My Trip to Oslo

Since my Seattle post was so well received, I thought I might as well write about my other travel adventures. Especially the ones where I look thin in pictures.

During my study abroad in fall 2008, a lot of my friends were going to Amsterdam. I of course was banned from going there because I would most likely get caught up in the red-light district and sold as a sex slave. Or worse, smoke pot. Luckily, a couple of my friends weren’t interested in going either. We looked on RyanAir’s list of destinations and saw that flights to Oslo were going for a mere 7 pounds! Brilliant. Side note: RyanAir is the sketchiest airline you can take. Flights are cancelled constantly and they fly to airports that are more or less 2 hours outside of the city that you think you’re going to.

I was excited to go to Norway mostly because I am of Norwegian heritage. It’s easy to mistake me for a Viking woman. In fact, when we were there, most people would talk to my friends in English and then talk to me in Norwegian. Unfortunately the only words that I bothered learning were hai hai (hi) and tak (thanks). So my cover was blown often.

As for eating, we had an amazing breakfast buffet every morning at our hotel. We would stock up on food there and then grab crap at 7-11 at night. Oslo had a lot of 7-11′s. But not one Starbucks. Go figure.

I remember when we first got there, some homeless Norwegian put his arm around me and I did a full “As if!” from Clueless.

So that was fun. Besides that clingy homeless dude, Oslo was dead. And by dead, I mean that there was literally no one around. It was a ghost town. Streets were empty. Stores were closed. It was spooky.

We were smart and went on a bunch of free tours to all of the hotspots in the city. One of the most memorable stops was the Vigeland Sculpture Park. So this Vigeland guy basically made a bunch of sculptures of people without clothes on so they would be timeless. Unfortunately everything just looks very sexual. You cannot take a normal picture there. For example:

Not phallic at all.

We went to an amazing Viking Ship Museum which was a definite highlight. I could just imagine my ancestors raping and pillaging other nation’s carefully built towns. Often times their boats were buried with the men who died so it’s a real miracle that these boats are in such good shape.

We also went to the Kon Tiki Museum. Before visiting the museum, I hadn’t ever heard of the Kon Tiki expedition. In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl made a journey to the Polynesian islands. The museum pretty much explains his entire journey. It was a cool place and I got some good pictures most importantly.

I’m probably the most annoying person you’ll ever meet.

I think we also went to Oslo’s Opera house which is right on the water and shaped like a glacier which is pretty bomb. But probably slightly traumatizing for any titanic survivors. Oh, and we went to the art museum to see some Edvard Munch paintings. After being in Oslo for a couple of days, I could see why Munch painted “The Scream”.

Along the way I manged to abuse most statues that I came across.
I hope this post encourages everyone to visit Oslo at least once in their lives. It’s clearly such a hot spot!

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