Woodpress

Here is the overdue Norway Day 5 report.

Day 5 in Norway was my last full day. I was there with a co-worker (who I’ll refer to as Rick, because that’s his name). Rick suggested that since the weather was great, we might want to leave work while there was still plenty of daylight left and see a bit of Oslo… so we did. He’d been there before, so he was my tour guide.

First we went to Vigeland Sculpture Park, which was pretty impressive, but before we’d seen the whole thing I developed a sudden urgent need to visit a watercloset. Rick suspected the cause was the enormous Coca-Cola Light I had on the way, but it wasn’t that sort of need. I’d apparently eaten something that was in a big hurry to get somewhere. Even though the stay at the park was cut short, I managed to get quite a few pictures.

Rick has six young kids spaced very close together. The youngest are twins. He said “see if you can find the sculpture of me.” I identified it without trouble.

There’s also an uncensored photo of the sculpture.

This one made me think of my son. This whole park has a family theme, actually.

Those sculptures lined the walkway. Here’s a snapshot showing how it looks (including the back of Rick’s head).

In the full-resolution version, you can see some detail in the sculptures.

After I took care of my business, we left the park and caught a train to a little ski resort area. As the train slowed at one of the train stops along the way, we noticed a man being given CPR just outside our window. Rick had a view of the man’s face from where he was sitting, and said it didn’t look good. When the train pulled away, they were still trying to revive him.

We accidentally got off the train one stop early and decided to walk to the next stop rather than waiting for the train. That decision worked out very well. I got some good pictures along the way.

This picture of moss could stand to be lightened, but for some reason I included it in the group of photos I uploaded for this post.

These flowers were growing on the side of the road. They’re white with yellow centers. The picture didn’t look very good in color, but I like the black-and-white.

Here’s the road we walked along. If you look off in the distance, you can see a “NO BLUE!” sign. Norwegian’s apparently HATE blue. These signs were scattered all over.

When we reached our destination, we could see some fjords, but it wasn’t clear enough that I felt like taking pictures of them. Instead, we had some soup and apple cake. It was yummy, and apparently the apple cake is famous. That evening someone asked me where I’d gone, and didn’t seem sure what I was talking about until I mentioned the apple cake.

We sat up at the top of the mountain looking down at fjords, talking, and enjoying the clean air for a while (it had rained recently, but it was a relatively clear day), then caught the train and went to a pier where I took more pictures. I’m only including a picture of a sculpture we saw there. If you’re interested in more pictures from the pier, there’s a link to all my Norway photos at the end of this post.

It’s a melon. In Norwegian it’s called a “melon.” Those wacky Norwegians.

After wandering around the pier, we headed back to the city. For some reason we stopped at a 7-11 (Rick needed something), and I noticed that they have a better selection of prepared food there than the 7-11s I’m familiar with (basically hot dogs and nachos, if you consider the warming of nacho cheese to be “preparation”).

While we were there, someone bought the sushi in the top right corner. I think there’s an Indian dish on the bottom. Everything looked pretty edible.

For dinner, we went to some sort of fancy schmancy restaurant where we paid about $100 per person. Rick wanted to have “the big fish” (apparently it’s huge) but they had a guest chef from Belgium and the waiter was very insistent that we order the Belgian food. The food was okay, but I think I missed the point or something. I wouldn’t deliberately order it again, even if it cost significantly less. Still, it was interesting. The waiter was snobby and French, so we could tell the restaurant was fancy even if we couldn’t understand him when he told us what we were eating. “He didn’t ACTUALLY say the scallops were served in battery acid, did he?” “Nah, I think it was his accent, but I’m not sure what he said.”

After dinner, Rick had to go to sleep, because he had an early (7:00 AM) flight out. I, on the other hand, had a late (12:30 PM) flight… so I went back to my hotel room for a little while, then walked to the karaoke bar I’d visited on the night when I learned how to ditch pushy prostitutes. I’ll cover the karaoke bar later.

Oh… and I saw this sign everywhere:

If you’re interested, you can check out all the photos from the trip on Flickr. There’s an excessive quantity of candle photos. That’s because they take their time serving dinner in Norway, and they often have candles on the table.