On Wednesday we decided to get an Oslo Pass. This allows you one day access to all the museums in town plus most public transportation. So we packed in a lot! We started with the Viking Ship Museum. It was interesting to hear that the reason these preserved so well is that after being used for sailing, they were then used to bury important dignitaries in burial mounds.
Our next stop, The Norwegian Folk Museum, was declared by Megan to be “the best museum she ever visited”. They have taken many old buildings built 150-500 years ago from around Norway and moved them here. It is mostly houses and farm buildings, although there is one traditional stavkirke (church). Many of them are open so that you can go inside and see the traditional furnishings. There are also people in traditional dress correlating to the age of the buildings who answer questions about the culture of their time. One guy told us about the festive porridges cooked for special occasions (instead of regular porridge made from oats and water, they would add meat plus sour cream saved up especially for the festive porridge).
Next we were off to see the Polar Ship Fram Museum (named Best Museum in Oslo on TripAdvisor!). Indeed it was impressive — allowing us to explore the deck and living quarters of Fram, the first ship designed to safely be frozen while sailing in Arctic Ice. The squeezing ice pushes the ship upwards instead of crushing it. It also had replaceable rudders so that when the freezing ice broke them off, new ones could be inserted when the water thawed. The Fram and its crew spent three entire years drifting in/on Arctic ice in the early 1900s as a study of how polar ice fields shift. The museum also contained the Gjoa (the ship that Roald Amundsen captained to be the first to cross the Northwest Passage). Below – Megan and Roald on the Fram’s upper deck, and a shot of the Gjoa.
Nextdoor was the Kon-Tiki Museum. We thought it was really cool to see the primitive raft used by Thor Heyerdahl to cross from Peru to the Polynesian Islands in 1947. We’d all recently read the book and found it quite thrilling. Now after hearing about the Fram and Roald Amundsen’s adventures, I want to read more about that as well.
Our last museum stop of the day was the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art which was a bit of a disappointment since many of the works of interest to me were on loan to other museums. Plus the ones on display were disproportionately disturbing! In particular, there was one which could have been fun but wasn’t … you start by seeing 2 large irregular holes in walls that look like a cartoon where someone afraid runs straight through a wall (picture below at left). Then you get to the other side of the walls and see lying on the floor what created the holes: it was the walking Kool-Aid pitcher (from old 1980s TV ads) who was running while carrying Roger Rabbit and Wile E. Coyote and then for some reason had konked out there on the floor. The disturbing part was that also lying there was the man who’d been inside the Kool-Aid pitcher and he was life-size, realistic, hairy and totally naked. Just crossing the border from “fun” to “Did I really have to see that?” The same artist did the work shown below on the right which Megan took one look at and said, “That looks like bird poop on a wall” before Leon read the title and it was from the artist’s “Bird Shit Series”, this one was titled something like “View of 34th Street”.
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