Oslo

Saturday's adventure: a trip to Oslo to meet my dear friend Abby Ferjak.
(She's a student at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, studying for the semester in Oslo. We worked at Okoboji Lutheran Bible Camp together this summer.)
Abby and I on Karl Johans Gate:


I jumped a train to Oslo at 10 AM and reached Oslo Sentralstasjon at 11:30 AM. And so the day began.

First Abby took me to Grønland, the immigrant part of Oslo, as she described it, and the part of the city where she works at a multi-cultural mission church. Grønland apparently has a reputuation for being more lively than the rest of the city of Oslo, and when we arrived, it was definitely living up to that reputation. We arrived at Grønland to discover some kind of party going down in the streets...there was a little carnival, music, and demonstrations (including a Taekwondo demonstration!), and all kinds of political activist stands. (The election is next week.)
It was a fun surprise. We saw a carnival stand that had the biggest candy bars I have ever seen in my life:


Some more interesting pictures from Grønland:



From there, we went down to Karl Johans Gate, the main street in Oslo, and went on a mission for some new shoes. I found the shoes I wanted, they were kr 699-, and because I wanted to actually get back to Hamar that night, I walked away from the shoes done with shoe shopping for the day. I mean, once you find the perfect shoes, no other shoes look good. So we continued sight-seeing.
It was interestingly enough, there was a parade going on down on Karl Johans Gate, that was celebrating China-Norway relations. Rather than than trying to describe it, I've posted some pictures:





You can't really see it, but the flag says something about Norsk-Kinesisk (Norwegian-Chinese) something or the other...

From Karl Johans Gate, you can see the palace and the City Hall, which is pretty cool. However, I didn't take too many pictures of them, because Wednesday we have a class excursion to Oslo, and I am SURE that we will get to see and learn a lot about those buildings. So, I'll hold off until I can explain lots of interesting information along with the pictures.

We did go to Akershus Fortress, which was pretty down-right cool. Of course, since it's a fortress, it over looks the harbor and most of the city. Behold:





BONUS: While we were at Akershus, we actualy saw the changing of the guards!!! I tried to take a video of it on my camera..and I thought I had...but I'm pretty digitally handicapped, and didn't actually get the cool video I thought I had. That was a real bummer. HOWEVER, about 15 minutes later, we saw some of the guards walking around the grounds, and I DID get a little clip of that! So...I hope it works for you...

From Akershus, we walked down to the Harbor, because they were having a show of old fire engines. They were neat. We had some really tasty ice cream down there too... On the way down, we passed by a random statue of our very own FDR. Abby told me an interesting story about one Norwegian writer. He was very popular, but in WWII, he supported the Nazi invasion, and after the war they deemed him legally insane so they wouldn't have to take him to trial, and aslo so he could still remain one of Norway's higly esteemed writers. As a result, however, there are now no statues or tributes to him. But there is a nice big statue of FDR.



Our final touristy adventure of the day was a trip to Frogner Park or as Abby calls it "Naked People Park." It's the most frequented sight in Oslo, and if you haven't been to Frogner Park, you haven't been to Oslo. It was neat, some of the artwork was very interesting. The tall statue thing in the middle of the circle has a whole bunch of bodies in it. It's really creepy, because if you look at for a while, even for just a short amount of time, the bodies actually seem real. Around the center statue, going to the left, are depictions of life in progressing stages. It is pretty cool to look at.

By the time we finished walking through the park, our feet and legs were PRETTY tired, and we were PRETTY hungry so we stopped at a cool pizza place called "Dolly Dimple's," relaxed, chatted, and scarfed down two 30cm pizzas in about 1.5 hours. We're champions. Then we went back to her room at the University and watched a movie and ate dessert. The day was a success!
I took the last train home at 11 PM, and I have to say, didn't have much trouble falling asleep when I got back.