I only spent a couple of nights in Oslo which really wasn't enough. I definitely prefer to spend a bit longer in places, especially places as large as Oslo to really get a feel for the place. But on the other hand it really kinda was just another city and I wanted to move onto seeing the Fjords which is the main reason to visit Norway I think.

So as it worked out I really only had one full day to actually do anything. And that day was spent visiting a bunch of museums. Again I had met up with Kristi and we in turn met Audrey, another American girl. Together we got a ferry to a peninsular in Oslo which contains a bunch of museums. We bought the Oslo Card which gave us free entry into all of them, so basically we figured in order to get our money's worth we ought to go in as many of them as we could.

The first museum we went into was a Viking boat museum very similar to the one in Roskilde in Denmark. Except instead of the ships having be brought up from the harbour these ones were all found in Viking burial mounds. The results of this is that they were in extremely good condition. In fact, it looks as though you'd still be able to even sail them.

The second place we went to was an open air museum which consisted of small villages that had been relocated from around Norway. This was kinda similar to the Pergamon museum in Berlin that way, in that they took apart buildings elsewhere and reconstruct them here. The main attraction (for me at least) was the stave church there. While it may not have been the oldest stave church in Norway, and of course had been reconstructed here not all that long ago, it was still pretty awesome. The museum was actually pretty huge and you could go inside a lot of the buildings and sometimes they would even have actors playing out traditional roles for the time period of that particular village. One place was even cooking some type of bread which you could try. Another place had some traditional Norwegian singing and dancing.

Audrey and I left after a couple of hours but Kristi wanted to keep looking around, so we left her and went and got some lunch. Then hit the maritime museum. This was a museum I probably wouldn't have bothered with if we weren't already getting in for free, but it turned out to actually be quite cool. They had a lot of models of ships from small ferries to the world's largest cruise liner. They also had a 2,200 year old dugout boat (basically a hollowed out tree trunk), so that was pretty cool.

Last was the Fram museum which was similar to the Vasa museum in Stockholm except the ship wasn't nearly as old, nor had it sunk. It was the ship used for an expedition to the north pole and was actually designed to get trapped in the ice and use the polar drift (actually it was used to prove the drift actually even existed). The museum was all about this expedition as well as others taken by the same team to other parts of the Arctic (one of which used a zeppelin) as well as to the south pole. It was pretty fascinating though not as good as the Vasa museum.

So that was pretty much Oslo. The only other thing of interest I guess that happened was that night we discovered a terrace on the roof of the hostel that no one had seemed to bother telling us about. We were just sitting on some couches drinking when one of the staff made a remark to us questioning if the terrace was too cold and that's why we were drinking where we were. The existence of a terrace was news to us, but then spent a few hours up there making up for lost time (though not drinking too much because Norway is stupid expensive). There was a pretty decent view from up there though.