanted a closer look!
Oslo was celebrating its 1000th anniversary and the tiger was the mascot
because a poem (whose author I forget) compared the city to a tiger.
All the tigers were in the same position, with that raised paw. Each
was a different color. The one that looks neon red in the photos was bright
hot pink in person, which was why Rory posed with it!
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We were docked within walking distance of this fortress.
These photos were taken from the ship. |
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| We had a full day of touring and walking around, but we weren't
too tired for a little fun. |
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Rory bonded with some of the marine life on the ship. |
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Our home away from home...the view of our cabin from the doorway.
It has that cozy, lived-in look! |
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The nautical term for this area is, "the head." It's definitely less
glamourous than the restroom we showed you earlier!
Those Holland America towels look nice and thirsty, but they weren't all
that great (or that big), so...we didn't steal any. |
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Aaaahhh, rest and relaxation! |
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We had an Amy-Beth Day in Oslo. I bought two CDs and Rory bought candy! |
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We don't know Norwegian but that cup looks interesting anyway. |
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Somewhere there is a videotape from a trip to London. There is footage
of me in our hotel room experiencing a Flake bar for the first time. That
must have been Rory's inspiration for this photo. |