We arrived at Oslo's Gardermoen airport about 11:45 am local time, having transferred at Amsterdam from the overnight KLM flight from Toronto. The airport building, only a couple of years old, was impressive, with the usual steel and glass traps avoided by means of muted wood floors and subtle artwork, such as the glass squares set into the floor of the baggage claim area with little metal sculptures of newts inside.
But the newness only served to underscore our lack of preparation for this trip. It had been cobbled together from original plans to visit Barcelona, the Basque country, and the French Pyrenees. We had a couple of papers accepted to a conference in Bergen, and we thought it unlikely that we would visit Norway at any other time. So we decided to spend a few days in Oslo -- not too many, as we would have to burn through money at a faster rate than we liked. We had vivid memories of an earlier trip to Copenhagen, where we nearly starved because we couldn't bring ourselves to pay the prices that the restaurants were charging.
We couldn't fly Air Canada, our usual carrier, because in the arrogance of their new monopoly status, their prices were astronomical. Our travel agent cobbled together a package on KLM, and so it made sense to spend a few days in Amsterdam, since of the four of us, only N had been there previously, and that as a child. So Barcelona got squeezed to a week, as we also had to fit in some summer music activities and our usual trip to Berkeley, overdue because of lack of time during the Y2K period.
I think it was this fragmentation, together with the pressures of the children's end of year activities, that led us to do much less planning and preparation for this trip than usual. Three days before departure, we had not started packing, or even making packing lists. Even though we would be visiting numerous museums, I didn't look in libraries for books on their collections, or on the artists featured. For Oslo, we had a few photocopies from various guidebooks, but I hadn't copied the sections on language or food, so we had only a few phrases found on a random Web page at the last minute. And the copies I had packed into the carry-on were outdated, referring to the old airport, so we had no idea how to get into town.
Still, this was Europe, and reasonably civilized. First order of business was getting money. Not so easy: the bank machine refused my bank card (which I'd relied on in Europe for the past decade) and wouldn't take the PIN on my main credit card. Fortunately, I had tossed six hundred dollars in old Canadian travellers cheques into the pouch with our tickets and passports, also at the last minute, so I was able to cash half of them. Nearby was the Flybussen kiosk; we bought tickets and boarded the bus.
The airport was not surrounded by the usual scar of clearcut; it seemed that as many twenty-metre trees as possible had been left standing, and I had a strong sense of Northern Ontario, though without the swamp and with limited-access highways. The bus took us into the main bus station (Oslo M), which did appear on the schematic city map I had on the photocopies; it may have made other stops, but I knew how to get to the hotel from there. We shouldered our packs and walked through the centre of downtown.
My first impression, though the area about a train station is not the best place from which to generalize about a city, was of a cross between northern German cities and Copenhagen -- not as industrially ugly as the former, but not as upscale and pristine as the latter. Our hotel, Norrona, was a block north and west of Stortorvet, the parliament building. They won our hearts immediately by asking the kids to sign in as well, in a registration book that was reached by a short curved set of steps up to the main desk. The room was plain and just large enough to contain an extra folding bed without feeling too cramped; there was a sofa bed made up for A, a double bed (really two singles pushed together, each with its own duvet) for us, and windows opening onto an interior courtyard instead of the busy street by which we had entered. The small bathroom was completely tiled, with a lip at the threshold which was a mixed blessing -- we tripped over it constantly, but it also kept us from worrying about floods, as the shower stall did not reach completely to the floor and there was already a puddle past it from a slow drip.
Our first task in town was to secure reservations for the next part of the journey three days hence, the scenic train ride from Oslo to Bergen. We had looked into reserving from Canada, but had been told by conference organizers (and one of our co-authors, a frequent visitor) that it should suffice to arrange it on arrival. To our displeasure, our preferred train was entirely sold out, and the earlier one (which left at 8:11am) had only a handful of smoking seats left. The agent suggested that we ask the conductor to switch us around. We had no choice, and bought the tickets.
Our walk back to the train station, along the pedestrian Karl Johans Gate, was delayed somewhat by buskers attracting the attention of the children. They stopped to watch someone preparing to ride a tall unicycle and juggle three flaming torches. Our small town hosts a buskers festival in late August each year, and I found I could predict the lines that this busker (who worked in English, with a European accent) was using. Is this some sort of effect of economic globalization? The same people dressed as statues in front of the same fast-food restaurants, to a soundtrack of Peruvian panpipers and strummed guitar. I need to get my kids to be more culturally critical.
On the way back, we stopped at the small supermarket across from our hotel to attempt to cobble together some dinner. Fruit seemed an extravagance -- strawberries looked good, but cost four times what we were paying just the week before at home. We bought an oval loaf of multigrain bread, a chunk of smoked salmon, a container of small cooked and peeled shrimp, and some fishcake. The kids spent some time in the play room set up by the hotel (furniture and toys courtesy of IKEA) and then we had a messy but satisfying meal in our hotel room, after I vetoed a picnic because of the difficulty of dealing with smoked salmon armed with only a small Swiss Army knife. The meal cost us NOK 100, about half of what a large pizza would have cost.
We had had the usual brief and shallow sleep on the cross-Atlantic flight, though we had gotten a bit more sleep on the connecting leg. We could feel ourselves slipping into a torpor, so we convinced the kids to take a walk. Heading down Rosenkrantz Gate (no Guildenstern Avenue in sight, alas) in five minutes we found ourselves at the harbour.
A's attention was attracted by the beamed look of the old buildings in the Akershus Slott, the fortress to the east of the harbour, so we climbed up, not quite knowing what to expect. This gave us a series of good views over the harbour and the Oslofjorden, and a look at some old cannon and a soldier marching about ceremonially.
Climbing back down, we walked briefly along the piers outside the Aker Brygge shopping complex, already thick with early Saturday cafe revellers (and more buskers) but the kids were really drooping, so we started back, walking up to the park surrounding the Nationaltheatret and along it to the east. This part of town was slightly more upscale, but it didn't much alter my initial impressions.
To perk the kids up, we treated them to some Movenpick ice cream, and then we went back to the hotel and wound down.