Afternoon:
We just got back from part of a walking tour of “Historic Oslo” and boy, are my legs tired! No, that’s not a “flew in from [blank]” joke—Mom is upstairs right now getting a few bags of ice for our knees. But aside from the creaky legs, we saw some interesting sights.
The most noticeable was an old base on a hill on the coast. There were a bunch of old cannons that pointed out toward the harbor and all around Oslo’s fjord, so if someone loaded enough gunpowder into one, the cannonball might reach one of the shopping districts as well.
The base had a lot of old barracks, a castle inside that included a dungeon (we skipped that part) and what looked like a well that had been capped off, but we knew what it was really for: that’s where they put the bad kids. Oh, and there were soldiers marching around the grounds. One was near the entryway, heading across a bridge and through the front area of the base; when he got back to his post, he looked left, looked right, looked down and shuffled his feet to the side so he was standing in the proper spot, then looked back up and just stood there. I wondered what might happen if you tried bumping into one of them, but I also wondered if they were allowed to use the bayonets on the ends of their rifles and opted not to find out.
We also passed by City Hall, which was across the street from the main harbor. Off to the side of the harbor and halfway up a hill, there was a statue of Franklin D. Roosevelt. We have no idea why. There was no plaque and all our tour book said was that Eleanor Roosevelt flew here to dedicate the statue. Dunno…
There have been a few very notable differences between here and home that we’ve noticed so far:
1. The architecture. There are a lot of old and modern buildings standing right next to each other all over the city. Some have criss-crossing patterns on front, some are almost completely blank, one looked almost like a cabin and one had orange windows. I’m completely serious. It wasn’t even like an orange tint—they were orange windows.
2. Public transportation. There’s a lot. Electric trolleys, buses (lots of tour buses since this is apparently tourist season) and… they’re kinda like rental bikes. There’s a long rack of bicycles (up to 12, I think): you put some money into the machine, pull one of the bikes off and ride it. Later on, you find an open spot on a rack (and there are a lot of these things around) and put it back in. I never found out what happens if a bully comes, beats you up and steals the bike.
3. It’s okay for a kid to sit on a naked statue for a photograph and pinch its nipples.
And now we’ve got a little downtime before going to watch a soccer game tonight. Don’t worry, we brought earplugs, so we’ll won’t be half-deaf when we get back. Maybe one-third-deaf.
