Sorry, too much Fanta and not enough water. I suppose I have the option of drinking out of the toilet (or get water out of the sink if I’m really desperate, but whatever the source, I better try to drink something that’ll cleanse my system instead of making me vibrate. But that certainly wasn’t the biggest story during the third day of our trip in Norway.
We had some big plans for today, visit some of the locations we’d missed yesterday. Unfortunately for those plans, we didn’t realize how many places are closed on Mondays here in Oslo. Since our options were somewhat limited, we headed to someplace relatively simple and relatively close (it would have been relatively closer if we’d taken a more direct route, but I was navigating). Our first destination: the Oslo Reptile Park.
I can only speak for myself, but when I hear of a location like a “reptile park”, I picture a place with cages and lots of lizards all over the place. As it turned out, it was a lot like all of the other buildings in the city if you discount the giant arrow painted on the side of a wall pointing us toward the front door. We had to walk through the entrance to an open area surround by buildings, through another door, down a flight of stairs and into a basement, but we got there eventually. After spending a few minutes looking through the fiberglass windows, we decided it was worth it.
Admittedly, there were more than just reptiles in the displays. Among the geckos, snakes, iguanas and a crocodile, there were a handful of spiders, toads, a pair of marmosets and a room of reptile park workers, please don’t bang on the glass. Yeah, the workers had a room behind glass, same as all the other animals (though theirs had a lot more cages and space to play with reptiles). Why they let people see inside, I haven’t the slightest idea. I mean, it was no problem for a worker to come out into the main area with a large snake and made a little girl cry. Maybe it’s just me.
We got out of there by 11:40 and were stuck in a quandary: we were going to the Royal Palace next and they offer tours on a regular basis, but the only tours presented in English were at 12:00, 2:00 and 2:20. I have no idea why they picked those particular times, but I did know that we had at least half a mile to get there and 20 minutes wasn’t going to be enough time to get there. Thus, we took our time, missed a turn while we were walking and added at least two blocks to the trek, then finally saw the castle grounds across the street.
We knew they were the castle grounds because it wasn’t concrete, cobblestone or pavement. There was a very stark contrast between all of the differently-designed buildings squeezed together and the plush green lawn surrounded by flowers. It could have been a city park, but there was a pretty wide variety of types of flowers that you wouldn’t normally find in that kind of setting (Mom took pictures of 10, but I’m sure there were plenty more). We crossed the street, took a path up through the grass and slowly made our way up to the palace.
It was an impressive structure with a large statue in front (I think it was the king who had the palace built, but I don’t recall and the plaque written in Norwegian didn’t help a whole lot). Much like the base we saw earlier, there were several armed guards walking around the front of the building, but these were in very strategic locations: the front door, the back gate where tourists could enter and back and forth in front of the royal sedans. (I’m assuming they’re royal sedans, but I suppose it could have been reserved parking for Wally the janitor.)
Upon reaching the tent where you can buy tickets and enter the gate (if you approached the gate outside of the tent, one of the guards would yell at you… they never brandished their bayonets, but they looked like those hard-core Army knives that could hack a small woodland creature to bits with a flick of your wrist.
You can only reserve tickets ahead of time at someplace like a grocery store or a 7-11 (yeah, they’ve got a bunch of those here in Norway), but if we wanted to show up 20 minutes before a tour, they’d probably still have tickets available. It was past time for lunch at that point and we ended up passing on the palace tour altogether. Instead, we headed toward the American embassy.
I’ll admit, I thought about walking up there and saying, “’Sup, dudes? We were at the palace and they were acting all stuck up, so we were like, ‘Hey, let’s head down and hang with our peeps!’” Then I remembered that they have armed guards, too. We took a picture of the embassy building and left.
