We all slept quite well, waking to the alarm at seven intended to prepare us for the early train the following day. After a leisurely breakfast, I set out to try to secure some money. There was a branch of the French bank BNP near the train station; my card had worked in their Parisian machines the previous summer, so I gave it a try. "Your card has expired," the machine told me. Was this some sort of Y2K problem?
Abandoning the bank card idea, I walked down Karl Johans Gate to locate the American Express office. It wasn't there. Fortunately, the people in the travel office that had replaced it directed me to their new location, near the Radhus (city hall). After a surprising amount of paperwork (probably because I presented my corporate card instead of my personal one) I secured a modest cash advance of NOK 2000, enough to see us through to Amsterdam if we could use our credit cards for most meals and all accomodations.
I retrieved the family at the hotel and we proceeded on the short walk to the National Gallery. The entire experience was low-key, from the building itself to the checkroom to the galleries. Highlights for us were the Munch room and the paintings of some of his contemporaries. As a bonus, the last room we viewed, discovered almost by accident, contained a series of plaster casts of great classical statues. The children had a chance to revisit Louvre favourites like the Venus de Milo and Winged Victory, and to anticipate future sightings of Roman works like the Laocoon.
We walked down to the park lining Karl Johans Gate and sat in the shade people-watching while the kids wrote in their journals. I had spotted a "gourmet" grocery store at Aker Brygge (closed the day before), so we headed down to shop for a picnic lunch. The store was larger than the one near our hotel, and only slightly more expensive. We bought bread, shrimp, something called "krepsalat" which I thought might be crab but turned out to be crayfish, smoked salmon, and gravlax. It turned out to be too much food for lunch, especially as we had promised the kids ice cream -- a 1.3 litre container, dug into with four plastic spoons.
That turned out to be pretty well it for our last day in Oslo. There weren't any other museums that were both compelling and open on Monday, and we didn't really have the energy or inclination to do extensive urban walking. Perhaps it was unfair to generalize from a couple of days spent walking around the very centre of town, but Oslo seemed like a small town to us, and we are very much city people -- at least, we're not suburban people by inclination (perhaps, in daily life, by necessity). We went back to the hotel and gave the kids unlimited time in the playroom while we researched Bergen and the conference, and I typed more travel notes. At one point we went over and lifted the lid of the studio upright piano in the lounge -- it was a studio upright Schimmel, and though the action meant a lot of dropped notes, the kids ran through their repertoire from the just-concluded recital season.
In the late afternoon, we walked around the pedestrian area (after warning the kids not to stop for any buskers), then went back and finished off the bread and seafood, with almond-paste cookies for dessert. We showered the kids (who had been looking forward to European handheld showers for months) and ourselves, N packed, and we settled into bed just after nine.