When Elizabeth and I booked our Spring Break trip to Scandinavia, we had a certain picture of Norway in our minds. We pictured fjords and Northern Lights and snow and reindeer. None of these things exist in Oslo, at least not in the way that we had imagined them. So we felt kind of down about Norway, solely due to our lack of planning. Oslo was beautiful and when we sat down to talk about it, Oslo was actually an amazing city.
We arrived at our hotel in Oslo around 2pm on Monday and left for the airport around 11am on Wednesday, so we didn't have a ton of time in Oslo. We spent our first evening walking around the city which was incredibly safe, even for two female travelers and even when we were wheeling around our luggage. We spent some time walking on the Opera House-- it's totally allowed, we weren't trespassing on night one. Later that night, we got hot chocolate at what would become our favorite coffee shop, Espresso House, and waffles with cheese and jam at what would become our favorite waffle shop, Harald's Vaffel.
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| The Opera House, which was designed for people to walk all over it, and the view from the Opera House. |
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| Espresso House: like Starbucks, but Scandinavian, so cooler. |
Walking (more like huffing and puffing, if we're honest) over the Opera House and watching people sit in saunas then jump into the harbor took up a large part of our time in Oslo. Since we had loved it so much the night before, we did it again on Tuesday morning in hopes of the sun being behind us and being able to see more of the city. We mostly just saw giant pigeon birds.
After our morning walk around downtown Oslo, we took the subway up to Holmenkollen. It's a ski jump tower that was built in the late 1800's and was even used in the 1952 Winter Olympics. There's a museum under the tower that chronicles a bit of Norwegian history as well as the history of ski jumping. The view of Oslo from the top was breathtaking, as was the fact that the jump tower is almost vertical and Elizabeth and I were both certain that we were going to take a tumble.
The best part of Holmenkollen, though, was that as we were leaving, a bunch of skiers were preparing to do some practice ski jumps. So we ended up sitting at the top of the ski jump for about 30 minutes watching them practice over and over. It's amazing-- it's so fast and so high. I feel like I'm a pretty brave person, but I definitely draw the line at ski jumping.
After getting our blood pumping by walking down the stairs at Holmenkollen, we decided to go for some tamer entertainment. We headed to Vigeland Sculpture Park which was tamer in the fact that we didn't have to climb stairs or hold onto railings for dear life, but ended up being an entire park of nake sculptures and I thiiiiink Elizabeth and I laughed the entire time. We tried to be mature about it, but we just couldn't. Especially when other adults were there actually appreciating the sculptures.
Whenever you Google Vigeland Sculpture Park, you see pictures of the angry baby statue, so we HAD to find in. In our minds, this statue was going to be like 10 feet tall. There was going to be no way that we'd miss it. In reality, it was approximately 2 feet tall and situated on a bridge with at least 50 other little statues. The eye rolls were real. In the end, it was decided that Elizabeth and I just don't appreciate art.
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| Photos like these are what make people think this statue is huge. |
We'd worked up an appetite, so we walked to Mathallen Food Hall. As like most food halls, there were many different food stands, so Elizabeth and I just went crazy. We got pasta, we got paninis, we got three different desserts. And we enjoyed every single bite. WE also tried moose, reindeer, and whale sausage. Which tasted like smoked meat and was nothing to write home about, in my opinion.
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| Chocolate cupcakes and Passionfruit Pie at Mathallen. |
Dinner was another stop at the real star of Oslo-- waffles from Harald's. The cheese, called brunost or brown cheese, is a combination of goat milk and cow milk and sugar. It looked sketchy and tasted delicious. I would have never put jam and cheese together on a waffle, but clearly the Norwegians know better than me. It was amazing. I would go back to Norway solely for more Harald's Vaffels.
Tuesday morning, we packed up, checked out, and did a little last minute shopping. Obviously we couldn't leave Norway without any troll memorabilia-- spoiler alert, I bought two. We took one last stroll at the Opera House and one hot chocolate at Espresso House before waving bye to Oslo and boarding the train to our next stop-- Poland!
