Museums, Museums, and More Museums
I don’t actually remembered what I had for breakfast because it was probably the same as every other breakfast that I had. We had gotten a bus pass last night, so we had free access to all the buses. We also got an Oslo City Pass which would let us have free access to quite a few museums and found out that it would also allow access to buses AND ferries. At the end of the day we still ended up paying off both passes and we had a whole other day of the Oslo City Pass. We went to quite a lot of museums today, the Maritime Museum, Polar Ship Fram, Viking Ship Building, Con Tiki, Norsk Folkemuseum, and Nobel Peace Center. My favorite out of all of them was the Con Tiki museum. The Con Tiki museum tells the story of six men who sailed on a balsa wood raft from Peru to Polynesia to prove that the settlers on Easter Island could have been from Peru. My favorite part was that they had the real raft, but slightly refurbished on display in the museum. On walls beside the raft it talked about, in Norwegian and English, the timeline of the expedition. I learned that there is a current that goes across the Atlantic Ocean. I also really liked the Polar Ship Fram museum. It was about multiple groups of people who explored the Arctic and researched it. I wasn’t aware that wooden ships could withstand the pressure from Arctic ice. Because they couldn’t just sail across the Arctic Icecap, they purposely got stuck in the ice and drifted with the ice all the way over the North Pole. I would say that my least favorite museum was the Viking Ship Building Museum, it was about how the Vikings were buried with their boats and had four dug up burial ships on show. The ships were also used on the ocean before they were used in the grave. The Maritime Museum told about shipping and boats in Norway. The Norsk Folkemuseum was about life in the earlier days in Norway and what type of houses and jobs they had. My mom was so excited because they had a candy store, like in the Heritage Park in Calgary, Alberta Canada. They had some really weird houses that were lifted up two meters off the ground by wooden posts, even though there was no danger of flooding. I think it might be because they tried to keep the rats and mice away. They have a Peace Center in Oslo because for some reason they get to give out the Nobel Peace Medal. We got to take a ferry on our way back from the museums, it was really crowded at the front of the boat because everyone wanted to get to be at the front. Almost nobody was at the back except for the people who knew it was better to be in the back than the front. Norway is known for its good seafood and has a lot of sushi restaurants. It was really good except that there were no Japanese chefs and they are really the only ones known for their good sushi. It was still very good. At the hotel we went straight to bed because we had long day, and another long day tomorrow.

Art
We saw a lot of art today, we even got to see The Scream! The first art gallery that we visited was the Munch Museet. They were in transition between exhibitions and had only one large room open. My mum really wanted to go to the Oslo Cathedral and I couldn’t say no so we headed in that direction. The hours are really wacky because today it opens at four and closes at midnight. We kept coming back every day to see if it was open and it was always closed when we checked. They have lots of public transportation in Oslo, trams, buses, and ferries, so you rarely see a car. The National Art Gallery was next on our list of galleries to visit. There they have a lot of Edvard Munch’s works, and three of his most most famous work, the Scream, the Madonna, and Sick Child. I’m not interested in art and didn’t think that any of Edvard Munch’s works were better than anybody else’s in the gallery. Lunch was complicated. Almost all lunches involve bread and my mom can’t eat bread because she is allergic to gluten. Finding a place that had salad was hard but we did do one and she had that while I had a very good sandwich. The Norwegian Royal palace isn’t very royal looking on the outside, it looks like a big box with windows. Though it has pretty nice grounds that are for public use. We spent a fair bit of time at the hotel blogging and also had dinner there, it consisted of lots of candy.

Vigeland Park
Breakfast was at the hotel because we were too lazy to go out someplace to eat and we already had the ingredients to make breakfast. Vigeland park was the first place to see for my mum, I wasn’t very interested. Vigeland is a park with lots of statues of nude people. It’s a public park and we saw some people playing bubble soccer, which is a game of soccer but everyone is surrounded by a big plastic bubble where only their legs stick out, so they ram each other to get the ball. Also in the park, there was the city museum, almost all of it was in Norwegian, except for a small movie that did an overview of the whole exhibit. The park is a major tourist destination and had a cafeteria, souvenir shop, and ice cream shop. The cafeteria was actually quite good, I had lasagna and it was great. Across the street from the Vigeland park was the Vigeland museum, which displays all of the plaster originals of the stone and metal statues. It also had a room that was full of mirrors that were put together in different shapes, I had no clue what they were. Tomorrow we are taking an overnight ferry to Denmark, but today we found where the ferry terminal was and what we needed to do. Norway has a lot of kebab places and they’re actually quite good, they had a lot of different sauces that I didn’t know what they were. In Norway, their equivalent of a Starbucks or Tim Horton’s is Wayne’s coffee. We were there until closing doing blogging.

To Denmark
Only nine days until we go home?! Where did the time go😧? Aside from all that we got to take a ferry today! The day started off as a sit around all day and turned into an exploring an old fortress/prison day. We didn’t really have a plan for before we could get on the ferry, so we just went with the flow. There was no place to store our baggage at the ferry terminal so we dropped them off at the train station. We didn’t have to carry them around all day, plus the train station was only about a kilometer from the ferry. A good brand of juice making company in Norway and Denmark is JOE & THE JUICE and is one of the only stores that is open early in the morning. They all had weird names like Iron Man and Stress Down, my favorite was the stress down because it had ginger in it😍. My mum wanted to buy a popular backpack in Norway. She ended up getting a Fjall Raven backpack and I got/had to carry it. When it was time to get on the ferry my mum said she was tired, and it was only 7:00. I wanted to watch a movie and she said we had to nap.