Oslo Day 4

Kristin again, for our last day in Oslo! This was another day with great weather, that made up for the fog and sleet and rain at the start. Oslo has a lot of ferries as public transportation, and since all of the tourist ferries through the fjords are seasonal and weren't running, we headed down to catch the commuter ferry to see the fjord from the water!

Not our ferry. But parked alongside it!

Happy Justin - coffee and another stroopwafel

The houses on the little islands were painted beautiful colours (reminded me of the Maritimes) and I think they are summer/vacation homes, as they all seemed boarded up. We were the only ones on the ferry for most of the trip (and definitely the only ones taking pictures!)

This was a pretty secluded ferry dock!

I always love churches on islands - I think they are so picturesque. I don't go to church, but maybe I would have if I could have gone by boat on a nice day?

You can just see the ski jump in the background here

Even the buoys and lights are pretty!

City Hall again

Akershus Fortress again

It was a bit cold!

After we got off the ferry, we wandered around the harbour finding geochaches and found these cool things:

We saw a few of these - painted covers for construction containers, that show the pertinent part of the city. There's City Hall on the painting!
 

(Here's one from near the Opera House earlier in the trip)

Scuba statue, back at the waterfront

We then went to check out some viking ships. I hadn't ever thought about how much information we had about Viking culture in general, or where we got it from, but it's actually from a surprisingly small pool, and this museum holds a lot of it - 4 archaelogical finds of funeral boats and burial sites, including most of the textiles we have from that era. This stuff is from the 800's! Just when we were getting used to how old the stuff in England is...

Beautiful day at the museum

This is the most ornate and the best-preserved of the 3 ships. The coolest thing is, they assumed for years that it was built either for a funeral only or for inland use, because every time they built a replica and put it in the ocean it sank. But a few years ago, when they were considering moving the boats to a new location, they took 3D scans of the boat and found that they'd reassembled it wrong originally. The new replica is seaworthy! How cool is that?

A very Tim Burton shadow cast by the prow

This is what the boats looks like when found (they'd be pilfered by grave robbers, they think soon after they were buried, but a lot of stuff was found there, including wooden carts, carved animal sculptures, and the remains of two women

Here you can obviously see the old wood and the new pieces. There were 15 pairs of oar holes, so this boat needed 30 people to row it

Details of the wood carvings

One of the intricately carved animal heads

Look at the details on this fabric! There are horses pulling a cart, hand-embroidered! And then remember that it's over 1200 years old! I struggle for months to knit a scarf!

This was the 3rd ship, and the least preserved. It's amazing the other two aren't in this condition

Final detail on the first ship

Our last official tourist stop was the palace for the changing of the guard. This was the first country we've seen with woman taking shifts as ceremonial guards, and it was also nice that their outfits and weapons seemed to be fairly utilitarian (except that side fringe! If something happened, I assume the guard would just pull it off?)

Incoming fresh guards march every day from Akershus Fortress, through town, past the palace and into the guardhouse to prepare. Here they are passing the outgoing guard.

This changing of the guard was very informal. While we had Greek police shouting at us, and helpful Danish officers explain to us what was happening and where we needed to stand, here they just kind of worked around everyone. Commuters and locals literally walked past during the actual marching!

Yeah, that hat is not useful. How does taking away half of the field of vision of a guard help them to guard things?

Hi, street sign on the wall of the palace in the middle of the palace grounds! Happy you don't want people to get lost!

Although it doesn't fit daylight time-wise, we saw the famous Tiger statue near the bus station about 6 times on our weekend, so I figured I'd post the pictures here at the end. It's a pretty common spot for pictures (surprisingly hard to get a clear shot) and is quite well-done. I like how the testicles are so realistic that I just want to neuter him:

Goodbye Oslo! We had a wonderful time!