Back to Oslo

Well, this is it. I’m back in Oslo. This is where I started this trip through some of southern Norway. Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to take two flights, with an almost three-and-and-a-half-hour connection in London, Heathrow.

Barring a flight cancellation or extraordinary flight delays, this will be my last post on this trip. You’ll find an Oslo summary as the penultimate section of this entry and it will end with a trip summary.

WARNING: Because this post describes today’s trip back to Oslo, my activity in Oslo this afternoon, and two summaries, it may be the longest one I’ve written in this journal. Please bear with me. Or not. It’s up to you.

My trip from Flãm, my previous stop before Oslo, took just over six-and-a-half hours, including two trains and a 45-minute connection between them.

The first train was the amazing Flåm Railway from Flåm to Myrdal. I took the Flåm Railway on the way down to Flåm and described it in my post about my journey to Flåm, so I won’t repeat that here.

The views from the train from Mydral were mostly of great mountainous beauty broken up by some tunnels. There were also some rivers and lakes and the occasional view of a fjord. The mountains were interspersed only occasionally with undulating fields broader than the usual valley. In other words, it was what I’d come to expect from Norway. Although to be fair, the proportion of tunnels versus travel outside was much lower than I experienced on some of my other journeys here in Norway.

Apart from the tunnels, much of the trip was through valleys, or hugging the side of a mountain a bit up from the valley. However, when we came out of one tunnel about 20 minutes after leaving Myrdal, the train travelled for a while near the top of a mountain ridge. The nearby peaks weren’t much higher than the track.

Back down near sea level, and even higher up at the Myrdal station, the temperature was such that a light jacket with a single layer underneath was enough to keep me comfortably warm. And I wouldn’t have been uncomfortable had I removed the jacket.

But as the train travelled along the top of the mountain ridge, we passed several large patches of snow, including some right beside the tracks.

As we got closer to Oslo, still more than an hour away from it, the mountains became less rugged, in many cases they were somewhat shorter, and they had much, much wider valleys, but still with lots of forests, undulating land, rushing rivers and lakes, big and small, along with some farms.

The Myrdal to Oslo train trip took about five hours. As much as I enjoy trains, that’s edging up to the maximum I want to spend on a train on any one trip. But if you are looking for some beautiful scenery to make the journey feel shorter, this route has a lot to offer.

I didn’t take any pictures while on the trains so this post is extremely photo-deprived. sorry about that. Or, if you’re not a fan of my photography, you’re welcome.

In Oslo

My hotel is close to the train station, but it was still about 3:30 p.m. when I checked in. After I settled in and used the bathroom, there wasn’t much time left in the afternoon. I used it to walk to the Ibsen Museum, about a 25-minute walk each way from my hotel.

Much of the walk was along the pedestrianized shopping street, Karl Johans Gate, which I found so pleasant for its lack of cars when I was in Oslo at the start of this trip. (Lack of cars, but lots of people.)

Ibsen Museum

Full disclosure: I don’t recall ever seeing productions of or reading any of Ibsen’s work or studying them in school. The “I don’t recall” does its usual work in the preceding sentence, but I honestly don’t think so.

I went to the Ibsen Museum because, well, it’s there. I’d spent a fair amount of time with the works of one of Norway’s other artistic heroes, Edvard Munch, on this trip, so I thought I owed it to Ibsen, another of Norway’s cultural icons, to visit his museum just to be fair.

To be clear, I’m not a total cultural moron. Only about 83.2%. I knew Ibsen was a playwright (and poet, but I didn’t know that part) and I’d heard of some of his more famous plays, such as A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, and Peer Gynt, but I don’t think I ever read, saw, or studied any of them.

The full name of the facility on both the Norwegian and English versions of its website is “Ibsen Museum & Teater.” I checked. Google Translate says “museum” is the same word in both languages. “Teater” is the Norwegian word for the English word “theatre” and the American word “theater.” I guess the facility figured that “teater” was close enough to “theatre” and “theater” that anglophones would figure it out. I know I did.

There is a theatre on the ground floor of the facility. The museum is on the second floor. They don’t stage plays in the summer, so the theatre was closed. They start up again in the fall when they also put on some English-language productions of Ibsen’s work. The majority are in Norwegian.

I suspect that the English language productions would do particularly well if they staged them in what is likely the prime tourist season, the summer, rather than going dark then. But, obviously, it’s their call.

The museum is divided into two parts, a small museum where you can wander around freely after paying the admission price and the apartment where Henrik Ibsen and his wife Suzannah Ibsen, nee Thoresen, lived their final years. The latter is available only on a guided tour, which is included in the admission price.

They run the tours hourly, on the hour. I arrived 15 minutes into a tour in progress. The person at the ticket desk, who was the same person who led the tour I went on, suggested I take a look at the museum first and come back for the next tour, which was the last one of the day. That’s what I did.

On the ground floor, by the theatre entrance, near the stairs ascending to the museum, there’s a dramatically lit statue of a dignified, robust-looking Ibsen.

The museum is quite small, with just a few rooms. In one room there are tall text panels providing information about I forget how many of Ibsen’s plays. Each panel provides a three- or four-paragraph synopsis of the play and some other information about it, such as its first staging, although the information provided varies for each play. There is also a small model of a set for many of the plays.

Another room has an artistically drawn animation protected on all of the walls and the floor. There are a couple of painted-over windows in the room. They have different window coverings projected on them through the short, continuous loop animation. Plus, during a winter screen, frost is projected on them and they crack. The soundtrack is entirely music and sound effects, with no dialogue. (To eliminate the need for multiple languages for tourists, I guess.)

I imagine that if I had read, seen, or studied Ibsen I would have known what the connection was between the animation and Ibsen, but I didn’t.

Another room contains a display case with some of Ibsen’s possessions, a coat, a top hat, some medals, and some tableware, among other items I forgot.

The only other room I remember (and possibly the only other room) contains some portraits and a bust of Henrik Ibsen. The portraits use a variety of media. There are a few oil paintings, a few sketches and etchings, a lithograph, and a watercolour. Only one admitted to being a copy. I don’t think any of the rest were by anyone famous, so they were probably originals. I’ll have a couple of words to say about the copy, but I want to save it for the end of this section, so bear with me.

The Ibsen Apartment

The tour of the apartment normally lasts 30 minutes. But when the guide started, she explained that on this tour some people spoke only Norwegian, I think just one person spoke only English (me), and a couple of people spoke a third language (French) but understood English. So she said she would provide all of the information in both Norwegian and English, alternating between the two as we went through.

She intimated that she can usually do the tour in just one of the languages. Rather than the usual 30 minutes, our tour took over 40 minutes.

The guide talked pretty much continuously, but allowed any questions we might have (there weren’t a lot). She spoke relatively quickly in both languages.

I got everything from here on in from the guide. I haven’t made any attempt to independently verify the information. I don’t remember a lot of what she said and I only posted here what I’m fairly confident I remembered correctly.

Ibsen’s works are the second-most produced plays after Shakespeare’s. And A Doll’s House is the most produced play in the world.

Ibsen spent a few of the early years of his writing career in Bergen, Norway because that’s where the Norwegian artistic scene was at that time.

For 27 years, Ibsen went into what he described as voluntary exile in Italy and Germany. He did so because he felt that he had reached the pinnacle of what Swedish-Norwegian society would allow at the time. (Norway was then merged with Sweden then.) In Germany, his works were translated into other languages and his fame grew considerably.

He came back to Norway after that voluntary exile and moved to Oslo. When he arrived, he and his wife stayed in a hotel for a while, but staying there permanently wasn’t economically viable. So he rented an apartment in the most luxurious apartment building in Norway. But he made a mistake.

He rented that Oslo apartment without consulting his wife. She had serious arthritis. The apartment wasn’t well insulated. When winter came, her arthritis worsened because of the cold and drafts and she told Hendrik that they either had to move or she would leave him. He found another apartment nearby that was under construction. They moved in when construction finished. They lived in that second Oslo apartment for the rest of their years. Henrik died in his bed. Suzannah died a few years later in her favourite chair in her library.

Oh, that library? It was Suzanna’s, not Henrik’s. Henrik read little during much of his career. He liked to say, in Norwegian, I assume, “I’m a writer, not a reader.”

Henrik Ibsen was a very regimented man. He woke up every morning at the same time, took the same walk every day, came back and took a bath, and was at his desk to work at 9:00 a.m. every day.

At the same time every day (I forget when), he stopped working, put down his pen even if he was in the middle of a sentence, and walked to the Grand Café a few blocks away on Karl Johans Gate. There’s still a Grand Café there today.

At the café, he met other intellectuals to discuss issues like freedom and equality, which weren’t widely popular in those days.

Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg never met, but they were bitter enemies. Ibsen was quite liberal, while Strindberg was very conservative. At one point (I forget when), Ibsen commissioned the painting of a portrait of Strindberg. He hung it in his writing room facing his desk so he could feel the glare of his enemy to motivate him. The painting is there today.

Today, everyone has to put on provided plastic booties to walk through the rest of the rooms and some of the rooms can be viewed only through glass.

The apartment has an interesting history after the Ibsens’ deaths.

The Ibsens never owned the apartment. They rented it. Their housekeeper wanted to keep the apartment as a monument to the Ibsens after they died, but she couldn’t afford the rent. So she printed up handbills and, in Norwegian, German, and English, advertised viewings of three rooms in the apartment for a small fee. Ibsen was famous, so it drew a lot of people.

However that lasted only a few years before she had to give it up. A museum (I forget which one) took some of the furniture. And they heated his writing room to 70℃, lifted the linoleum, rolled it up, and carted it to the museum. The Ibsen family took some of the remaining furniture and furnishings. The rest were sold at auction.

The apartment was then converted into offices. It was a dentist’s office for a while. The bathtub was a unique shape, but the dentist didn’t need a bathtub, so it went too.

During World War II, Oslo was bombed and a lot of the buildings in the area were heavily damaged or destroyed, including the nearby Oslo apartment Ibsen rented first. But the building that contained the Ibsens’ final apartment was untouched.

In 1990, a famous actor went to the landlord of the building and begged him to rent the exact space where the apartment was to him. The actor convinced government officials that it should be turned into a museum. They then rebuilt the internal walls in the positions they were in when it was the Ibsens’ apartment.

The furniture and writing-room linoleum floor came back from the museum. And the Ibsen family donated or sold (I’m not sure which) the furniture and furnishings they had.

The museum then set out to try to find the items that were sold. Because they were sold at auction, there were receipts and because Ibsen was famous, the buyers usually kept those receipts as a way of authenticating their purchases. As a result, the museum was able to track down many of the items and buy them back.

They found the bathtub in a farmer’s field, where it was being used as a trough. They were able to authenticate it because of the tub’s unique shape. That one required a lot more cleaning than the other items.

The museum is still looking for a few pieces, but it was able to recreate the apartment as close to exactly the way it was when the Ibsens lived there, in the exact location where it was. Pretty cool, I’d say.

I forget much of what the guide said, but I’m thoroughly amazed that I remembered as much as I did. I didn’t take any notes at the museum or apartment. If I was interested enough to remember all that, maybe it’s high time I saw an Ibsen play.

Moving virtually back to the museum, I promised to tell you about that copy of an oil painting. The original of it is in a private collection. The version in the museum is a photographic reproduction on canvas of a portrait of Henrik Ibsen by—drumroll, please—Edvard Munch.

So I managed to, unexpectedly, end this trip tying together two of Norway’s cultural icons. Top that.

Oslo Summary

In the last post about the days I spent in Oslo at the start of this trip, I suggested you should expect some superlatives when I wrote the Oslo summary today.

There would have been more superlatives here had I visited only Oslo and then gone home. But I did go on. And just when I thought I’d seen the best I was going to see on this trip, I moved on again and witnessed somewhere more spectacular. So other destinations stole some of the superlatives intended for Oslo. (See the next section.)

Oslo isn’t like most tourist destinations I’ve been to in Europe. In other European cities, Medieval, Renaissance, and/or Gothic churches and other structures, and major museums displaying art and other artifacts from those periods—and other items of historical significance—tend to be the big tourist draws. You won’t find a lot of that in Oslo.

But there are great museums and other cultural institutions to visit (if you have a Munch quota you can fill it in Oslo), a pleasant pedestrianized shopping street, and beautiful parks including two terrific sculpture gardens. And how many cities have a fjord? Oslo does.

I’m glad I got to visit Oslo. At least two more days to see more of Oslo and take more side trips would have been even better.

Norway Trip Summary

I’ve been in Norway for more than two weeks and, to resort to a cliché, the time flew. The trip had too many high points to recap them all here. If you want a page that displays links to all my journal entries from Norway, you can find it by clicking this link. (It spans multiple pages, so you’ll have to click the “Older Posts” link at the bottom of the page to see them all.) Even if you don’t want such a page, you can still find it through the above link.

As you read in the preceding section, I very much enjoyed Oslo. I won’t say any more about that city here because it’s in that section.

My next stop was Kristiansand. If you read the posts from there, you might remember that I wasn’t thrilled with it. It has some good points, including a few spots with great views, an exceptionally charming fish wharf district (mostly restaurants and shops), a surprisingly engaging modern art gallery (“surprisingly” for me, because I’m not much of an art gallery guy, particularly modern art), and a few other interesting sights.

Since leaving there, I’ve been somewhat upset with myself for being so indifferent about Kristiansand. I seem to recall saying then, and I’ll repeat here, if your time is unlimited, a brief stop in Kristiansand is worth your while. It’s a generally nice city. The length of time I spent there, two nights, translating into a day and a half, is probably adequate.

But if your time is limited, it’s skippable. Knowing what I know now, with only the little over two weeks I spent in Norway this trip, if I were to do it over again and if I could have found a way to do the rest of the route I took without stopping in Kristiansand, and without having to spend all day getting from Oslo to my next stop, Stavanger, I probably would have skipped Kristiansand. The problem was finding a way to do that without an interminable bus and/or train trip. I couldn’t find one. So Kristiansand made for a pleasant stop.

Stavanger was fantastic. When I arrived there, it was one of the places I thought had to be the best place I was going to see on this trip. I loved Oslo, but Stavanger impressed me more. It’s much, much smaller than Oslo, but it has some interesting museums, beautiful views, and, of course, the fabulous Lysefjord cruise.

I spent three nights, two-and-a-half days, in Stavanger. Another two days or so would have been well-spent. Some side trips that I could have taken from there, including some full-day ones, looked interesting, but I didn’t have time to take them. And more time just experiencing the city would have been satisfying.

I then went to Bergen and had a new favourite on the trip. It’s Bryggen district, where my hotel was, is the epitome of charm. Bryggen is Norwegian for wharf, so it’s naturally beside Bergen’s harbour. The whole harbour is picture-perfect.

And Bergen has several small, sometimes quirky specialty museums. I enjoyed them much more than I thought I would. The fact that I enjoyed them and that they are small might have been related. I didn’t try to analyze my feelings.

Again, I would have appreciated at least a couple of days more in Bergen to see more and experience more in and around the city.

Then I went to Flåm. And I had another new favourite.

There’s not a lot to do in Flåm other than ride the amazing Flåm Railway¹, take the Næroyfjorden Cruise, and glory in the alluring scenery both on the cruise and in Flåm. But what unbelievably breathtaking beauty it is. Another couple of days to absorb it and treat Flåm more as a resort than a tour stop probably would have done me good.

And that brought me back to Oslo for my return flights tomorrow.

You might have noticed that for almost all of the destinations I visited, except Kristiansand, I said that I would have appreciated at least a day or two more. What’s more, I did a circle of only southern Norway. There are other spots noted in guidebooks generally in that circle that look interesting that I didn’t get to. And I didn’t visit northern Norway at all. There are places up there that, if the guidebooks are indeed worthwhile guides, are also worth a visit. Trondheim is one of them. I didn’t get there.

The conclusion to draw is that I should have spent longer in Norway than I did. It is a country of great beauty and interesting sights to see and activities to do. I’m sad I’m leaving.

One general note before I wrap this up: In one of my earlier Oslo posts, I mentioned that Oslo drivers were respectful of pedestrians at crosswalks above and beyond the call of duty. They’d, without exception, stop if l got just close to the curb and looked like I might, possibly be planning to cross.

Sometimes, I was still a few steps from the curb but headed toward the crosswalk and a driver stopped even though they could have easily gotten through before I got to their side of the road, without me having to slow my pace or stop.

It’s incredible. Drivers in some cities have more respect for crosswalks than in others. In some I’ve been to (looking at you, much of Italy and Greece) drivers treat crosswalks as decoration and pedestrians as people to be bullied.

In many other cities, drivers take crosswalks more seriously than in Italy or Greece, but you often have to get right up to the edge of the curb and be very assertive about your desire to cross before drivers stop.

But I’ve never seen anything like the attentiveness to crosswalks that I saw in Oslo. That is until I went elsewhere in Norway. It was the same in all of the cities I visited here. As someone who usually uses walking as the primary transportation mode in cities, I say bravo, Norway. Bravo! And, thank you.

Warning: The above works only at mid-block crosswalks or at crosswalks at intersections without traffic signals. At signalized intersections, pedestrians are expected to obey the lights.

If you cross on a red I think drivers enjoy an open season on running you down. Although, I might be wrong about that law.

That being said, the guide on the Bergen walking tour I took said the police practice common sense enforcement of the laws. (I don’t know if she was referring to just the police in Bergen or across Norway.)

The one example she gave was walking on a red light. She said that if no cars are coming and you cross on a red, the police won’t ticket you. However, I don’t know if that is police policy or her wishful thinking. I take no responsibility if you assume that common sense suggests that a law here shouldn’t be enforced, but you get arrested for breaking it.

A lot of people here jaywalk, including sometimes me while I was here. I did not get a ticket or see anyone else get one. But that might have been luck.

What will be my next overseas destination? I’m not entirely certain, but I’m hoping it will be one to visit a very dear relative. (I think she reads this sometimes. I put this paragraph here to remind her of my plans.)

That’s it until next time. See ya.

1. Many people arrive in Flåm via other means of transport (such as tour buses or monster cruise ships) and then take a round-trip on the Flåm Railway without getting off the train simply because it’s a journey that shouldn’t be missed. I, on the other hand, used it as a means of transportation to get to and return from Flåm, with a stay in Flåm in between. So I had a super-bonus, both Flåm and a ride both ways on its railway. ↩︎