Visiting the Vikings - Norway 2012

This story will have to be told in English, so Ingeborg has some idea of what I'm on about. Since my lovely family decided to stay in Istanbul till January 6, and my lovely boyfriend had to go back to work January 2, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to invite myself to Ingeborg's house for a few days. Luckily she and her family agreed, and I was fortunate enough to get to spend my first few days of 2012 in Norway! Thank you Ingeborg, it was awesome, and I felt so welcome. And Anne: do accept her invitation as well!

After braving the trains of Norway at 1 in the morning, I happily managed to find Sandefjord; it was difficult to believe that this was the modern country of Norway, the richest country in Europe - where I jumped out of a train in the middle of the night without any idea whether it was the right stop. No announcements, no signs, just a small dark platform. Rather something you expect in the Turkish countryside. (Sorry, just teasing you a little now Ingeborg. Norwegian trains are much better than Swedish trains.)

In the light of day however, it turns out Sandefjord is very modern and pretty. Although I have to insist they do have some serious issues with transport, as can be seen above. (That's some of the remnants of storm Dagmar blowing through the harbour.) We had a great walk up the mountain (or 'hill') from where you can see most of the city, and we wandered through the town center, followed by some lovely coffee. Apparently Sandefjord is very well-known for whale-hunting. Ok.

Although we both wanted to stay inside and do some work (read: watch some movies), we pushed ourselves outside the next day as well, and visited a nearby town. This had a great mountain ('hill') with archaeological remains; the so-called earliest proper town in Norway, the fortress dating back to the 10th century (if I remember correctly). It was all burned down in the 16th century and therefore the old medieval remains are quite clearly visible, albeit very, very badly restored and preserved. That tower is a complete copy - its actual ruins are located 10m to the left (or right depending which side you're on =P).

On the bottom of the mountain ('hill') was an awesome museum. They had some whale bones and some info on their local Viking ship, but most importantly: an exhibition on Runic inscriptions! So lucky! It was called 'kiss me', after one of the inscriptions. It displayed bone, wood, metal - all kinds of objects, with inscriptions regarding daily life. Some Runic inscriptions were even from Latin, and some related to very early Christianity. So interesting.

It came with a modern exhibition on communication, or something. Kinda cool, although I am not entirely sure what the 'museum' value of it was, if that makes sense.

On the last day, we went to Oslo before I had to catch my flight back to Amsterdam at 7 PM. Oslo is a great city; quite like Stockholm, in the sense that is was very calm, but it did feel bigger. Stockholm feels like the smallest capital city I've ever visited, even though most of Sweden lives in it. Oslo on the other hand required travel by bus to get across the center, and it has an enormous amount of very interesting museums - definitely worth going back to a couple of times. For example, we didn't visit the Edvard Munch museum, which has to be the Norwegian van Gogh museum.

The museum of antiquities was much smaller than I had anticipated. Well, we only visited the Norse section really, but still, for a national museum - even the museum on Gotland has more Rune stones. It was a great museum though. All the objects were very well-chosen. However, most information was only available in Norwegian - which for me was ok, but I wonder about other foreign visitors - and the lighting was absolutely terrible for photography; hence the lack of good photos.

I got especially excited about the artefacts in these last two photos: left some Viking currency (the bits in the back I mean, not the actual coins haha) like the little bit we found in Iceland last summer! Very cool because I'd never seen that before, until we dug some up. Right is some Roman pottery (2nd century AD-ish), all found in Norway. How did that get there? Very interesting.

Then we went for some tasty lunch, and onward to the Viking Ship museum. This museum holds the very famous Gokstad ship, the Oseberg ship, and the Tune ship, plus a small exhibition of the very cool objects found inside them (including a Buddha!). This was a pretty epic experience, as this is the stuff my lecturers go on about in Durham; it was great to be able to go see all of it in person. The preservation of the ships was done so well too!

We still had about an hour left at that point, so we ran to go take a look at the famous opera house of Oslo, right as the sun set in the background. It was nice to walk through the busier shopping streets of Oslo, with the remnants of Christmas lights here and there. Finally, we made our way back to the train station, where we had to part ways - bye Ingeborg, I hope you will have me again some time. Thank you.