Kathleen
Oslo, Norway – July 23&24, 2013
From the fjordlands, we had a simply beautiful long drive to Oslo. Again, the scenery and amazing feats of road engineering were spectacular. It was a longish, but very enjoyable drive. You have probably already seen the pictures so you know how beautiful it is.
When we arrived in Oslo, we checked into our apartment and then went immediately to return the car, since there was nowhere to park it and it was getting latish. I must say at this point that although both the rental car experiences and the Garmin navigation had been pretty good until this point, we were thoroughly disgusted with both by the time we arrived back at the hotel more than two hours later. Rental car companies…don’t locate your car returns in places where a 2 dimensional map is unlikely to be able to guide someone who is completely unfamiliar with the city. Garmin, we have come to rely on you to be able to help us when hotels and rental companies are difficult to find, but you totally failed on this one…directing us to streets that dead-ended in pedestrian walks and into tunnels that put us back on the highway – URGHH!! The rental car company was about 2 miles from our hotel and it took us about an hour and a half to find it – this was not due to traffic, it was due to the maze of one-way and ending streets plus the fact that all of Oslo seems to be under construction for some inexplicable reason plus the fact that there was an upper and lower level of street in the area to which we were trying to get and unbeknownst to us, this place was on the lower, which could only be reached (seemingly) in one specific way and carried the extra hazard of a wrong turn putting us on a highway that took us about 5 miles before we could exit and head back (said highway also under construction).
Anyway, we managed to get back to our apartment, which was in an excellent location and had a lovely balcony. The only problem is that we were in the beginning of a heat wave of unusual proportions for Norway (high 80s and 90s), which wouldn’t have been a huge issue except for the fact that air conditioning is virtually unheard of. Thus begun a series of 6 nights in both Oslo and Copenhagen in which we had booked reasonable (for Scandanavia), well-located apartments with decent balcanies which both faced Northwest and had no air-conditioning = hot nights. This coupled with the fact that it still wasn’t really getting dark until after 11 PM meant our schedules got a bit funky, but all-in-all, we were estatic it wasn’t raining, had some beautiful blue sky and fluffy cloud days in which to run around and take pictures, and where generally pretty happy with our choice of lodging.
Oslo is a lovely conglomeration of the old and the new, and although there was a LOT of construction, we were able to thoroughly enjoy the city and imagine how it would be even better when the construction was more complete. The old sections of town were grandiose and European, the new sections of town were brand new, glassy and angular, and something to behold. The section of town we stayed in was characterized by a bunch of high rise apartment complexes (not so new and glassy) mostly inhabited by a robust ethnic population that seemed dominated by Indian and middle-Eastern enclaves. We were suprised at the reasonably large number of non-anglo folks in all of Scandanavia, in fact, as we somehow imagined that it would be a fairly homogenous population. Our particular complex was a bit of a delight in the fact that there were children playing together everywhere in mini areas or just in the larger bits between buildings and there was a very nice community feeling. The grocery stores also seemed to be more reasonable than in other areas of Norway, although we nixed plans to finally have a dinner out in Oslo, realizing that we would probably spend about $150-$175 if we had dinner at an average-type restaurant and about double that if we wanted to have some wine with our dinner. I know you foodies will be disappointed at our lackluster persuit of Norwegian cuisine, but we ARE on a budget, so we settled for enjoying touring the cities during the day and finding some Kylling (Norwegian for chicken) to cook up in the evenings. We were able to get some really good fish from the groceries a few times and enjoyed that quite a bit, even making it ourselves.
Oslo was our last stop in Norway, so overall I guess our feeling is probably that Norway is beautiful, amazing, beautiful, beautiful, expensive and beautiful.
On to a very brief stint in Sweden……