Oslo...On My Own

I'm going to ask you to lend me your mind. Lend me your mind and I'll paint you a very vivid picture.

Imagine somewhere ludicrously expensive. So much so that you're forced to stop eating properly and embrace hunger-based delirium. Imagine a place where a Subway 'Sub of the Day' costs £7 instead of £1.99 and a generic hamburger from a venue you'd turn your nose up at unless you were steaming drunk costs £10 alone. Now imagine bright blue skies, lakes as flat as mirrors, alpine trees and a quaint, bustling but by no means large city centre. Add some good looking women. You've just imagined Oslo. I loved it but I was so very glad to move on. I was so beautifully hungry.
The two days I spent here were an understandable blur. They started with an unpleasant introduction: a RyanAir flight to a RyanAir concept of Oslo's location - Rygge, 60km away.Over an hour's bus journey at well-past midnight followed.
I have two more of these joyous sardine-style encounters in the skies and assuming I make my flight to London Stansted with them as planned I will probably touch down somewhere nearby. Somewhere like Norwich.

Eventually we got into Oslo itself after the Ekspress bus took a decidedly British-public-transport definition of 'express' and turned up 25 minutes late. On the way there I got involved in my first Scandenavian conversation; chatting with a man who looked, dressed and sounded like an accountant but who actually was a conceptual artist named Stein. Stein gave me some good tips on Oslo, strongly recommended the Viking Ship Musuem after recounting the impact the ships had on him and saw me to my hostel. A thoroughly nice man well worth the exchange of emails.
What confronted me at the hostel was a strange site indeed, a totally empty dorm room. Even the space normally occuppied by Phil laid very much vacant this time...

The only was to deal with change is to embrace it. The following day in Oslo saw me walk further and travel farther than on any of our previous journeys. Having paid £20 mainly for fruit and water from the cheapest supermarket there was no need to stop for the day and I walked from 10am to 9.30pm straight. I covered the city centre, it's shops, the Royal Palace (which is rather austere and hence not photographed), the Viking Museum, the amazing human-sculpture park Vigelsparken, and an ENITRE island of Oslo hiking through its miles of woods and scrambling its shingle/rock coastline.

The Viking ships are incredibly impressive in that there are 3 of them in what is largely just a hall on Bygdoy Island but it was difficult to share Stein's enthusiasm that they were 'on par with the Pyramids'. Perhaps it is because they are so well preserved that you need to continually remind yourself they ARE Viking and were built over a thousand years ago. Or to put it another way, they were in everyday use well over 10x our lifespans before us and could STILL be in everday use now...

Without a doubt the outside elements of Oslo have had the biggest impact on me. I've always wanted to see if the ever-green image of Norway was accurate and a step into the densley packed forest of Bygoy has confirmed it to me. There's not much I can account specifically about the trees except that the forests had a decidedly homely feel to them and it was a pleasure for me to be able to hear, see, and record a woodpecker at work. One observation is the Norweigians seem as keen on outdoor running as Austrians are on skiing and whoever's selling bright spandex must be laughing all the way to the bank...
To break out of forest and onto an isolated beach was treasure for me and I embraced it fully by trying to traverse as much of the coastline as possible. The rock to my amateur geology is rather slate-like, hence a grainy grey shingle beach. It also means a smooth grip for the hand, and plenty of attempt-worthy toe holds. So I headed straight to the cliff faces thinking (a) they were easy and (b) they weren't that high. I started to climb up and down the stretch of rockface between the shore and the woodlands. It was only when I was attempting such a manouevre and I found I had a mouth-wide-open spectator at the top of one of my climbs that I realised the 'saftey harness' of a single shoulder strap bag and a jumper around the waist probably weren't sufficient enough for a 20 ft drop onto ragged roacks and waves. In my defence, and my climbing-buddy Andrew will back me up I'm sure, they were only about a level 5 climbing difficulty...

My return to the hostel found me in good company as Paula and Emma - 17 year olds from Sweden - had turned up ready to attend the Metallica concert that had materialised and saw an influx of people dressed all in black staying at the hostel. We got on well, I feeling brotherly to them (before anyone suggests otherwise) and I helped them make their signs with typical Swedish grammar. The dorm really came to life when a group of elder French teachers arrived. I'll state my concerns for the English-speaking standard of the next generation of Frenchmen however. One of the teachers (of English), whose name eludes me, sounded like a cross between the policeman from Allo Allo (there's that reference AGAIN) and Ronan Keating...not easy to understand at all!

Those of you expecting details of late night clubbing antics are going to be sorely disappointed for now. We'll wait until Poland before alcohol makes a return...but I'm in Sweden now and I certainly won't rule out late night antics of any other sort just yet ;-) x