Our time in Oslo was a bit rushed. The apartment in Oslo was cool. It was fourth floor with big beams and a slanted ceiling as well as a small deck and sunlight windows. The owner clearly had good taste in books as we reckon recognize many of the titles on her bookshelf as some of our favourites. Climbing on the roof of the Oslo opera house provided good views of the city, the even better views came from the ninth floor of the Munch Museum. Aiden loved seeing “the Scream” at the museum. It was kept in darkness much of the day and only on display for about 2 minuets, every 30 to 45 minuets. None of us had realized that Munch did so much work with wood cutting and it was amazing to see how creative some of his designs were, there was also some fascinating information about his landscape work, as well as what he’s known for related to expressing human emotion in his paintings and strong vibrant use of colours. Some of the work reminded us of Nancy’s work and we had to buy her a Christmas gift (a book featuring his contributions to landscape painting).
While in Oslo we explored some fantastic playgrounds and botanical gardens. We also filled an afternoon with the amazing Natural History museum, none of us had ever seen such a diverse collection of taxonomy Seeing animals from all the different continents as well as animals specific to Norway and reminding ourselves about the Svalbard seed repository was cool. One evening we attended a classical music concert at Gamle Logen, a historical concert hall. The concert consisted of 3 classical music composers work, each with multiple movements. We enjoyed the Mozart and the Schubert; the piece played in minor was disappointing. Sophie found it amusing how some members of audience would aggressively shush those that clapped between movements, we learned from our neighbour that this was not appropriate. The musicians were incredibly animated, if not overly exaggerated making Alastair joke about them developing EPS secondary to a string instrument. The acoustics of the cathedral was fantastic.
