48 Hours in Oslo

Well, Leah and I almost got detained in Ireland for trying to start a small army. I unknowingly had children’s scissors in my backpack and she had knitting needles. They let us off the hook and gave our weapons back so stay tuned to see how far I get traveling Europe with these scissors!

Oslo is an incredible city! We took a bus from the airport downtown because it’s about 30 miles and it was a beautiful ride. We checked into our actually very nice hostel and walked downtown to have dinner on the water. The next day we bought a 24hr “Oslo Pass” which gives us free entry to lots of museums and discounts on restaurants and we really made the most of it- even in the rain. We saw the Kon-Tiki Museum (about the first man to cross the pacific on a balsa raft), Norsk Folkemuseum (an open air museum on the culture and history of different regions of Norway), Viking Ship Museum (preserved Viking ships and burial tombs/artifacts), the Polar Ship Fram (the worlds most famous polar exploration) and the Nobel Peace Center. The Nobel Peace Center was SO cool, as well as everything else obviously! They have a huge exhibit focused on interactive solutions to environmental issues that was right up my alley. Now I am sitting in the airport waiting for my delayed flight to Stockholm, nice and full from a lunch at a delicious cafe we stumbled upon that was full of only locals. Almost everything here is written in Norwegian so most of the time I’ve just been pointing to something on the menu and hoping I like it! Many people speak English as well as Norwegian, but where’s the fun in that… (Picture us navigating busses, trams, and trains all over with absolutely nothing in English too)

All in all, after only 2 days I feel like I know the city well, it’s even more manageable and calm than Boston! Some things I’ve noticed: There is graffiti everywhere which is interesting, but pretty graffiti. The stop lights turn yellow before they turn green and the cars and trains drive on the same roads (as in the train tracks are literally so flat that trains and cars can both drive directly on them). There’s an oddly large amount of electric scooters and almost every work vehicle I saw was a Mercedes (I’m talking everything from tour vans to DHL to garbage trucks). Everyone is very kind and the world over here works on the honor system. A lot of the shops and markets leave their stuff out at night. Although we triedddd to pay for our tram tickets the app wouldn’t accept foreign cards and you can’t pay on board and yet not once in the many times we took the tram did anyone come by checking tickets. I’m now sitting on the plane and realize that I was never asked for any form of ID, which is shocking because if I were traveling internationally from America I would have shown my passport ten times by now and a drivers license wouldn’t even suffice. I can’t wait to see what adventures lie ahead in Stockholm! (The scissors made it out of security in one piece again incase you were wondering- they flagged my bag but couldn’t find anything bad in it when they checked and gave up easily heheh)