Our Scandinavia Adventure: Day Two (1 August)

We started our second day a bit sleepy, but eager to see more of intriguing Oslo after our brief wanderings yesterday. We didn't really have time to get used to the money during our brief visit and kept asking each other how much things were . . . the 20 kroner coins were straight out of the Viking Ship Museum:

Our hotel included a nice buffet breakfast and after getting a sense of Norwegian prices yesterday (in our travel experience, Oslo definitely lives up to its title of most expensive city in the world), we were grateful for the lovely spread of hot and cold brunch items. This photo isn't to show you the food, though--it's to show you the light fixtures in our humble breakfast room:
This entire trip was like a design tour of light fixtures--no matter where we went, the light fixtures in all three countries were spectacular and we kept marvelling at the care put into their design. (That's a not-so-subtle way of warning you that many photos of lights are coming your way.) In terms of our hotels, all three strangely featured self-serve shoe-shine machines in their lobbies, much to Bob's delight:
But back to the sightseeing: we started off today with a visit to Oslo's city hall, one of the buildings that intrigued us from the outside yesterday.
The impressive doors
and wooden friezes that run all around the entrance are beautiful. The friezes display motifs from Norse mythology, and are composed of pine deck timber pieces glued together into 1000-kilogram blocks which are then oiled, painted, and gilded with gold or silver. The sculptor, Dagfin Werenskiold, describes the friezes as "based upon the rhythm, the principle of balance, upon a totally natural and free foundation, without the golden mean and geometrics." We walked around and admired all sixteen panels before heading inside.




City hall impressed us from the outside, but once we went inside, we were REALLY impressed. The murals of the main hall (where the Nobel Peace Prize is presented every 10 December) are gorgeous and overwhelming. Oslo's patron saint, St. Hallvard, is at the centre of this mural:
We would love to hear what the organ sounds like in this huge space!
If you look really closely, you can see Bob sitting waaaaaaaaay over on the other side of the hall:

Great light fixtures:

Once we finally tore ourselves away from the main hall, we explored the other beautiful rooms, beginning with the banqueting hall



and moving onto the city council assembly room, where Oslo's parliamentary metropolitan government collectively assumes the responsibilities of a mayor.
The east gallery is completely covered with murals (notice more amazing light fixtures),
but my favourite wall in the room was this one, with its magnificent tree motif.
City hall gave me a bit of a kink in my neck, what with all the time I spent pondering the ceilings!
It wouldn't be Oslo city hall without some reference to Munch, and the Munch room features his painting Life as its centrepiece.
I wish I had taken more photos of Oslo’s inventive roundabouts—as we travelled around the city, we kept coming across roundabouts that were more like art installations than utilitarian pieces of the urban landscape.

Our next stop, Akershus castle, was at the end of a peaceful walk toward the water:

After taking in the amazing views from the fortress grounds,
we headed inside.
The fortress was begun in 1299 and has been used as a royal residence, arsenal, and prison during its history, and is still used for official state functions.

The crypt was nice and cool (we had warmer weather on this trip than we've been having in London this summer)
and we visited Kings Haakon VII and Olav V on our way up.
The castle contains a chapel,
many detailed tapestries,

and several grand halls, which were previously used as apartments, administration offices, space for grain storage, and continue to be used as reception and dining halls. The walls of Olav V's hall are painting in a splendid pattern based on a medieval church--with the low light, it took me a minute to realise I was looking at paint rather than fabric!
The funniest room in the fortress was Henrik Wergerland's office. In 1841, the poet was given the task of creating the first public records office at the fortress. The plastic snake on the floor represents Wergerland's pet adder, who had been defanged, but who still scared away creditors who did not know that the snake was harmless.

On the same grounds as the castle is the Resistance Museum,
which documents the Jewish resistance during the Nazi occupation of Norway from 1940-1945.
After spending a while in the museum, getting a bit overwhelmed by the detailed exhibits, we made stops at two places where photography wasn't permitted: the Astrup Fearney Museum of Modern Art, an amazing building that houses contemporary art, and the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design, where we enjoyed the contemporary work as well the extremely well-done permanent exhibit of design and craft in the last century. We spent our last few hours in Oslo wandering around, trying not to lament our short time in a city that had thoroughly charmed us. We didn't make use of the city rental bikes in Oslo, thinking that we would use the free ones in Copenhagen or the rental ones in Stockholm, but none of those bike-riding dreams ended up coming true! Still, it was very nice to be in countries where bikes are used so regularly by such a large demographic of the population.
Another thing we often talked about having on our trip was ice cream, but somehow we never did! I really liked this particular advertisement for ice cream, which ended up being common in all three cities, with its wordless message of "Eat our ice cream and you'll feel so cold, you'll need your very own orange and red snowsuit!"

Attention to design was everywhere, from security window grills to manhole covers.
Just when we were barely used to being in Oslo, it was time to head to the airport to catch our one-hour flight to Copenhagen. The city greeted us with a fantastic view of wind turbines,
and Bob instantly made himself comfortable in our spacious hotel room (I took this photo about ten seconds after we walked in the room):
Although our Copenhagen hotel didn't include breakfast, we got a fantastic deal at a place that would have definitely been out of our price range--the hotel's website listed our room at USD$398 a night for our dates, but we paid $125--still more than we would usually pay for a hotel, but at Copenhagen prices and for our king-size bed with huge bathroom, it was a real steal (a private room in a Copenhagen hostel would have cost us USD$95, if they had a room available for our dates, which they didn't). How did we pay so little and get so much? Priceline. We've used Priceline for hotels in Seattle, London, and now Copenhagen, and I've helped friends get Seattle hotels and Bob's parents get an Ottawa hotel as well. If you take a bit of time to figure out the little quirks of Priceline's "name your own price" feature on hotels, I HIGHLY recommend it as a great way to get hotel rooms for a fraction of any other online price (don't believe their claims that you can only save "up to 50%"--we saved 69% in Copenhagen) . Anyway, since we didn't arrive at the hotel until 8:15 P.M., we just went for an evening stroll to try to get some sense of the city before catching up on our sleep (I think it took us until the third day of our trip to recover from our 2:00 A.M. start in London) in the superbly comfortable bed. We walked along several canals,

including the touristy, restaurant-packed Nyhavn,
before wandering down various quiet streets. I liked the way this building seemed to have a separate house perched on its roof
and thought the stone dogs flanking this entranceway were pretty great.
"Whoa, what's that?" I said as we walked past this enormous concrete building with the tiniest windows dotting its surface. (I never did find out.)
We ended the walk and the night with a late picnic dinner and as always happens when we're travelling, I spent too long in the supermarket, fascinated by the ways that supermarkets are both the same and very, very different from country to country. Bob was craving some chocolate milk, which was just fine with me, because it gave me an excuse to buy something whose graphic design alone was worth the price!