This morning was our only full day in Oslo, and I have to say I'm glad I didn't expect all that much. Just about any city would've been a let down after the past couple of days in the mountains, but Oslo seemed particularly charmless. We did visit some pretty great museums, but overall the architecture and streets were bland and underwhelming. When we walked through Prague for the first time each of us almost held our breath in disbelief at what we were seeing, but here we experienced a collective feeling of: meh. Maybe that's just because we know the trip is coming to an end or we're a little jaded from Budapest and Prague. This morning we took the bus to an area littered with museums (five bucks a pop for a bus ticket!) and went to the Fram first. This was kind of similar to the Vasa Museum in that it was a huge building with a storied ship inside, but what made it extra special was that you could walk on and even inside the ship, which gave the experience a whole new dimension. This thing had been all over the world and carried its crew to the South Pole and back. They were the first to ever make it there, and the very well laid out museum explained the expedition in thrilling detail. There were several levels, all filled to the brim with interesting exhibits and artifacts from the ship's many voyages. We all kind of split up for this one and took it in at our own pace. You could see the men's actual clothes and tools used on the trek. Brittany especially loved learning about all of the dogs that made the whole thing possible. They even had a couple of full-sized polar bears in attack mode. I never realized how huge they were! Seeing one of those things approaching in the distance would definitely be an "oh ****!" moment. If you only have time for one museum in Norway, make it the Fram. Just next door to it were the Norwegian Ship and Kon-Tiki museums. We spent about ten minutes in each of them, really just trying to make sure we made our money back on the Oslo Pass. The ship thing was really uninteresting, save for a giant harpoon gun I got to play with. I just chose to ignore what it was actually used for and pretended it was a controller for a crazy video game. Otherwise it's just a whole bunch of meticulously crafted scale models and a giant 2,000 year old log that's supposedly the oldest 'boat' in Norway. The Kon-Tiki thing was pretty cool because they have the actual papyrus boats a Norwegian used to sail across the Atlantic in the 70's. He wanted to prove that ancient civilizations on separate continents could've reached each other thousands of years ago, and succeeded. Still only worth half an hour, tops. A short way down the road was the Viking Ship museum, which I had been really looking forward to. It houses some of the oldest Viking ships in Norway, along with all kinds of artifacts and treasure found inside of them. Apparently the Vikings did all kinds of different things when someone died. Sometimes they cremated the person, sometimes the sent him off to sea in a burning ship, and other times they buried him in a ship with every comfort of life, which was what was on display. The museum is actually pretty small, and the white walls are drab. Maybe that's an intentional choice made to highlight the ships? In any case it meant that I was bored within an hour. The wood carvings were beautiful to look at, and we learned that just about everything had been covered in bright colors originally. I always mentally envisioned those Nordic ships as a dark, muddied brown, but to imagine them with vibrant colors throws a different light on Viking life. I learned quite a bit, but you can only stare at old pieces of wood for so long and the last museum we wanted to see was again just down the street. It was the Folk Art museum, which I think Brittany liked more than anyone. She's been on a weird kick with knitting lately, and keeps talking about how much she wants to do it. The strange thing is that she talks about it like someone is preventing her from picking up some needles and going for it. What will you make? I ask her. "Sweaters and scarves." Ah, just what we need in Florida! Haha The museum was actually very interesting and the traditional costumes and furniture were surprisingly beautiful. My favorite part was the 700-year-old original stave church that had been relocated to the area in the 1800's. Very cool, and very stereotypically norwegian. After years of knowing nothing about Norway except what's seen on the Epcot ride, that stave church is exactly what I would expect to find here. These things were all built with wood, so not many of them have survived and the one here in Oslo is particularly well decorated. I had no idea it was around until today, so it was a nice surprise to see! Just about all of the museums close at 5 or 6pm, and we closed down the Folk one. That was just fine for us though because there wasn't anything else we really wanted to see and we definitely got our money out of that very expensive pass (which meant my stomach could stop rolling). It's still so strange to see everything closed in the evenings when the sun is so high and bright. It feels like the middle of the afternoon but most of the stores are locked up. It would take a LONG time for me to get used to so much daylight! I woke up at 3am last night and would've sworn it was 10am by what I saw out the window. With just about everything shut down for the day we went into the city center and aimlessly walked around. We stumbled onto a movie theater and thought we'd kill a couple of hours there, but decided Spiderman wasn't worth the $52 entry fee. Holy guacamole batman! And we thought Sweden was expensive... Our pass got us a discount on some reindeer patties that tasted a whole lot like cafeteria meatloaf (tragically we have yet to see moose on the menu again) and we finished out the night snapping pictures of some of the prettier buildings in the city center. Everything looks...nice, but Oslo has none of the charm or enchantment we've found in so many other cities on this trip. Maybe if we stayed longer I'd come around and think it was great, but for now I'm glad we're just swinging through for a day. Tomorrow we'll catch a six hour train back to Stockholm. We really don't know what we'll do once we get there because we hit everything we wanted to the first time around. We're going to have some extra time so, IKEA anyone?