Norway #6: Ballet, Arctic Exploration, and Art

As promised, I’m back with another post about Oslo. This is the last one, and it’s long, but mostly pictures.

Remember, this is the Opera House. You can walk to the roof, and we did on our first day.

As I was researching Oslo, I found the Opera House (you can see it in Occupied as well), and thought, well, it would be fun to watch an opera or something there. Looking at the dates, it made more sense for us to see a ballet, so I bought tickets for Swan Lake and then didn’t think about it again until it was time for us to go to see it.

At our seats in the Opera House. We were in the very back row but it was pretty central and we could see just fine.

The curtain went up, there was a live orchestra, and a screen over the stage, and suddenly I realized the music wasn’t Swan Lake. Oddly, it wasn’t NOT Swan Lake, but it wasn’t Swan Lake. The screen showed the opening credits about “A Swan Lake” and I looked at Louie and whispered, “I may not have read the website correctly.” And then the screen came up and there were dozens of people onstage shouting all together, “ONCE….UPON…A TIME….!!!”.

Instead of the ballet Swan Lake, we watched something so much better. It was called A Swan Lake, and it was an absurdist take on how Tchaikovsky wrote Swan Lake. It was absolutely hilarious and really well done. The first act was dedicated to how Tchaikovsky came up with the idea, and took place in the 1800’s. At one point before the premiere, the dancer/actor playing Tchaikovsky said, what if we had them dancing onstage in water, and the other character said, we don’t have the technology for that…yet. And then when Act 2 started, the stage was covered in a few inches of water and the entire act took place on the water, and it was amazing! In any case, if you ever have an opportunity to see A Swan Lake, do!

We haven’t watched the video yet, but there is a video of it on Amazon, and I plan to watch in the near future.

The Opera House is right on the water, and the views from inside are lovely. It got hot in the sun though!

Other things to know about seeing ballet in Oslo: the intermission was nearly 45 minutes long! I think this is relatively normal even though obviously during the intermission for this show they had to fill the stage with water.

Some pictures I took at intermission of the inside. I loved all the wood, which contrasted with all the glass outside.

View of the bows from our seats. One man in front of me insisted on leaning forward throughout most of the show.

Before the show we ate at the restaurant at the Opera House, Sanguine Brasserie. We both ordered two courses, and the first course was great! The second course took nearly 45 minutes and tasted like it had just been sitting under a heat lamp for most of that time (it was confusing as most people near us got their entrees while we kept waiting, yet our food was not fresh.) So it was a mixed experience, and a little disappointing.

Lovely seating area though, with a view of the Oslofjord.

The last night of Louie’s conference I went to Lillestrom to meet him for a banquet. I got to see the ending of the conference and see where he had been going all week, so that was nice. It was in a suburb, which was a quick 10 to 12 minute train ride away. I cannot speak more highly of the public transportation in Oslo. And walking was so easy as well, and if you needed to cross a road, the cars stopped for you, even before you knew you needed to cross. To me, that is freedom.

I followed the signs from the Lillestrom Train Station to his conference.

The banquet was nice, though the food was as you might expect for a large banquet. We sat with some people from Lyon, France, and had a variety of great conversations. We had spent so much time just the two of us so it was nice to talk with others. They were surprised that I played the violin rather than being an engineering researcher, and laughed when I said I was there for the food.

After the conference was over, it was simply sightseeing time.

Can you guess which house I went into for a selfie?

We went to Bygdoy Peninsula to visit some museums. It was supposed to rain later, so we walked around outside first. Louie is posing with the arctic explorers here.

We started with the Fram Museum, which is really just a museum built around a ship. It was a little confusing at first, where to start, what it was about–neither of us knew much about arctic exploration though I did watch an excellent documentary about Shackleton once, Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure. But we got into it and appreciated the museum and seeing the ship, and being so glad we weren’t arctic explorers because it seemed so cold and miserable!

More outside pictures first. It was a gorgeous day!

The Fram Museum is literally built around the ship, so it’s a tight fit.

After the Fram, we went to the Kon-Tiki Museum, also worth a visit. Together we always take longer at museums than the guidebook recommends, probably 2 to 2 1/2 at the Fram and 1 1/2 at the Kon Tiki? I think guidebooks suggest 1 hour for each…perhaps on my own I might have rushed through as Louie tends to be a slower reader than I am, but I also see people who look like they are skipping most stuff. If you are pressed for time, I can see trying to rush, but if you have the time, take it and really look at it all.

The Kon-Tiki Raft. Basically a Norwegian guy built a raft to show that people could have done so and traveled across the world on it.

Oh look, another shrimp sandwich! From the museum cafe (at the Fjord Cafe.)

Indian food at Jewel of India, near our Airbnb for dinner one night.

We did Rick Steves’ walking tour of the Grünerløkka neighborhood one evening, and ended up having dinner at Mathallen, which all the websites are excited about and is just a modern-day mall food court. We got some lovely Bao and paid dearly for it, but we saw some nice stuff and enjoyed the Akerselva River enough to walk it again later.

The Old Aker Church, the oldest church in Oslo. Or in Norwegian: Gamle Aker kirke.

Grain towers turned into student housing!

So much public art! Some of it good, some of it just silly.

Nothing in particular, except that vines are taking over that building.

These women worked in the factories along the river, in what you may imagine were harsh conditions.

The Ringnes brewery, their Budweiser but approximately $12 to 15 a pint.

One day we took the train to Holmenkollen Ski Jump. This was a lot of fun. Warning, it is quite the uphill walk from the train station, but it is worth it.

They have a variety of activities including some sort of ride where you ride a zipline down the jump, but we just looked around and went to the Museum, which was great and also nice as it covered some of the stuff from the Fram again in a different way so we felt like we were actually learning.

You could see another view of the Oslofjord from up there, but it was of course hard to capture in pictures.

The museum talked about the history of skiing and the ski jump.

With a statue of Nansen, one of the great Arctic explorers from Norway.

Somewhere on Louie’s phone exists a photo of me in this prop.

We ate at Mucho Mas in the Grünerløkka neighborhood one night. We ate most of our meal outside, but at the end it started raining so we had to run inside to finish.

The internet said Mucho Mas was terrific and also overrated. We liked it quite a lot, and it was fun to sit outside and people watch as well.

And one day we spent over 4 hours at the National Gallery, which had recently reopened.

For some reason I take a lot of pictures of musical instruments.

The shields looked like Humpty Dumpty to me.

This doesn’t look that different from the room Louie’s mom keeps her harps in, though I suppose it’s a little fancier…not by much.

I laughed at the idea that my old Nokia phone could be in the National Gallery.

Very popular, The Scream. There was a room dedicated to Edvard Munch, even though there is also a whole museum elsewhere.

Another dinner at Lorry, shrimp sandwich and fish soup. We made the mistake of not asking for the soup to come out first.

I think that’s the gist of our trip! Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions. We loved Norway, I would go back in a heartbeat. If I could do anything differently it would be to try to relax more when things didn’t go as planned. I had some stressful times that in retrospect weren’t a big deal. But we saw some awesome stuff, enjoyed just wandering around, took advantage of a terrific transportation system, ate wonderful food, and really got a sense of the culture, we think.

We had an early flight to the airport, and that was a little stressful: we had to take the very first train, which left at 4:34 and arrived at 5:02. Our flight left for Heathrow at 7:05, which was as tight a time as we would want, but there was no other way. It was a full train, and the airport was crowded upon arrival, but we had no trouble: the biggest line was going through passport control, but we were at the gate by 6:15 am, which was plenty of time. London was a mess, security, passport control, that took about an hour, and then we wanted coffee before the plane which should have been quick but wasn’t. All was “forgiven” when we boarded the long haul flight and a lovely flight attendant randomly decided we should be seated up further in the comfort seats rather than the regular economy, which meant slightly more leg room and really made things better.

We got to Charlotte, went through security for the 3rd time that day, had the worst fish tacos we’d ever had at a restaurant while paying prices comparable to Norway, and after about 2 hours of delay, finally boarded the last leg of our flight. We got to St Louis, took a cab home (more expensive than uber, though I like to support cabbies sometime) and I think I was asleep within 20 minutes. I believe we had been traveling for 22-23 hours by then and it felt like it!

Looking back though, I can’t believe we were there. It feels like a dream!