billbauer

Today we said goodbye to Oslo and took an early afternoon flight to Amsterdam. We are overnighting in Amsterdam simply to avoid having to get up in the middle of the night in Oslo in order to make the flight connection to Minneapolis.  As we are accustomed to do when arriving in Amsterdam, we take the train to Centraal Station and then head to our hotel from there. [Photo from 2017] The trains are slow today and stop several times and wait to approach the station.  When we arrive we find a major portion of the station cordoned off with police tape.  Only later do we learn that a double stabbing and subsequent police shooting had occurred there just two hours earlier.  Close only counts in horseshoes. Some months ago when making reservations for our hotel this evening I made a mistake and canceled a perfectly good reservation at a perfectly good hotel.  I then discovered that remaking that  reservation was twice as expensive.  Ouch.  After c...

A view looking back at Oslo from the so-called "scream corner" providing a panoramic view. Going to the Opera House, we pass the "factory" which produces costumes for the opera.  These braille looking patterns are actually supposed to represent punch cards used to produce fabric patterns. We spot an artistic "ice berg" floating in the Oslo harbor. And here we are standing on the roof of the Opera House.  It is a very Oslo thing to do. Oslo, as well as all of the Nordic countries that we have visited, is booming. The new Oslo library (under construction). We visit the Viking Ship Museum which is absolutely amazing. These statues honor Roald Amundsen and his crew, the first to reach the south pole and heroes in Norway. Next up is the Kon-Tiki Museum honoring Thor Heyerdahl for proving a South America to South Pacific connection by raft. We then are treated to a National Geographic exclusive, a talk with Thor Heyerdahl, Jr....

Today we take the train from Stockholm Central Station to Oslo.  Along the way David Scott Silverberg, our National Geographic geographer, leads explanations of the geography, government and history of the Nordic countries and, in this particular instance, an in depth discussion of the role Norway and Sweden played in WWII. We pass Swedish farmland ... and lakes ... before arriving at Oslo Sentralstasjon. It is a seven hour train ride so we don't have an over abundance of time in the afternoon so we make our way to Vigeland Sculpture Park, containing more than 200 sculptures all made by a single artist, Gustav Vigeland. All of the sculptures are nude because Gustav didn't want the sculptures to be tied to a particular time or era. The sculptures depict Gustav's vision of the circle of life from babies, childhood, adults, elderly, death and rebirth in further children. I particularly liked the sculptures depicting a grandfather and a grandchild. ...