Norway+ Coach Tour: Oslo

London List #15: Norway = Check!

Instead of trying to cover the insanely emotional experience that was June through August of this year, I am going to jump right in to our 30-day honeymoon travel adventures. I do intend to catch up on some of the other major events of the summer in future posts, but for now let’s get to the stuff that most of you have come here for anyway: updates on our European adventure.

We began on August 22, flying from San Diego to Oslo, Norway (via New York and Helsinki). Finnair is amazing. Anyone flying to Scandinavia or the area around the Baltic Sea should use them.

Oslo, our first destination, is the capital of Norway. We knew very little about Norway going in, except that it was supposed to be beautiful. Oslo has 650,000 inhabitants and Norway's entire population is only 5 million. Coming from San Diego, CA, where the populations are 1.3 million and 38 million respectively, we were destined to be constantly baffled by the absence of people anywhere we went.

This is Joe’s first time in Europe, but he wasted no time finding craft beer at the first place we ate in Oslo. He also quickly identified the Norwegian craft brewery of choice, Nøgne. The restaurant, Tekehtopa, was near our hotel and had an impressive beer list (including San Diego local favorites like Port Brewing of Pizza Port) and the food was delicious! We were semi-shocked by the steep Norwegian prices, though we had been warned before our arrival. Still, we liked it enough to return with our friends a few days later.

That evening we met up with our friends, Alicia and Manuel, and the rest of our Gate 1 coach tour group. As expected, the average age of the passengers excluding the 4 of us was about 60. Surprisingly, Joe and I were not the only or even the most recent newlyweds, though.

Day 2 was a full day in Oslo. We had a tour in the morning, a free afternoon, and then boarded the bus to start heading west. The 6 am wake up call would’ve been a shock to Joe’s system if we weren’t experiencing the affects of jetlag and hadn’t both woken up naturally at 4 am.

Some highlights in Oslo included wandering through Vigeland Sculpture Garden in Frogner Park and the Opera house. In the early 1920s, the city of Oslo wanted to build a library on a plot of land that already contained sculptor Gustav Vigeland’s home. He agreed to move and bequeath all of his subsequent works to the city if they built him a new home and gave him a place to display his masterpiece, a series of scupltures about the Human Condition and the Cycle of Suffering inheren in the human experience. The deal produced the striking sculpture garden in Frogner Park. Although the style of the pieces was too bold and often too violent or depressing for my taste, the assembly of one artist’s creative vision in one location was incredibly interesting. Even without any previous knowledge about Vigeland, it was completely possible to understand his perception of the world we live in.

The Opera House was completed recently (only in 2007) and was visually interesting from afar, but the architecture of the building drew us closer. The steeply slanted roofline slopes down almost all the way to Oslofjord, where visitors can walk right up on top of the building.

At the end of our Norwegian journey a week later we returned to Oslo and had an entirely different experience of the place. This time we met up with Manuel’s friend and roomate from college, Mike, and his girlfriend Julie who live in the city. With them, we visited Schouskjelleren Mikrobryggeri, a local alehouse that produced some surprisingly well-crafted brews.