20th Anniversary European Bike Adventure: Day 12, Oslo
Another day to wake up on our own schedule and roll out the door whenever we felt like it.
Except.. we didn't "roll" out the door. We decided to make this a "check out the public transportation in Oslo" day, and not a "ride our bikes around" day. We just needed a break from the bikes for one day.
I fretted over this for a few moments, because my "need a break" half was at war with my "I've ridden my bike every day for 11 days, and now I'm breaking the streak!" half. Fortunately for that first half, Matt seemed to feel no compulsion to continue this meaningless streak, so no bikes were ridden, and the streak was broken. Thank you, Matt, for being the sane one for once.
We first walked over to Tøyen Torg again, but managed to NOT go to the same bakery this time! We tried out a different little bakery, and got this delightful cake:
The young lady who works at the bakery is telling us what all the different pastries are. "I don't think there's a word for this one in English. It's a little dry and crumbly, like a scone. It's a traditional Norwegian cake. Like.. old person cake." SOLD! (Partly because we were trying to eat as much "traditional" stuff as possible, but probably mostly because she called it old person cake.) It was delicious.
On our way out of Tøyen Torg, we stopped into the Tøyen T-bane and bought a 24 hour ticket for all the Oslo public transportation. Yes, just one ticket. There was no option to purchase 2 tickets at once, and when we tried to buy another ticket as a second transaction, the machine told us "Duplicate transaction" and failed. Okay. So.. uh.. ONE of us could ride around Oslo!
Thanks a lot, ticket robot.
Fortunately our first destination was in walking distance, so we decided to go there, and then hope that later we could purchase a second ticket.
First destination: Munch Museum!
Long u, but I enjoyed saying it with a short u anyway. MunchMunch.
This was walking distance from our apartment, so we had no excuse not to go. It was a delightful little museum, just the right size to be interesting but not overwhelming/boring. And evidently the museum has a fascinating history of theft and damage. When I read about that, it explained why there were so many uh.. helpers? standing around in the various galleries. (Guards.)
Some of the destruction and broken glass from previous thefts. They were also showing some fascinating videos on how they meticulously restored the injured paintings.
Ahh, The Scream. There's nothing like getting to see such an iconic piece of art in person.
Just kidding. We did finally manage to catch it when the tours weren't surrounding it.
Vampire
Madonna
All three of the above were stolen from the museum at some point.
This painting was never stolen, to my knowledge, but it has two horses and a dog, so clearly is a great painting.
After the Munch Museum, we wandered back over to Tøyen T-bane and did, in fact, manage to procure a second ticket. And then onto the subway over to the National Theater station.
Mission: Visit National Museum!
*sad trombone*
But! That meant we had more time to be outside! Remember how it was supposed to be cold and rainy? It was neither of those things. It was sunny and delightful. So we walked over to Det Kongelige Slott (The Royal Castle).
I have some fairly rigorous expectations from my "castles", and many of the castles we saw on our trip did not fulfill those expectations. I mean, it's nice, but it's very "modern".
The grounds around the castle (Slottsparken) were beautiful and peaceful.
Weird, neat, kinda .. metal-wicker mushrooms.
Representation matters.
Sniffs.
But THEN we got to my favorite part of Slottsparken! There is a little subpark called Ingrid Alexandra Sculpture Park, and it was designed for children, by children. Clearly these are in my artistic wheelhouse.
Loved them all.
It seemed like a good time for lunch, so we googled up our nearby options, and found a promising Norwegian-food restaurant a few blocks away. With a giraffe out front!
And this completely delicious sandwich.
Since my mom asked and I had to look it up anyway, here is what it is: LORRY SPECIAL:
Warm sandwich served with ham, bacon, gratinated cambozola & cheddar. So good.
Now we were two people who had no Next Plan, but did have a 2 24 hour transit passes, and knew of a tram station right in front of a place that they felt they didn't fully explore, so.. back to Ekeberg Park!
After some intense phone-study, we managed to figure out the tram station was a couple blocks away from our restaurant, so we headed out for more public transit adventures! Fortunately this stop had a tram that went directly where we needed to be, and we only had to wait 15 minutes or so.
Related side note: I'm baffled by how trains and trams with human ticket-checkers work. It depends so much on humans being good and honest people and.. that's often not been my experience with humans. But I guess it must work, if they continue to do it!
Back to Ekeberg! We looked at a map and tried to set out onto trails that we hadn't managed to explore the day before. There was still plenty out there to see.
One of my favorite sculptures from the whole trip. Just so striking.
Dilemma
Anatomy of an Angel
As we reached one end of the park, there was a sign pointing further down the road, out of the park, indicating there was a petting zoo in that direction. I'm sure they intended that to appeal to small children, but.. I like petting animals. So we went!
We accidentally went the wrong way around, so communed with some animals through a fence for free.
It's hard being little.
Then ate some ice cream.
Purple flavor.
Then decided we didn't need to pay to go pet more stuff, so headed back into the park to finish off our tour.
There was a LOT going on here.
A lot a lot.
The Couple.
When I saw that one, I thought, "Hey, that looks like that weird cocoon out in front of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam! I only just now remembered that and looked it up, and it's the same artist, Louise Bourgeois!
Aww, I kinda feel like I'm back at home, with this sign reminding people not to be complete assholes! Because if they had to put up a sign..
Sometimes it was hard to even tell something was Art until you got close.
Hello, lady.
Hello, giant fake lady.
And with that, we decided we'd seen as much of Ekeberg Park as we could without a map and a checklist. (There was more, but I'm sparing you ALL of it. This is me sparing you. Ha. You should just go see it yourself.)
Back on the tram toward our apartment! And yes, I did pet that dog.
And then on our walk home from the tram, we also pet this dog.
Can't not pet a greyhound.
Once we were home, we decided we would do another easy pasta dinner at home. We hadn't really done a great job on our "rest day", with 17,000 steps, and the next day we were heading out again, this time for 6 days of riding in a row. And the hardest, longest rides of the trip. So we did some final laundry, packed up our gear which had gotten fairly spread out, charged all our stuff, and went to bed early.
Total miles for day 12: 0 miles ridden!
Except.. we didn't "roll" out the door. We decided to make this a "check out the public transportation in Oslo" day, and not a "ride our bikes around" day. We just needed a break from the bikes for one day.
I fretted over this for a few moments, because my "need a break" half was at war with my "I've ridden my bike every day for 11 days, and now I'm breaking the streak!" half. Fortunately for that first half, Matt seemed to feel no compulsion to continue this meaningless streak, so no bikes were ridden, and the streak was broken. Thank you, Matt, for being the sane one for once.
We first walked over to Tøyen Torg again, but managed to NOT go to the same bakery this time! We tried out a different little bakery, and got this delightful cake:
The young lady who works at the bakery is telling us what all the different pastries are. "I don't think there's a word for this one in English. It's a little dry and crumbly, like a scone. It's a traditional Norwegian cake. Like.. old person cake." SOLD! (Partly because we were trying to eat as much "traditional" stuff as possible, but probably mostly because she called it old person cake.) It was delicious.
On our way out of Tøyen Torg, we stopped into the Tøyen T-bane and bought a 24 hour ticket for all the Oslo public transportation. Yes, just one ticket. There was no option to purchase 2 tickets at once, and when we tried to buy another ticket as a second transaction, the machine told us "Duplicate transaction" and failed. Okay. So.. uh.. ONE of us could ride around Oslo!
Thanks a lot, ticket robot.
Fortunately our first destination was in walking distance, so we decided to go there, and then hope that later we could purchase a second ticket.
First destination: Munch Museum!
Long u, but I enjoyed saying it with a short u anyway. MunchMunch.
This was walking distance from our apartment, so we had no excuse not to go. It was a delightful little museum, just the right size to be interesting but not overwhelming/boring. And evidently the museum has a fascinating history of theft and damage. When I read about that, it explained why there were so many uh.. helpers? standing around in the various galleries. (Guards.)
Some of the destruction and broken glass from previous thefts. They were also showing some fascinating videos on how they meticulously restored the injured paintings.
Ahh, The Scream. There's nothing like getting to see such an iconic piece of art in person.
Just kidding. We did finally manage to catch it when the tours weren't surrounding it.
Vampire
Madonna
All three of the above were stolen from the museum at some point.
This painting was never stolen, to my knowledge, but it has two horses and a dog, so clearly is a great painting.
After the Munch Museum, we wandered back over to Tøyen T-bane and did, in fact, manage to procure a second ticket. And then onto the subway over to the National Theater station.
Mission: Visit National Museum!
*sad trombone*
But! That meant we had more time to be outside! Remember how it was supposed to be cold and rainy? It was neither of those things. It was sunny and delightful. So we walked over to Det Kongelige Slott (The Royal Castle).
I have some fairly rigorous expectations from my "castles", and many of the castles we saw on our trip did not fulfill those expectations. I mean, it's nice, but it's very "modern".
The grounds around the castle (Slottsparken) were beautiful and peaceful.
Weird, neat, kinda .. metal-wicker mushrooms.
Representation matters.
Sniffs.
But THEN we got to my favorite part of Slottsparken! There is a little subpark called Ingrid Alexandra Sculpture Park, and it was designed for children, by children. Clearly these are in my artistic wheelhouse.
Loved them all.
It seemed like a good time for lunch, so we googled up our nearby options, and found a promising Norwegian-food restaurant a few blocks away. With a giraffe out front!
And this completely delicious sandwich.
Since my mom asked and I had to look it up anyway, here is what it is: LORRY SPECIAL:
Warm sandwich served with ham, bacon, gratinated cambozola & cheddar. So good.
Now we were two people who had no Next Plan, but did have a 2 24 hour transit passes, and knew of a tram station right in front of a place that they felt they didn't fully explore, so.. back to Ekeberg Park!
After some intense phone-study, we managed to figure out the tram station was a couple blocks away from our restaurant, so we headed out for more public transit adventures! Fortunately this stop had a tram that went directly where we needed to be, and we only had to wait 15 minutes or so.
Related side note: I'm baffled by how trains and trams with human ticket-checkers work. It depends so much on humans being good and honest people and.. that's often not been my experience with humans. But I guess it must work, if they continue to do it!
Back to Ekeberg! We looked at a map and tried to set out onto trails that we hadn't managed to explore the day before. There was still plenty out there to see.
One of my favorite sculptures from the whole trip. Just so striking.
Dilemma
Click to viewAnatomy of an Angel
As we reached one end of the park, there was a sign pointing further down the road, out of the park, indicating there was a petting zoo in that direction. I'm sure they intended that to appeal to small children, but.. I like petting animals. So we went!
We accidentally went the wrong way around, so communed with some animals through a fence for free.
It's hard being little.
Then ate some ice cream.
Purple flavor.
Then decided we didn't need to pay to go pet more stuff, so headed back into the park to finish off our tour.
There was a LOT going on here.
A lot a lot.
The Couple.
When I saw that one, I thought, "Hey, that looks like that weird cocoon out in front of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam! I only just now remembered that and looked it up, and it's the same artist, Louise Bourgeois!
Aww, I kinda feel like I'm back at home, with this sign reminding people not to be complete assholes! Because if they had to put up a sign..
Sometimes it was hard to even tell something was Art until you got close.
Hello, lady.
Hello, giant fake lady.
And with that, we decided we'd seen as much of Ekeberg Park as we could without a map and a checklist. (There was more, but I'm sparing you ALL of it. This is me sparing you. Ha. You should just go see it yourself.)
Back on the tram toward our apartment! And yes, I did pet that dog.
And then on our walk home from the tram, we also pet this dog.
Can't not pet a greyhound.
Once we were home, we decided we would do another easy pasta dinner at home. We hadn't really done a great job on our "rest day", with 17,000 steps, and the next day we were heading out again, this time for 6 days of riding in a row. And the hardest, longest rides of the trip. So we did some final laundry, packed up our gear which had gotten fairly spread out, charged all our stuff, and went to bed early.
Total miles for day 12: 0 miles ridden!