Fast but not that Furious

Denmark and Sweden so far had been super expensive countries and Oslo looked like it was going to end up being a similar if not worse situation. With that in mind we threw caution to the wind and bought a city pass giving us access to public transport and 30 museums for one price. This started the race to get our money's worth, and boy did we

Our two days in Oslo started with taking advantage of our parking on the fjord and having a swim. Were it not for our jelly fish visitor it would've been a very refreshing start to the day

Our museum crawl started with the historical museum and it's very cool viking exhibit. A personal favourite was this reconstruction of a grave chariot. Different norse gods had their chariots drawn by different animals including Freyja's drawn by 2 cats. How she got them to go in one direction let alone pull a chariot I think is more astonishing than the existence of Gods.

These Vikings had big heads

We moved onto the Viking Planet with lots of very fancy techy exhibits including some funky VR. Keeping up the pace we headed out and past the city hall (pictured). This is incidentally where the nobel peace prize awards ceremony is held and which was won by *checks notes* not Trump in 2025. 

Museum 3 was a real whistle stop tour of the National Museum (art gallery) including the Scream, a Van Gogh, and some very silly Viking mosaics

Wanting to get the most from our passes we popped into the nobel peace prize museum. Amongst the cool exhibits was an actual medallion

Our final museum of the day was the Norwegian Resistance Museum. It's always very fun reading about Norway's resistance to the Nazis during occupation. Especially involving the comically incompetent and hated puppet dictator called Quisling. 

We hopped onto the train back to Moira safe in the knowledge that our 5 museums today alone would've been more expensive than the pass. Our drive over to our second park up in Norway also went in a tunnel under a fjord which was an experience. Driving down 134m to the bottom of the fjord felt akin to driving to the underworld

Day two started with a train into the centre (for free yay) and a walk down the main road including past this awesome parliament building (the Stortinget). Possibly my favourite parliament building so far after Budapest's

After a nice lunch and some wandering we headed up to the Oslo city museum. Top fact: the city was called Oslo from the 1300s but after a fire leveled it in 1624 the then Danish overlord (Christian IV) moved the new city several miles to the west and called it Christiana. This situation remained until 1924 when a now independent and increasingly nationalist Norway renamed the city Oslo

We followed this up with a ferry (again free yay) across the fjord past the Arkus castle (incidentally the site of Quislings execution in 1945)

Our ferry dropped us at the museum island (although more of a peninsula than an island) with 3 very exciting maritime museums. Museum 2 of the day had one of the Gorkstad ships: a burial collection of several of the most impressive Viking ships found to date. 

Annoyingly, and a fact oft repeated by museums around the city, the two most impressive ships discovered were stored at the new Viking museum to open in 2027. Second trip to Oslo in the works...?

Our second sea themed museum was the Fram which was the specially designed artic and antarctic ship that was built for the famous expeditions including Admunsun's to the South Pole. Very mighty and cool. Very stinky ship.

It was specially designed to survive in the ice after it had gotten stuck which was the plan for the expedition to the north. After sailing north the Fram got iced into the arctic and used the drift ice for a free ride north. This was achieved by shaping the hull more curved so the encroaching ice couldn't pinch the bottom and it would just be forced up out of the water

Our final and 9th museum of the 2 days was the Kon Tiki Museum documenting the history of 6 men who built a traditional Peruvian raft. They were trying to prove it was possible to sail across the Pacific in the type of raft and therefore that the Peruvian culture could have had contact with the Polynesians. Crazy idea but all 6 survived (although the parrot did die)