We awoke feeling a little sore from walking and a little groggy… which was probably related to the choice of dinner last night 😅
Seriously though, Manja was feeling a bit ill last night already and awoke with a stomach ache. Not the best start for the day…
None the less, we got ourselves up and ready. As we left we got a message from our host, asking us to leave a spare set of keys in the flowerpot outside…. Errr… Okay. Well, not our flat, so: Done!
This tree grows keys now
We decided to try out the bakery downstairs, which looked fancy. As we headed in we had two problems: Manja was overwhelmed with choice for sweet breakfasts and I was underwhelmed with choice of savoury breakfasts… especially the €8-10 price-tag for a sandwich option. So we asked the Google-Oracle for an alternate option and it provided one en-route for our daytrip with excellent reviews. Once there Manja settled on an “Apple pocket” with Chamomile tea while I had a tomato-mozerella-egg giant baguette with coffee.
It’s not the size that… Well, no, okay, it’s all about the size.
Charged up for the day we walked down to the Habour, making the most of the few rays of sunlight to take some nice pictures. This was followed by a walk across “Akershus Festning” which was the original castle of Oslo and actually survived a bunch of attacks, and is still used as a military base even though it’s open to the public. Amongst brilliant views of the Fjord from the ramparts, it also had a bunch of cannons of various eras to inspect. There is also a church and two museums to visit, but we opted to use the daylight to continue our exploration of Oslo.
Our next stop was the Opera of Oslo, which is a fantastic bit of architecture. You can walk all the way up the building and appreciate yet another view over the Fjord. Along the side you can also see some Sauna Boats, basically a houseboat converted into a sauna with the option of jumping into the freezing cold Fjord water at the end… Brrrrr….. 🥶. We use the Opera itself to spend a few minutes inside and warm up again ourselves.
From there we headed to the Oslo Mathallen, which is a really cool and fancy food-court. Just outside we also found this place:
I think I would feel riiight at home in this area, particularly when I spotted a rock-climbing gym not 5 minutes away! We decided to have a small cupcake and coffee break, just to give us some energy while making sure we’d still be hungry for dinner.
Charged up, our next stop would be “Æreslunden” which is the main Honorific Graveyard in Norway. We didn’t know much abou the history, but Manja pointed out that it was the burrial place of Edvard Munch, who famously painted the scream. We wandered the graveyard for a while, being delighted by some stories we found by way of QR codes on the graves. I also found a cool goose.
With daylight starting to run out, we had one more important stop to make: Frogner Park. Now, contrary to what a metal goose may tell you, I’ve got to say that I am generally not a huge fan of sculptures, but this place was amazing. A whole lot of sculptures of people and families and human life represented in bronze and granite, including a monolith in the center which is, upon closer inspection, a pile of people. I was honestly taken aback by this, in terms of the emotion displayed in many sculptures, by the volume of sculptures and by their life-like appearance. I mean, the bodies used were not idealized in any way, they were simply representing normal people, which seems unusual to me. In addition, many sculptures had multiple people as part of them, some even whole groups of children. As the sun set we headed back to our Airbnb, and I was very happy to have come here and experienced this place – especially because I would have never thought to go if it were left up to my planning!
Pretty exhausted we arrived back at our Airbnb, with just enough time to freshen up a bit and select a place for dinner. We had been seeing pizza all around us all day, so that was the flavour of the evening. We found a nice place just 5 minutes away, but when we got there they were all booked out… dang! Not to be discouraged we headed over to another place, which was 10 minutes away from our accomodation, unfortunately in the other direction… Manja was getting a touch tired, so I offered to carry her for a bit… Which she actually accepted. So I walked with her on my back for a block, much to the amusement of passer bys, and our own giggles. I maintain that I just had to put her down because I was laughing too much 😉
When we got to the pizza place we were lucky – getting the last available table in the house. The place was small, run by an old skinny Italian guy who spent his time behind the counter greeting everyone and continuously making Pizzas. We opted for the Vegetarian and the three-cheese version, spending our waiting time observing the other guests, as our table was perched on a platform in the corner of the restaurant. The pizza arrived not long after and we were pleasantly surprised by how good they looked. The flavour wasn’t as great but not bad either.
Happy and full we walked the final 10 minutes to our Airbnb and spent the night relaxing and updating this blog 🙂
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