Adjø Oslo!

Here's a little (probably not so) secret: sometimes blogging gets tiring! I find the most tiresome and time-consuming part is sorting through photos, especially at the moment when I've been taking hundreds. This is an incentive to blog every day, as it leaves you with less to go through (plus the longer you put off blogging, the more sketchy and vague your posts will be), but it gets a bit much sometimes. I somehow ended up with 385 photos from the last couple of days alone, ai-yi-yi! Well, I should roll up my sleeves and get on to it, because this is our last evening in Norway before heading back to the barren internet-less wasteland of northern England (hasn't been invented yet up there).

We've had a great trip. I've got to give a big shout-out to Mum and Dad for picking Norway (Dad), planning (some of) the trip, and financing it!! We've had wonderful weather almost the entire time and seen and done some amazing things. However, all good things must come to an end, so it's up early tomorrow (Wednesday) to get back to the airport, then I have a couple more days in the UK before flying back to France on Saturday.

Yesterday (Monday), we had the long drive back down to Oslo. It was a fun little roadtrip, but I think we were all glad to get rid of the rental car, after sitting in it for more than 1000 km over three days.

A couple more shots of the scenery from the return journey

Today was quite relaxed, with the main activity a trip to the Museum of Decorative Arts. First, though, we called in at a nearby cemetery. I love cemeteries in general, and while this wasn't as full of interesting graves as, for example, Eastern European cemeteries or Père Lachaise, it did have Munch and Ibsen (and some other "famous" Norwegians).

Ibsen's grave

Munch's grave

I don't know who this is really, but tonight Matthew, he's going to be Joseph Stalin

I did a terrible job of taking note of what period or designer things were from in the Decorative Arts museum, so here are just some contextless pictures of things I liked/thought were interesting.

My absolute favourites were the tapestries, such as this early 17th century Norwegian tapestry

The close-ups are priceless. EVERYONE in this tapestry is permanently surprised

Well, Jesus is a Bit Sad

And as for the faces on this late 17th C tapestry...

This is obviously made by the same dude as the last one. I think this Where-The-Wild-Things-Are-looking guy is meant to be one of the Magi

This is amazing - a tapestry from between 1040 and 1190. Look at how bright the colours are! It was my official Favourite Thing in the museum

I think this was 17th C too, depicting King Herod feasting. I love their outfits! The text you can see above the feasters is nonsense. Often illiterate tapestry-makers just copied scraps of text (which was often mirror-image to begin with), and, over the years, it ended up as gibberish

A much-later tapestry featuring Nordic maidens about to be licked by polar bears - ???

A dress owned by Norway's Queen Maud. I know they wore corsets back then (early 20th C), but damn, that's a tiny waist! How did she manage it?

Oh, I see, clearly she was one of the undead

I would have sworn this was by El Lissitzky, but funnily enough it turned out the black plate with red dots in the background was by him

A 19th-C throwback to traditional Viking motifs

How sweet is this little Japanese plate?

Talking of sweet, awwwww

I fell in love with the work of the Norwegian Nora Gulbrandsen. This cabinet is full of her work

Gulbrandsen (I think!)

Definitely by Nora Gulbrandsen, because this one came up on Google Images

Okay, that was a lot of photos, sorry! Here's just a couple more from our last evening in Oslo

Me and Dad at the restaurant. The French people sitting behind us chain-smoked through the whole meal, holding their ciggies over their shoulders so all the smoke went away from them and straight towards us. I really wonder if smokers just don't realise how horrible that is, even outside, or they just don't care

Me and Mum at the apartment. She's cheating by wearing shoes while I'm barefoot

Me at the restaurant, looking like I'm about to get a Christmas present

Angst and Art in Oslo

We came up with a perfect strategy to make the most out of Oslo with the Oslo Pass, buying a 24 hour pass for 270 kroner, and then starting it at lunchtime on Thursday, so that we got Thursday afternoon and Friday morning for sightseeing, rather than trying to wear ourselves out cramming a million activities into one day. It was a good money-saver too - I think if we'd paid for everything, including a 24-hour transport pass, separately, it would have 470 kroner (65€). Everything's so dear in Oslo, it pays to economise where you can!

Anyway, in accordance with the plan, we were up bright and early on Friday morning to go to the Munch Museum. I had seen (photos of) maybe three or four Munch works only, so other than this:

Argggggh!

Munch was pretty new to me. I was pleasantly surprised with his oeuvre. While some of it was dark in emotional tenor (as you'd expect from a man who had a nervous breakdown), most of the works were colourful and sometimes even humorous.

In person, The Scream is beautiful, especially the colours of the sunset and the way the swirling, flowing lines work together in harmony throughout the painting. There are four versions of The Scream - the one in the Munch museum is the latest, from 1910 - and it is one of a set of three paintings: The Scream, Anxiety and Despair. This version of The Scream was stolen in 2004 and not recovered until two years later.

You'd think he'd have used the same-sized canvas

The Murderer

I think this was just called Model on a Couch or something. Munch wasn't very creative with his titles

And this was something like Girl in a Red Dress on a Couch (or similar)

The Munch Museum was quite small (a good size, really) and only took about 45 minutes to look through. Then it was off to the Historical Museum before our pass ran out. The ground floor featured Norwegian history from prehistoric times to the Middle Ages. My favourite part was the Middle Ages (of course), especially a spectacular painted ceiling from a wooden Stave Church, dating to the late 13th century. Upstairs they had ethnographic collections, including Egyptian mummies, Arctic peoples, and North and South America; Norwegian coins through the ages (I was surprised to see they only started making coins with holes in the middle in the 20th century, I wonder why); and temporary exhibitions, this time including an exhibition on horses which was much more interesting than I, not a horsey person, would have expected.

The Viking section featured a ton of these bizarre cloth creations, here featuring the goddess Freya

Judging by the hammer, this is Thor

A medieval altar cover. These guys' facial expressions crack me up

Got an enemy, a severed horse's head, and a wooden pole? Then make a Nithing Pole in order to bring down the wrath of the gods on your enemies! A totally sane how-to guide in the horse exhibition

The fantastic 13th century painted ceiling

Close-up of Elizabeth visiting the Virgin Mary

Herod listening to the devil telling him to slaughter the innocents

A carved doorway from a Stave Church telling the story of Sigurd slaying the dragon. This is the same story that features in the Nibelungen. I actually read this story in the original medieval Icelandic (the Völsunga Saga) when I was at university. Don't ask me to read any medieval Icelandic these days though!

Gunnar, another character in the saga of Sigurd, was thrown into a pit of serpents for some reason. He played the harp with his toes and managed to send all the serpents except one to sleep. The remaining serpent bit him to death. Bummer.

Ha, this guy! We saw the carved version of this head at the Viking Ship museum, but I like him even better chilling out here.

An unusual Viking water jug

After the museum, we chilled out for a bit in the sunshine and then walked down to the sea to check out some lovely views of the city and the harbour from the site of Akershus castle and fortress, originally built in the late 13th century, but much altered over the years.

Fountain in front of the town hall

Part of the Akershus Castle and Fortress

View of the harbour

If you've ever wondered what I sound like, you can hear my obnoxious accent and inane commentary in this video of the view from the fortress:

In the evening, we had a lovely meal of tapas near our apartment, including patatas bravas that were miles better than I had in Barcelona, lovely soft bread with aioli, delicious chicken, tender squid, spicy chorizo, etc. All topped off with (in my case) a yummy chocolate mousse cake with a tasty raspberry coulis. I think we did very well navigating through the menu as well, since it was only in Spanish and Norwegian!

We're taking a wee roadtrip up north tomorrow. It's been mostly lovely weather so far, so fingers crossed it will continue!