I flew there on a Wednesday night. The only direct flight from Zurich landed at about 10 p.m., so that's what I did. I got to the hotel around 11 p.m., and it was still twilight. I already talked about this a bit, but even just in Oslo, it never gets really dark at night in the summer. You couldn't do fireworks on the Fourth of July there.
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I spent three days in Oslo. I spent the first day walking around a peninsula, Bygdøy, which is across the harbor from Oslo. I visited five different museums. The first was an open air museum that showed examples of how life used to be in Norway.
The second was the Viking ship museum, which contained restored Viking ships. Pretty cool.
The other museums had to do with various Arctic and Antarctic explorations and such. The Norwegians did some pretty astonishing things in exploring both the North and South Poles. One guy had a theory that the ice at the North Pole drifts in such a way that if you got frozen into the ice in the polar ice cap on one side, you'd eventually pop out the other side. So he built a ship, the Fram, to do just that. They deliberately froze themselves in the ice and drifted along for three years. Sure enough, they popped out on the other side. They didn't quite reach the North Pole, but the trip was pretty astonishing. The ship took up the whole museum, so I could only get a picture of one part of the ship.
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That pretty much covers Day 1. I'll do more postings for the rest of the trip.
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