We flew from Heathrow to Copenhagen on Saturday morning with no problems. There is fast, cheap, frequent train service from the airport into the city and our hotel was in the same square as the central staion, so it was very convenient for us. The Hotel Astoria's major selling point is its location. It's clean, but feels more like dorm accommodations than a hotel, with single beds and very little floor space. But we pushed the beds together and straightened out a small problem with the shower and survived reasonably comfortably. Of course, being next to the train station, there were trains going by next to, in front of and under the hotel at all hours, which is an additional challenge, but we managed to sleep fairly solidly.
Jason had to be in Copenhagen for a meeting of the International C++ Standardization Committee, so he took the train out to the Danish Standards Institute every day to meet with 50 other techies from all over the world. Several of their wives were also there and I very much enjoyed their company. Our old friends, Brendan & Elana, were there from Ireland and we also got to know some of the other couples a bit better. One of them, David and Luann, have just bought a house on Prospect Hill in Somerville, around the corner from the apartment my sisters shared for years.
Once we had checked in on Saturday afternoon, we went out and walked around the city for a couple of hours, visiting several of the main squares and finding the Christianborg Slot (slot=castle/palace). We came back for a nap and then went out for dinner with Brendan and Elana to a sushi place we'd noticed in our travels. Wonderful, wonderful sushi! There is no yellowtail in London, as far as we can tell (one place has it on the menu for #12 per pair, but they never actually have any), so we were ecstatic to find it there and at very high quality. And their salmon was incredible. And they hadniku no tataki (raw beef in ponzu sauce) that is one of my favorite things.
On Sunday we went out with Brendan & Elana, Richard & Marina (who also live in Dublin, although she's from Barcelona) and Andy, who, as someone else put it, "is from England even though he looks like he's from MIT." We walked back down to Christianborg Slot, walked around the equestrian grounds in the center of the castle, and toured the ruins of the various previous castles on that site, which are now in the basement of the current slot. After that we walked past the stock market building and across the bridge to Christianshavn, the neighborhood on the next island to the east. It was described as a nifty neighborhood of shops, cafes and restaurants, but they were all closed for Sunday. We did visit Vor Frelsers Kirke and after appreciating the beautiful interior of the sanctuary with its stunning organ and lovely statues, Jason and I climbed the 400 steps to the top of the tower --the last 150 are outside, in a spiral around the tower. Looking down from there, we could enjoy the amazing view of all of Copenhagen.
Back on ground level, we walked by Christiania, a commune still surviving from the 60's, and then decided we'd had enough walking in the rain and wanted lunch. So we grabbed cabs back to the hotel and tried the Bistro next to the station. Half of the party had their buffet, but Jason and I both went for the "laks og hojreb," or "smoked salmon (starter, with salad) and roast beef (with fries and green beans)" that was delicious. The others went back to the hotel to nap, but we decided to make the most of Jason's non-meeting time and set off again. We walked along a lovely canal, with many water birds, including a swan nesting right by the path. We walked past the botanical gardens (they closed at 4pm, about fifteen minutes before we arrived) and ducked into the Statens Museum for Kunst , the national art gallery, to use their bathrooms before they closed at 5pm. From there, we walked through the park of the Rosenberg Slot , which was really beautiful, and then along a colorful pedestrian street of shops, past the Round Tower --stopping to admire the public art at its base--and St. Peter's Church, and then back to the hotel, appreciating all the architectural details of the buildings we passed.
We napped for a bit and then went to dinner with nine other people at RizRaz, a Mediterranean restaurant one of the couples had noticed in their wandering. Many people tried their buffet, but I started with carpaccio (since I can't find it in London, I have to take every opportunity here) and followed it up with "shamarma" which was lamb bits with onions and other vegetables, served with hummus. Jason had the lamb with couscous, which he enjoyed, but he confessed that mine was better. We finally let the waitstaff close up the place and headed back to the hotel around midnight. It was at that dinner that we were seated with Luann and David and got a chance to really talk with them.
On Monday I got up for breakfast with the guys, but then decided to spend the morning reading, which turned into napping. I met Luann in the lobby at noon and when the Mortensens arrived to pick me up, I asked if she could tag along. They are the parents of an exchange student who lived with my family while I was in high school. They also had Ulla's sister, Camilla, with them, so it was a tight fit into their car, but they were very gracious about letting me bring Luann along. They took us on a tour of the harbor area of Copenhagen, then we drove about an hour up the coast to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek. We spent a few hours there, including a lovely lunch looking out at three Calder sculptures beside the sea. It is a wonderful collection in a beautiful museum in a breathtaking setting. The special exhibit was a retrospectiveof the work of Sigmar Polke. None of us had heard of him, but I really enjoyed some of his stuff, particularly his work with transparent media.
After leaving the museum, Mr. Mortensen drove us around for about an hour and showed us several other castles in the area, and then took us back to their home for coffee. Their house is just astonishing. He is a renowned designer and has designed much of their home and its furnishings. One of the most remarkable bits is that after visiting one of Frank Lloyd Wright's houses in the Chicago area on the trip that brought them by my parents' house in New York, he went home and ripped out the plain white ceilings of their living room and designed and installed the recessed wooden ceilings he had seen. We commented on the lovely writing desk and he said that he was very proud of it, as the country had chosen it as their gift to the Prince Consort (the Queen's husband) for his 50th birthday. Every piece has a story and is exquisite. Starting with a fairly non-descript, two bedroom tract house, they have created something unique and incredibly beautiful.
Mr. Mortensen had a Rotary meeting to attend at 5pm, so he left and after a few minutes more, Mrs. Mortensen dropped us at the train station in Hillerod and we made our way back to the city. She really got me--I suddenly realized I had left my coat in the car and asked if Mr. Mortensen had taken the car to his meeting and she told me yes and let me go on for a couple of minutes, figuring out if there were anything vital in it and how I might get it back without inconveniencing them terribly, before she revealed that he had taken the other car and my coat was still sitting in the car in front of the house. I really appreciated their taking the time to see me and entertain me so graciously in what Ulla confessed was the worst possible week I could have picked, since the annual furniture design tradeshow was starting on Wednesday and they were frantically busy in preparation for it.
We made it back to the hotel just in time to meet the guys returning from their meeting. Someone had recommended a tapas restaurant, so after getting help from the desk clerk (impeded by her hearing "topless" instead of "tapas" at first) in finding it and calling to see if they could accommodate us all, we headed out. We ended up with nineteen people and managed to have a very lovely meal of a garlicky seafood soup, a sample plate of tapas (two bites each of chicken drummettes, potato salad, meatballs, potato cake, chicken in a tomato sauce, and sauteed mushrooms), and a good paella, washed down with very nice Sangre de Toro red wine.
We later found out that somehow our end of the table had a completely reasonable dinner, but the other end of the table was much less content. David found a piece of glass in his gazpacho and Andy stormed off in a huff before his food arrived, because they weren't keeping him supplied with beer at a sufficiently steady pace. I was sorry they had a less-than-stellar experience, but was glad in some ways that it didn't impact us.
We strolled back to the hotel and the guys went off to bond over beer. Elana and I hung out for a while and then Brendan called to say his Palm Pilot--her Christmas/birthday present to him--was missing. It seems that it was picked from Brendan's pocket during the walk back, along with an attachment for it, and their credit and bank cards, which were together in one pocket of his bag. So they had a late night of cancelling cards and arranging for replacements, after running back to the restaurant to look between the cushions and be sure nothing had gotten left there.
On Tuesday I sat over a leisurely breakfast with Luann, Marina and another wife, Vivian, with her 5 month-old son, Peter. Marina headed off to Rosskilde on her own and the rest of us went to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Denmark's answer to the British Museum. It is a lovely building with an amazing collection, founded by the Carlsberg family of brewery fame. They've established a couple of different foundations for the arts and education and one of our guidebooks pointed out that Denmark is the only country in the world where you can drink to support the arts.
Luann is an archeologist by training and works in the administrative department of the Harvard Museums. So she was able to make the rooms of Egyptian, Greek , Etruscan and Roman artifacts even more interesting than they would be on their own. It's amazing to me how much I did learn on our trip to Egypt. Now when we see Egyptian artifacts, they make so much more sense to me than they did previously. We had a very nice lunch (puff pastry filled with shrimp salad for me) in the palm court at the center of the museum. Luann and Vivian spent the remaining 45 minutes in the gift shop, but I ran through their collection of paintings. I breezed past most of Denmark's Golden Age of Painting in the older section of the museum, unstruck by any of the works. I spent more time in the new wing , looking at their wide selection of paintings by Corot, bronzes by Degas (including some of his horses, influenced by the stop-motion photography he was doing at the time, which I'd seen exhibited at the SFMOMA), and unusual pre-Tahiti Gauguins, which I liked more than his other work I'd seen. I made it back before the shop closed and bought a couple of things. Luann was desperately trying to winnow a huge pile of books she wanted down to something she thought she could fit in her luggage and finally took the six she couldn't bear to leave. We walked back around the Tivoli Gardens to the hotel, where I napped until dinner.
The guys were all staying at the Institute for a special session by the creator of C++, so six of the wives (Elana, Luann, Vivian, Marina, Lana--a sweet woman who organized the Hawaii meeting I enjoyed so much--and myself) went to a steak place around the corner. It was okay--my "carpaccio" turned out to be prosciutto, which was probably my own fault with the language, my "rare" steak was quite medium, and our waitress was surly and slow--but when the bill came (after our waitress had left for the evening) it was wrong in some subtle way we couldn't quite identify, and came out at 200 kroner each, instead of the 300 per person we'd expected. Without our waitress and without any Danish, it was just too complicated a problem to attack and the baby was getting restless and cranky, so we just gave them what they'd asked for and got out.
The guys had gotten back while we were out and were just heading out to the bar, but Jason turned back and kept me company and then fell asleep while I caught up on my email and got started on this report.
On Wednesday I left the hotel at 9:30am and walked all day! The weather was warm enough that I didn't take a coat and even my cardigan was too heavy later in the day. After popping into a small grocery store to wander around and check out what odd foods I could find, I went back over to the Rosenberg Slot and toured that. It's filled with objets d'art and paintings and furniture , in addition to the tapestries and ceiling paintings and parquet floors. Much to my delight, they had many different tables and cabinets of inlaid wood or semi-precious stone, several of which were strikingly beautiful. On the top floor is the throne room and in the basement they have the Danish Crown Jewels, which are very beautiful. There are also artifacts connected with Ole Romer, the Dane who discovered the speed of light back in the 17th century before coming home from Paris to set up the Danish office of standard weights & measures and serve as the king's technical consultant. They have an ingenious method of dealing with all the different languages of their visitors--instead of having curatorial notes posted with the objects, they rent you a guidebook that has introductory material on the castle and its history and a brief description of each room in the castle, followed by a listing of all the objects in the room. So when you're in a room and you're interested in knowing what a particular piece is, you look for the number on it and then look that up. I enjoyed that, because I didn't get bogged down in reading descriptions of pieces that didn't actually interest me, as I often do in museums.
After leaving the palace (and watching a changing of the guard), I wandered through the botanical gardens of the University of Copenhagen, across the street. They are very beautiful and just starting to bloom. There wasn't an exit where I thought there would be, so I ended up walking up to the exit by the greenhouses, at which point it seemed silly not to go in and see the pretty plants. Leaving there, I walked back around to the Statens Museum for Kunst and had some lunch in their cafe. Once again my desire for carpaccio and my lack of Danish tripped me up and I ended up with a plate of thinly sliced *beets* with olive oil and parmesan cheese. They were reasonably tasty, but not what I was expecting. I consoled myself with a slice of their lovely, rich, nutty carrot cake before heading into the galleries.
In many ways, the SKM feels like two different museums. The new wing of glass and steel, high ceilings and white walls, feels like MOMA and is filled with 20th century art, most of it Danish. They do have Modigliani's "Alice" and several works by Georges Braque (and not just his Cubist stuff). After a couple of hours in there, I wandered back into the original building, where the Danish and European Paintings (and a few sculptures) 1300-1900 are housed in a maze of small, jewel-toned rooms. I walked fairly quickly through those and wasn't incredibly impressed. The collection is vast, but not first rate. Somehow they managed to have five completely uncompelling Rembrandts. I went back and spent some time sketching, and left around 5pm to walk back through the park and home again. Copenhagen's parks are very lovely and seem to always have people in them. Mothers here all seem to use the old fashioned prams that make me think of Mary Poppins. I guess the fact that they just leave them on the street outside shops and cafes means that they don't need the smaller, collapsible ones.
I got back to the hotel at 5:30pm and Jason arrived shortly thereafter. We made arrangements to have dinner with Richard & Marina and then Jason napped for a bit while I read email. The four of us went to a place in Grey Friars Square called Peder Oxe. They serve slightly French, but mostly traditional Danish food. I had a tasty but wimpy lobster bisque, followed by a steak in a lovely creamy sauce. Jason had their salad bar with the best tomatoes I've ever tasted in such a setting--obviously vine-ripened and very fresh--followed by a nice rack of lamb. We skipped dessert and had coffee...they brought us an enormous pot and demitasse cups and we drank several cups each. Richard and I (the talkers at the table) got into a long meandering conversation about education and racism and the Irish political situation that was very interesting and fun. We wandered back to the hotel and Jason worked on some drafts while I hung out with Brendan and Elana.
On Thursday morning I breakfasted with some of the other women and then read for a bit. At 11:30am seven (Vivian, Luann, Elana, Michelle, Carina, Marina and I--and Peter, of course) of us met in the lobby and headed out to Sweden for lunch. Now that they've opened the Oresund bridge, there are regular, inexpensive trains to Malmo that take about half an hour. Luann's guidebook had a "daytrip to Malmo" section that recommended a lovely little cafe about a ten minute walk from the station where I had a delicious sandwich of bacon and garlic potato salad together with a bowl of Thai chicken soup. The weather was beautiful and Malmo was lovely, but Elana had to be back to meet someone she knows online and I wanted to check out a couple of shops, so the two of us took the train back together while the others stayed to wander around for a couple of hours. Back in Copenhagen I wandered down the Stroget pedestrian mall and checked out Illums Bogliehus, a department store specializing in Danish design. They had some lovely things, as did a couple of the other shops I stopped into, but I made it back to the hotel without making any purchases.
I really like some of the Danish furniture, particularly the stuff made of wood, with clean lines, like the tables & chairs and the bureaus, and they have some marvelously simple and ingenious fixtures for the bath and kitchen. In Norway we especially enjoyed the heated bathroom floors, tho' it was never cold enough for them to be really necessary, it is really nice not to have cold tile underfoot. But when it comes to upholstered objects, I find that the spare lines make all the couches look to me like they belong in ladies' rooms and doctors offices; I want something more snuggly. But some of the leather armchairs are truly beautiful and in everything there seems to be an awareness of design aesthetics that I think is often lacking among American consumer products.
Back at the hotel on Thursday afternoon, I napped for a bit and then Jason arrived from the meeting, having sprained his ankle on cobblestones while running for the train. I ran out and got a bandage and an ice pack and he iced and took ibuprofen and elevated. This was the last night of the meeting, so we were all going to the Tivoli Gardens for dinner and he didn't want to miss it. Elana had noticed in her guidebook that they have wheelchairs that can be reserved, so she got the deskclerk to call ahead for one and it was waiting for us at the cloakroom when we arrived. We had dinner in the garden pavilion of one of the restaurants. It was sort of an unfortunate occasion--the host company didn't have the money to provide a banquet, so it was just a group of about sixty people going out to dinner together. The food was okay, but the service was excrutiatingly slow and the waitress messed up our table's order, so the woman next to me got stuck with a choice between eating steak instead of the salmon she'd ordered or waiting twenty minutes for another salmon plate to be prepared. People made the best of it and moved around between tables to visit in the long spaces between courses. I started with smoked salmon and then it was my turn for a rack of lamb with garlic and a potato cake, which were both completely acceptable. Jason started with an underwhelming lobster bisque, mostly smoky, salty and alcoholic, though it did have chunks of lobster meat in it. His salmon entree was only okay, though he might have been playing it down to make it easier for the woman who didn't get any. We all skipped dessert, not wanting to wait another hour in this place, and headed out into the gardens.
Jason and I went on two rides. The first one was amazing. It's a very tall spire with a ring around it, onto which are strapped twelve people, with their feet hanging free. The ring rises and rises and rises and you think "this is a nice view, lovely, gee we're really high, and we're still rising, and still going and geez, how high are we going..." and then the ring drops almost down to the bottom and then bounces halfway up and down a couple more times. I found it exhilarating, with a real sense of spiritual transformation. Jason had a less emotional reaction to it, but still enjoyed it very much. The trip up, with all the attendant anticipation, is the scary part. The drop is just wonderful. The seat holds you securely enough that it never feels like you're falling out of control, just soaring back down to the ground.
The second ride, The Monsoon, is hard to describe. Picture a huge comb with eight teeth, upside down, with people strapped to the front and back of each tooth, four across. The "comb" moves forward, up, back, and down and then reverses (back, up, forward, down), while jets of water rise out of the base below you, so that you get a little bit of spray in your face. It's not at all frightening, just fun, like a merry-go-round.
After that we wandered through the park for a bit with Elana & Brendan and various other people who came and went. I had lots of fun pushing Jason around in the chair and Elana got him a pinwheel to carry. We left as the park was closing, around midnight and came back to the room to read email and sleep. Jason's foot was "uncomfortable," but not terribly painful and didn't seem to be swelling much and on Friday he was walking on it with only a slight limp and claiming it was "okay."
On Friday, after breakfast with the wives, I took our laundry out to have it done (since the hotel doesn't do laundry over the weekend) and then got our remaining things somewhat more organized. Elana was packing up, so I hung out with her until the boys got back from the wrap-up meeting around noon. We went out to a nice lunch with the three Irish couples and Robert Klarer from IBM Toronto at the lovely Apollo Brewery just down the street. I had carpaccio (beef this time) with minestrone soup and caged bites of the others' pork shortribs and bratwurst, all of which were very tasty. It was good to have a chance to say goodbye to the Kehoes, who were leaving right after lunch.
Lunch over, we left the group and ran over to the Glyptotek. We only had forty-five minutes, so Jason got a very quick tour of the things I considered most interesting, including the new wing that hadn't been open when he was here in '95, the Rodin sculptures, and the small special exhibit on the Belvedere torso and its influence on 19th century sculptors, together with a copy of the most recent scholarly attempt to recreate the entire sculpture, based on the clues of the fragment. A small classical chamber choir was rehearsing in the theater at the center of the south wing, adjacent to the torso exhibition, and their clear voices were resonating in the lovely acoustics of the chamber. One of the most interesting paintings in the collection was a small study by Manet of "The Execution of Maximillian." Manet later painted a large (8'x6', maybe), more finished version, but whoever bought it decided to cut it up and sell the smaller pieces separately. Degas was horrified and went around trying to buy up the pieces and then reconstructed what he could find onto a large cavas--now in the National Gallery in London--but there are several key sections missing and it was neat to see the whole composition. We met up with Jamie, Vivian and Peter as we were leaving and walked back to the hotel with them. I napped while Jason worked a bit and then we went back to the sushi place we'd enjoyed so much on our first night in town, this time with Luann & David and Steve Adamczyk of EDG in NJ. I hadn't had much of a chance to talk with him earlier in the week and ended up hearing all about the renovation of the kitchen of their Craftsman home, which was kind of nifty.
On Saturday we had breakfast with the remaining folk. Stefan, the exchange student who had spent some time living with my family, was to pick us up at noon, but called to say he couldn't make it until two. So we took the subway up to Osterport Station and walked along the canal--stopping to greet the nesting swans and ducks-- through the lovely Kastellet Park to see the Little Mermaid --because you haven't really been in Copenhagen until you've seen it. From there we walked past the fountain of Gefion and St. Albans church in Winston Churchill Park to visit the Danish Resistance Museum. It's a small exhibit, but manages to convey a real sense of the Danish experience with World War II. The tone also seemed to be very objective, neither over- nor underestimating the contribution of various resistance movements and strategies and not villifying the people who tried to maintain the greatest degree of independence for occupied Denmark that was possible while cooperating with the Nazis. They mentioned that the story of the Danish king wearing a Star of David in solidarity with the Jews is a myth, but that it has endured and spread, perhaps because it is such a concise symbol of the real heroism and solidarity of the Danish people of the time. The letters from people condemned to die for their work with the resistance were very moving, displayed in front of a window dedicated to the memory of all who died in the resistance.
We left there and were horrified to see graffiti on the back of a traffic sign right near the museum replacing the "s" in "Israel" with a swastika. We would like to think we've moved past the place where the horrors of World War II are possible, but people are still stupid and cruel.
We got back to the hotel and had time to pick up sandwiches across the street. The bread was stale, but the meat was good and it was an easy lunch. Just as we finished, Stefan arrived and we headed north together. He took us up to Helsingor, which Shakespeare made famous as Elsinore in _Hamlet_ which was based on stories of the Danish folk-hero, Amleth. We crossed the moat to tour Kronborg Castle, built in Helsingor in the 17th century and re-built twice since after fires destroyed various sections. The outside of the building was lovely and interesting and the views across the straight to Sweden were stunning, but the interiors were fairly bare and plain. The most impressive room was the great hall with its vast ceiling of oak beams. Stefan was disappointed, I think, that we used up our time there, rather than using the time to tour the more impressive inside of the castle in Hillerod, but we were glad to see what we did.
From there we drove down to Fredensborg Palace, the summer home of the royal family, where we got an ice cream and walked around the building. Then we visited the castle in Hillerod. It was closed by the time we arrived, but we could walk around the outside courtyard with its fountain and statues. The elaborately decorated facade and archways were lovely and the gardens across the lake at the rear of the palace were gorgeous. We wandered along the paths and alleyways of the castle grounds for a while and then left Hillerod and went on to Stefan's home. There we met his wife, Brigitte, and his two sons, Caspar (almost 3) and Alex (5 months). They have a lovely home in the house by a lake about 20 kilometers from Copenhagen where Stefan's grandmother lived until they bought it from her three years ago. We enjoyed a nice dinner with the family, starting with fish eggs and onions in cream sauce served with a tasty bread, and then a main course of salad, potatoes with sour cream and dill, and a leg of lamb roasted on the grill with garlic embedded in it. It was all quite delicious. After dinner I got to hold Alex for a while. He caught a nasty cold virus two months ago and is still somewhat sick with a terrible cough. But he is a calm baby with huge blue eyes like saucers and a penchant for grabbing the nearest available finger and sucking on it. We had a lovely chat with them and then Stefan very kindly drove us back into Copenhagen, though we could easily have taken the train. It was good to see him again after fifteen years and catch up a little on all the changes we've both been through.
On Sunday we had breakfast with the Schmeisers (Vivian, Jamie and Peter) and the remaining Irish folk, then checked out and put our luggage in the hotel's storage room. We took a train down to Ishoj, on the coast, south of the city, and made the 20 minute walk out to Arken, another Museum of Modern Art. It is built to resemble a ship, in a very modern-art kind of way, and is set among the dunes. There are a few works from their permanent collection on display at any one time, in the main hall of the museum. Most of these were computer generated or enhanced photographs and the most interesting of these were works by a woman who takes a bunch of headshots of famous people and creates a composite of them, according to some equation of importance. For instance, she has one called "War Head" that took the faces of the leaders of the "Nuclear Club" at the time (Reagan, Brezhnev, Thatcher, etc.) and weighted them according to the percentage of the global nuclear arsenal they controlled. The resulting "portrait" has a lot of Reagan and Brezhnev, but the others are in there. More visually fascinating were pieces examining beauty that took various film stars and combined them to create two male and two female "portraits" of conventional beauty. There was also a special exhibit by Gerard Richter, whose paintings on glass I had seen at the SMK.
All this was interesting, but the real reason we were there was to see "Echoes of the Scream," an exhibition of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" and other works, along with several pieces by other artists (Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, George Baselitz, Per Kirkeby, Joseph Beuys, etc.) who were influenced by Munch. I was not very familiar with Munch's work, so it was a good chance to see more of it. I particularly enjoyed his later works, especially "Nude by the Wicker Chair."
We took a bus back to the train station and thence back to Copenhagen proper. We went past the Central Station and up to Norreport and then walked back toward our hotel. In the square next to Peder Oxe, we found a tiny little sandwich bar in a cellar. You pick your bread, cheese and meat and then take them over to a buffet where you can slice yourself tomatoes, onions and peppers and add lettuce, mayo, mustard, pesto, olives, capers or cornichons to your sandwich. We ate them at tables in the square, where there are blankets to keep off the chill, but they weren't necessary that day.
The first couple of days were occasionally rainy, but generally we were surprised by how lovely and warm the weather is. Copenhagen was mostly in the 60's, but got warmer at times, and in Norway it was downright hot for touristing. We mentioned our surprise and were told that spring is actually late this year, that usually it would be even warmer by now, but that early May is the best time of the year to visit Scandinavia, as the tourist season hasn't really begun and the weather is consistently beautiful.
We walked back to the hotel after lunch, picked up our luggage and got in a cab to the pier. We boarded the DFDS Crown of Scandinavia and found our stateroom. It was very compact (my closet at Cognito was bigger), with four bunks that folded down from the walls. We were very glad not to be sharing. But it was an outside cabin, with a window from which we could watch the amazing view float by. After dropping off our luggage we went out to explore the ship and sat on the top deck at the base of the smokestack to admire the view until we were well underway. Then we napped and watched the view from our stateroom before going up to dinner at the Seven Seas buffet. It was quite an extensive buffet, including several kinds of herring with traditional fixings (sour cream, capers, onions, hardboiled egg), two kinds of smoked salmon, poached salmon, poached halibut, smoked halibut, salmon & spinach pie, roast beef/turkey/ham, pork slices in gravy, penne carbonara (bacon & cheese sauce), cold mussels, mussels in saffron sauce, roast chicken, scallopped potatoes, roasted potatoes, sliced meats & cheese, breads, an interesting salad (greens, garlic cloves, string beans), tacos, pate, and several other things I'm sure I've forgotten. For dessert we tried several of their cheeses, a berry trifle and a very light gelatin with green seedless grapes in it.
After dinner we saw the movie _Miss Congeniality_ in one of the ship's two screening rooms. It was a cute movie, an old-fashioned romantic comedy in many ways. The dialog wasn't great, the plot was completely inconsistent, I know more about beauty pageants from watching the TV coverage of Miss America than the screenwriters seemed to, and there was no chemistry between Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt. But Michael Caine was divine ("It takes a secure man to walk that way in public.") and Sandra was fun and it wasn't a movie to be taken too seriously. Once that was over we walked out on deck for a while, enjoying the full moon on the water before heading to bed.
Since I had only brought my winter coat and managed to leave my black cardigan at Stefan's, I decided to buy a light jacket at the duty free shop on the ship. It has been very useful, but I think that Jason is actually more likely to end up wearing it in the long-run, since he's more of a beige person than I am.
After the bounty of the night before, the breakfast buffet was disappointing and I lost all interest when I discovered that the scrambled eggs were served cold. We packed up and were in line to disembark when the ship docked in Oslo at 9:00am. We didn't have any Norwegian money, so we were lucky that the cabs take credit cards. We'd expected to have to drop our bags at the hotel and check in later, so it was a pleasant surprise that our room was ready. The Hotel Bristol is a grand old hotel, with a very dark, plush lobby, but our room was gorgeous--very simple and lovely. It has hardwood floors with area rugs, white walls and a gorgeous, very modern bath. The beds were two singles, pushed together, but that seems to be the norm in Scandinavia. We rested for a few minutes, then headed out to see Oslo. We walked over to the Central Station to get money, and then up Karl Johan street, past the Storting (parliament house) and the National Theater with its statue of Ibsen, to the palace, set amid its park. From there we walked down to Pipervika, the ferry pier across from the Akershus. We had half an hour to wait for the next ferry, so we wandered through the Aker Brygge shopping mall to use their bathroom and find sunscreen. While applying it, once on the ferry, I managed to get some in my eye and it continued to bother me for much of the day.
We were heading over to Bygdoy, about a ten minute ride across Oslofjord from the city. Once there we walked up the hill to the Norsk Folkemuseet, a collection of over 100 buildings from throughout Norway, dating back to the 12th century stave church. We wandered there for over an hour, and then stopped into the Viking Ship Museum, where the three Viking ships discovered in burial mounds near Oslo are displayed, along with some of the artifacts found with them. We headed over to the next ferry stop, where the Maritime Museum, Kon-Tiki Museum and Fram Museum are clustered. We grabbed a couple of hot dogs--the hot dogs in Scandinavia are very good, especially compared to the nasty ones we got on the street in London--and decided that we didn't really have the time or stamina for the Maritime Museum, but would hit the other two. The Kon-Tiki Museum is a monument to the work of Thor Heyerdahl and contains the Kon-Tiki raft on which he and five other men cross the Pacific in 101 days from Peru to Polynesia, proving that such a voyage could have taken place in pre-historic times. It also has the Ra II, on which he crossed the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados, proving that a similar voyage could have been accomplished by Egyptians. It was nifty stuff, displayed well. Across the parking lot is the Frammuseet, where the conventional ship to travel the furthest north and south in the world is enshrined, along with the story of its voyages, variously under the command of Nansen, Amundsen and other Norwegian explorers. Its most impressive feat was travelling, embedded in ice, along the ice current from Siberia to Greenland. That took three years. Visitors are able to explore the Fram extensively, accompanied by a recording of the sounds of wind and ice that would have surrounded the crew. Just putting up with that noise is an astonishing feat. Out in front of the museum is the Gjoa, the small ship on which Amundsen managed to navigate the Northwest Passage.
We finished up there right at five and caught the ferry back to Oslo. While we were waiting for it, we saw the Crown of Scandinavia heading back out to Copenhagen. Back at our hotel, we napped, and then went to Dinner. That's the name of the most highly recommended Chinese restaurant in Oslo and we had a fine meal there. We shared oven-baked dumplings and hot & sour soup (which was actually more sweet & spicy, but still quite tasty), followed by a Szechuan hot pot (which we requested "mild" and seems not to have offended my tummy) and the Cantonese shrimp, chicken & scallops in black bean sauce. It was all good and with an ice cream cone on the walk home, made a perfect meal. Jason wanted to work for a bit, so I hung out in the lounge, listening to the piano/saxophone duo, and then took a bath. We had wanted to use the hotel's Internet connection, but the key to the office had been misplaced.
On Tuesday we had to be up early in order to make our 8:11am train to Myrdal. We had breakfast at the hotel (the egss were warm!), took a cab to the Central Station and caught our train with three minutes to spare. The train was quite comfortable, except that the bright sunshine pouring in made it pretty hot. Strange to be sweating while watching enormous snowdrifts out the window. After 4.5 hours of incredible scenery, we arrived in Myrdal and changed for the Flamsbana, "the famous Flam mountain railway". That took us down the mountain into the Flam Valley on a track that descends 863 meters over 20 kilometers of track, past what seemed like hundreds of waterfalls, through 20 tunnels as the train spirals through the mountain down to the farming and tourist community at sea level. Pretty amazing geology and the scenery was incredible.
We arrived in Flam around two and had twenty-four hours in which to fully explore a place for which "hamlet" is too big a word. The population outside the hotel is 450 and the place exists mainly as a place for 400,000 tourists each year to switch from train to boat. For reasons that aren't very clear, our travel agent booked us a night there. The hotel was quite lovely, though, and our room on the ground floor had a stunning view of the fjord and mountains. After a nap we went out and wandered along the jetty and through the four different souvenir shops and then up onto the ridge over the town where we sat on a rock outcropping and watched boats moving up and down the fjord. Back at the hotel we enjoyed the restaurant's set menu of smoked fish soup, roast lamb with potatoes and veg, with flan for dessert. Jason figured out how to get his computer online and spent the evening working in the lobby, while I caught up on the news by watching the BBC. Periodically I would go out and marvel with Jason over how light it was...still bright enough to read outside at 10pm and still not *dark* at 11pm.
On Wednesday we slept in and had a late breakfast. Jason worked some more, while I packed and then we checked out of the hotel and went off for a walk. We walked as far around the west side of the fjord as we could, then turned back and walked along the path parallel to the road on the east side until it was time to turn back. We saw sheep and some lovely vacation cottages. There has obviously been a lot of work done recently to the roads and the waterside. Back in town, we grabbed hot dogs, picked up our luggage at the hotel and boarded the boat for Gudvangen.
The fjord really is just as gorgeous as it is rumored to be. The snow-topped mountains plunge down to the still water and waterfalls run down every crevasse. The trip takes two hours, up the small branch headed by Flam to the main fjord and then down the next branch to Gudvangen, passing a few small towns and hamlets along the way. Gulls followed us and people tossed them peanuts, for which they would dive and wheel and then catch up again for more. It reminded me of feeding french fries to the gulls at Revere Beach.
We arrived in Gudvangen just after five and checked into the Gudvangen Fjordtell, which consists of two large, low sod-roofed round huts right next to the ferry landing. The first hut contains the reception desk, dining room and souvenir shop. Our room was one wedge of the other hut. It was a simple room, decorated with lovely woodcarvings and our bed was, as usual, two single beds, but kept together in a wooden "corral" bedframe with carved Viking dragons on the bedposts. The bathroom made up the narrow end of the wedge. There was no tub, just a showerhead and a drain in the floor. It seems like a fine idea, until you walk into the bathroom in your socks. Definitely one of the most unique hotel rooms I've ever had and the reindeer skin on the bed added to the "hunting cabin" atmosphere. The door and window at the front of the room continued up into the roof as an enormous skylight, giving us a stunning view of the mountains above.
After settling in, we went for a walk across the narrow wooden pedestrian bridge to the other side of the fjord and along the path on that side. We went on for a ways, then turned back and took the highway bridge back over to the town and walked through its 200 meters of what appear to be mainly 18th century clapboard houses. It reminded me of some of the small, old hamlets up in the Catskill Mountains. The tunnel being drilled through the mountainside near the hotel suggested that perhaps Gudvangen will soon be less isolated than it is now.
We had dinner in the dining room, where we were one of only two parties, the other being a couple from Buffalo with their son, who is studying in Copenhagen this term. Our starter was small crayfish, served in garlic butter like escargot. That was followed by salmon steaks and tiny shrimp in a dill hollandaise sauce. The fish was annoyingly bony, but very tasty. For dessert we were served orange mousse with raspberry sauce, a slice of star fruit, whipped cream and one of the best figs I've ever tasted. It was odd to be all alone in this cavernous hall that could seat two hundred at least at its long wooden tables with chairs backed in red leather with Viking designs on them. It made me think of Valhalla, waiting for the warriors to come in from hunting for the feast. The host explained that the hotel is not technically open until May 15th, but that for old customers they make certain exceptions and our travel agent is one of them.
After dinner it was only just after 8pm, and the power had gone off during dinner, so we decided to go for another walk before sunset. There was a waterfall up the side of the mountain across the street, with a long hill of scree on either side of it that looked climbable, so we headed up the side of the mountain. It was tricky at a few points and there were a couple of times that I thought long and hard before going on--I kept having visions of having to be airlifted out of there--but we made it up to the first big cataract, maybe 100 meters above the floor of the valley. We watched the water pouring over the granite face, took some pictures and then headed back down. That was a fun little adventure.
The power was still out, but it was not yet dark and the host gave us some candles. I read a couple of Jane Austen's short, silly stories to Jason before we headed to bed.
In the morning we had breakfast and bought a few souvenirs--a hat to replace the one I dropped somewhere in Copenhagen, a gorgeous cardigan, some film and some socks, since the only clean ones I had left were wool, and it was much warmer throughout the trip than I expected. Then we walked through town to the bus stop. This was our first real snag of the trip. The bus due at 9:30am didn't arrive until ten and we pulled into the train station at Voss just as the Bergen train was pulling out the other side. It took us a few minutes to take stock of our options, by which time the bus had gone on to Bergen, eliminating that one. We had two hours to wait for the next train, so we put our luggage into the station's lockers and walked out around the fjord, through a lovely pine forest, over a pedestrian bridge, and up the hill on the other side to the Dagestadmuseet, dedicated to the work of a local woodworker. It was closed, but we didn't have time to go in anyway, it just made a convenient destination. We turned around and walked back, this time choosing a path that would take us by the kirke and through town, where we stopped at a bakeri for pastries. We got back to the station to find the train sitting at the platform with its doors open, so we got our luggage, got on and waited there for twenty minutes for the train to depart.
One of the things we've noticed here in Norway is that their idea of color combinations is not ours. As in Denmark and Sweden, the houses are often brightly painted. Many of them are a terrible mustardy yellow, which they often combine with a bright red or olive green--this isn't sounding as bad as it looks. There are many pretty ones, but the blecherous ones are remarkable. It's been such a treat to take public transportation, because it means that we can both look out the "vindu" at the same time.
The ride to Bergen was uneventful and I was lulled to sleep by the lovely view and the music of the rails. On arrival, we underestimated the distance to the hotel and ended up making about a twenty minute walk fully loaded. We checked into the Hotel Augustin, a lovely family-run hotel that has recently been renovated. We were given a lovely corner room, with a small balcony out over the street. After a brief stop, we headed out again and explored the Fisketorget (Fish Market, where they had tanks of live fish and beautiful sections of different fish as well as piles of crawfish and shrimp and lobsters; there were also several fruit stands where we bought a tasty pint of the famous Norwegian strawberries and devoured them as we walked along the quay) and the old Hansa port section, the Bryggen. We explored the Bergenhus Festning (Bergen Fortress), including the Haakonshallen, the great hall originally built under the reign of Haakon Haakonsson in the mid-13th century and restored after its many re-workings through the centuries and serious damage during World War II, when a German ammunition boat blew up in the harbor just below the fortress. The restored hall is very impressive, with a gorgeous trestled wood roof and thick walls.
We wandered down Ovregaten, the street of antique shops, to the base station of the Floibanen Funicular. This took us up to the top of Floyen, one of the seven mountains surrounding the city. From the walkway 1050 ft. above the harbor, we looked out on the whole area. We took a walk in the surrounding woods, enjoying the wildness of the place, and then walked down the side of the mountain on a trail that switched back and forth...and back and forth and back and forth...all the way back to the base station.
Consulting our guidebook, we identified three restaurants that sounded interesting and wandered around the Bryggen looking at their menus. Eventually we decided on Finnegaardstuene, set in a series of four small rooms in one of the merchant homes of the 18th century. This was one of the best meals I've ever enjoyed. They started us off with a lagniappe of duck liver terrine served on a bed of mango chutney. The chutney had a tendency to overwhelm the terrine when combined in a single bite, but alternating the flavors provided an excellent balance. We shared a plate of six raw Norwegian oysters, which were some of the most flavorful I have eaten and a real treat after disappointing experiences with oysters in London. Next we both had seared scallops with salmon roe. Jason's were served with a pipperade (bell peppers and onions marinated and sauteed), while mine came with a small cake of couscous, topped with the sweetest crayfish I have ever tasted, and a pesto beurre blanc. After a palate cleanser (I don't believe I'd actually been served a palate cleanser before) of white wine and lime granita, Jason was served a lightly smoked fillet of sea trout. It had been advertised as coming with a ginger confit and sweetcorn cream, but they'd substituted a potato cake and what tasted more like soy butter (advertised for another of the fish dishes), along with some marvelous sauteed wild mushrooms and a stalk of lightly steamed asparagus. Jason was disappointed not to have the ginger treat, but in the end enjoyed his entree very much. I was in raptures over a loin of veal, wrapped in pancetta, with a port demiglace and very happy with my share of the potato cake, mushrooms and asparagus. It was Jason's night for disappointment, as they were out of the fruit gaspacho with Thai beignets he'd planned to order. My dessert, a fig tarte tatin with chantilly cream, blackberry tea glaze and a cinnamon nougatine (sugar wafer), was exquisite and Jason happily split it with me as we enjoyed the excellent house blend of coffee. It was quite warm in the dining room, but eventually the staff took pity on us and opened the door, so we got a nice cross breeze and were much more comfortable.
Lounging outside the nightclub across the street were a bunch of young people in the baggy red pants emblazoned with names and the year and signatures, that we'd noticed all over Norway. I got up the courage to walk over and ask them what was up with their pants (always a delicate question) and they explained that it's part of the high school graduation ritual, that all graduating seniors in the country wear special outfits during graduation week.
Between carrying my pack so much during the day and then walking all over Norway, I was really aching by the time we got back to the hotel. The kind of if-only-my-arms-really-would-fall-off kind of feeling. So I took a long bath and took painkillers and we got to bed reasonably early. In the morning, Jason asked if I had slept well and the rest of me was better, but my shoulders were still hurting.
We were out of the hotel by 9am on Friday, having enjoyed their breakfast buffet. We walked out to the Bergen Aquarium, on the point of the peninsula that our hotel is on. We decided to visit, partly because it's the only thing in Bergen that's open before 11am. The hours of operation of the various sites are quite erratic, with one thing only being open 12-3 on Sundays and another open 11-1:30, most things closing at 4pm, except the art museums, which are open 12-5.
The aquarium has a couple of outdoor pools with several species of penguins (including my favorites, the " macaroni" or " rockhopper" penguin, the one with the blonde spiky hairdo) and seals. There are underwater windows into the pools, so you can watch the flocks of penguins flying through the water and see the seals sleeping upside down on the bottom. The main aquarium has a wide variety of tanks, many showing native sea creatures. There is an emphasis on the commercial aspects of the ocean, including a small exhibit on seal-hunting, which seemed odd to us, though it makes sense, as fishing is the second largest industry in Norway (between oil and tourism).
Leaving there, we hoped to catch a bus back to the center of town, but the next one wasn't for an hour. Plan B was to take a ferry, but they apparently weren't following their published schedule. So we walked back around the Vagen (harbor), through the Fisketorget and onto the Bryggen, where we visited the Hanseatisk Museum, the 16th century home and offices of one of the German merchants who controlled Bergen and its cod trade for 300 years. They had an interesting set-up. No fires were allowed in the houses, by the rules of the Hanseatic Office. So all cooking and socializing were done in common "assembly rooms" and everyone slept in cupboard beds (that reminded me of the "coffins" in the 4-4 at Fenway) to keep warm. The merchants serving in Bergen were not allowed to be married, nor to fraternize with the local women. Apprentices could become journeymen in time, then move up to be the local agent of a Hansa merchant, then buy their own "house" and move back to Germany to marry, raise a family, and run their business long distance. After seeing the house, we walked up the Ovregaten (High Street) to the Shotstuene, the surviving example of the assembly rooms, with their ornate iron stoves and very simple kitchens. In the dining hall, one of the three places of honor was labelled "Beerkoeper," so that was obviously an important role in the community.
From the Schotstuene, we crossed the street to the Mariakirke, where the German community worshipped. Services were actually held in German until the mid-20th century. It's a fairly simple building, with ornate decorations provided by the merchants and a very peaceful churchyard.
Our next stop, the Bryggens Museum, is a modern building, built over the ruins of 12th century buildings, just down the hill from the Mariakirke. The permanent exhibit focuses on late-medieval Bergen, while the upstairs temporary exhibit of the moment was on the many roles of animals in medieval Norwegian life.
On our way back through the Fisketorget, we picked up sandwiches of smoked salmon and boiled shrimp, which were both fresh and lovely. From there we walked past the Lille Lungegaardsvann, a small lake in a park that has a lovely fountain in the middle, to the art museums. There are actually four small museums, all in a row on Rasmus Meyers Alle, three of which are included in the Bergen Art Museum under a single ticket. Our first stop was the Stenersens Samlinger (Collection) of 20th century art, including a fantastic room of eight works by Paul Klee. This section of the gallery was dark, with spotlights illuminating just the pictures. It was a very effective way of focusing one's attention on the works. I have not previously been very excited by Klee, but these works, particularly "Enclosure for Pachyderms," were quite compelling. There was also a room of Picassos and a room of works by Andreas Wols, with whose work I was previously unfamiliar, as well as a selection of pieces by other artists.
Next down the row was the Bergen Kunstforening, the contemporary art gallery, which was open despite being under renovation inside and out. The current exhibition is the thesis works of the Kunsthoyskolen (Art School) and included several interesting pieces, mainly in video. My favorite work was actually an audio speaker made to look just like a rock. It's surprising how disconcerting it is to have sound coming out of a rock.
On down the alley we entered the Rasmus Meyers Samlinger, with works by various 19th and 20th century Norwegian artists, as well as room interiors from 1750-1915, including a couple of rooms of work by Munch and artists who were directly influenced by him.
The last gallery is the City Art Collection, where we saw mainly contemporary works, in addition to a couple of rooms of landscapes by J.C. Dahl and antique maps of Bergen. The most memorable piece in the gallery was "Crickets," by Yoko Ono, which consisted of perhaps twenty different wooden cricket cages hung from the ceiling. On the bottom of each cage was a plaque with the name of a city and the date of a famous atrocity that took place there (e.g. Hiroshima, August 6, 1945; My Lai; Phnom Penh; Dresden; Tibet; Sarajevo (both 1914 and 1992); Soweto). And then there's New York City, December 8, 1980 and you think "what happened there, then?" and then you remember and your breath catches and your eyes mist up. Or they do if you're me. There was a guestbook underneath inviting guests to write their own...Jason wrote "I have no cricket."
With three of the four galleries only half-open (the Stensersen and City Art Collections were between special exhibits) the whole museum experience took only 2.5 hours, but by the time we were done, we were pooped. After some reinvigorating ice cream at the Fisketorget, we walked back to the hotel, where Jason wrote email while I napped.
Jason had chosen that evening's dinner, based on the guidebook's recommendation, so we had booked one of the six tables at Munkestuen, just up the hill from our hotel. The surroundings were more homey than the previous night and the food less elaborate, but still very, very good. On the recommendation of the owner, I started with the oysters poached in a scallion butter sauce (which I sopped up with the excellent fresh bread), while Jason's first course was an ideal lobster bisque (hummersuppe), creamy and just slightly smoky, with lots of lobster meat. I had beaten Jason to the decision to have the reindeer fillet, with a twice-baked potato, cauliflower, french beans, brussel sprouts (you're right, Anne, they're perfectly edible with a good sauce), and sauteed mushrooms in a "sauce Chevreuil," which was a creamy wine sauce. I was shocked by how tender the reindeer meat was. Jason had a lovely wild boar fillet with a chickpea mash and mustard sauce, served with the same potato and cauliflower, but with snowpeas and asparagus. For dessert, Jason had the gratinated fresh berries with a sweet muscat sorbet, while I had the creme brulee, which was okay, but much improved when I got Jason to donate some of his berry sauce.
We headed back to the hotel and Jason packed up while I worked on email. We had trouble getting to sleep, because of the street noise, but that was greatly reduced when I realized that the cleaning staff had left the window by our bed open at the top. We pried ourselves from bed at 6am and made it through the breakfast buffet and out of the hotel by 7:30am. Our train was at the platform when we arrived at the station, so we boarded immediately. I went to sleep for the first couple of hours, not really waking up until Myrdal. It was chilly on the train at first, but warmed up as we got back down below the snowline on the eastern side.
Back in Oslo on Saturday afternoon, we checked back into the Bristol, threw our luggage in the storage room and headed out to the Nationalgalleriet around the corner. Arriving there just before three, we thought we had until five--and so started with the maze of tiny galleries of lesser-known works on the top floor--but it turned out the museum closes at four, leaving us with half of the main floor still to see. We went back to the hotel to put our stuff in a room (this one was not quite as nice as our last room--no tub, some visible water damage, an older phone--but had an exciting jungle motif to distinguish itself) before heading out again. We took the tram (or "trikk" as the natives call it) up to the Frogen area and walked through Vigelandparken. Gustav Vigeland was Norway's greatest sculptor and he designed the Frogen Park's landscaping and created hundreds of sculptures for it, including the fountain at the center of the park and the 450 ton granite monolith that crowns the highest hill surrounded by sculptures and wrought iron gates intended to represent the gamut of human relationships. It's a beautiful place and was quite full on such a lovely day. We wandered around there for over an hour, looking at all the different statues including the famous "Angry Baby "--and got a T-shirt and a Vigeland-designed embroidery kit at the gift shop before walking back down toward the center of town.
After two nights of fabulous four-star dinners, we were ready for something more basic, so we went back to Dinner for Chinese food. Jason's seafood hotpot came with a lot of shells on and when he saw it, he got a look of horror, so I shelled everything for him and made him share heavily. I think our choices were not quite as good this time around, but it was still a tasty and easy choice.
Once again we tried to use the hotel's business center to get online. They had found the key, but only had a modem connection, where we needed an Ethernet hookup. Jason went off to find the Internet cafe he'd noticed earlier around the corner, while I had an amusing time returning the key and explaining why we shouldn't be charged, since we were unable to use their setup. My exchange with the deskclerk finally got down to me saying "I can explain to you how the system works, which will take about ten minutes, or you can just trust me that it isn't what we need." She laughed and agreed.
On Sunday morning, I was really ready to be headed home--my tummy was acting up and my back was still sore and my feet were aching up to my knees--but Jason was motivated to get to the Munch-museet, so after partaking of the hotel's breakfast buffet, we took the T-bane up to the Toyen area. As a former Bostonian, it's funny to me that the Oslo subway is also called the "T" and has big round "T" signs marking the stations.
Munchmuseet is a modern space, built to house the collection of works the artist bequeathed to the city upon his death in 1944. The basement has a comprehensive biographical display about his life and work. The main exhibit was somewhat disappointing. Many of the pieces from his "Frieze of Life" that we saw in Arken were from this museum and their absence was notable. It was interesting to get a picture of his artistic process, which included multiple attempts to capture various subjects and translation of the images into woodcuts and engravings.
Just across the street from the Munchmuseet are the natural history museums of the University of Oslo. Set in a lovely park are museums of Botany, Zoology, and Geology/Paleontology. We spent about an hour in the Geology museum, looking at cool rocks and trying to piece together the illustrations and charts, since most of the explanatory text was in Norwegian. This was fairly unusual throughout Norway, as most museums at least had translations of titles in English and often had English guides to the collections.
We took the T back into the center of town and went to the two modern art museums, the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and the Museet for Samtidskunst. The first was small, but quite interesting, especially the special exhibit, "My Private Sky" by Borre Saethre. We entered a room with some pink metallic slabs glued to the walls and I was thinking that was kind of lame, when Jason wandered near enough to the oval panel on the wall that it opened, revealing a corridor lined with geometrically molded white foam, with grey carpet and a strip of overhead light. We entered and the door shut behind us, leaving us in a corridor with another panel at the opposite end. That opened, leading to a square room with the center occupied by a solid core (so basically, it was a square corridor around the room) and monitors on the walls, framed in chrome and displaying firework-like explosions as a chiming, droning music filled the air. At the far side of that was another panel, leading to another room, this one also carpeted in grey, but with a wall of shaded windows to the outside, and perhaps twenty elliptical, white, plastic, geometrical objects (Jason describes them as a cross between an insect head and spaceship) hanging from the ceiling to about five feet off the ground. There was another freestanding box, perhaps forty feet long by twelve feet high by twenty feet wide, taking up most of the larger room, with another oval panel on the short side facing us as we entered the room. Through the doorway, the room revealed was carpeted in royal blue on all surfaces, except along the long walls, which were covered by a series of white bubble panels. Almost at the far end of this chamber was a unicorn. A stuffed white horse with a twisted horn of iron-grey to match its hooves was lying on its side amid the blue. The air here was filled with an almost annoying tone. The whole thing was very 2001, very surreal, with--as Jason put it--the sense that you had entered a future that you could not possibly understand.
After that, the Museum for Samidskunst (Contemporary Art) was a bit of a let-down. The exibited works consisted mainly of video installations, which we didn't have time to sit and watch. Four of them (by one artist) were series of groups of about twenty women in various states of semi- to complete nudity just standing around in small rooms. There was one interesting room of works by Marina Abramovic, a performance artist of the 70's whose new work, "Cleaning the Mirror I" (five stacked TV's showing the artist's hands scrubbing a skeleton clean) we had seen in Arken as one of the "influenced by Munch" works.
We sat in the courtyard outside the museum for a few minutes and then took the T back up to the Nationalgalleriet and went in to look through the section we'd missed the day before, including two rooms of Munch paintings and some of the more modern Norwegian and European works, as well as a room full of Russian icons. Leaving there we wandered down Karl Johans Gate, looking for late lunch. The food court at the Paleet mall had been recommended, but although the front doors were open, everything in the mall was locked up tight. So we ended up at the sidewalk cafe in front of the Grand Hotel, across from the parliament building, where I had a roastbeef smorbrod (open-faced sandwich) and Jason got a bowl of strawberries and ice cream and felt terribly decadent ordering only dessert.
One more trip back to the hotel to reclaim our luggage and then we hopped a cab up to the train station and took the 20 minute express train to the airport 50km outside the city. We checked in and got the tax on our one large purchase (my sweater from Gudvangen) refunded and then hit the duty free shops, where we found a sweater for Jason and a few other little things. We still had an hour to kill, so we stopped by the Salmon House restaurant and had a last seafood fix--a bowl of lobster bisque and a combination plate of smoked salmon, mussels, shrimp and crayfish. Finally it was time to board our flight.
The plane was fairly empty, so we could spread out across our row. I've become fairly fond of British Air's inflight magazine and browsed through that for most of the flight. We got a lovely sunset and then a great aerial view of London on our approach. We got through immigration, found our bags (the claim area was a real zoo and we were in the older, less-well-desiged terminal), and headed for the tube. I spent the last leg of the trip catching up this report, which made the stations fly by until at last we were at Manor House. It's somehow still strange to feel at home in London, but it was very good to see our newsagent and our doner kebab shop and our bus rolling by as we walked down the hill. The house was fine, if a little warm, but we opened up the windows and went through the mail and called our mothers to say "Happy Mother's Day." We both set to work catching up on email and it's gotten terribly late. So now it's time to send this behemoth out and go to sleep.