The Expectant Traveler: Oslo via Ryanair, Part II

Now that we’ve enlightened you with some of our hard-earned wisdom, here are some highlights of our trip! (Note: Since there was so much to share, Janel wrote about our first couple of days in Oslo, and Soren wrote about our time with his sister!): 

Part II: Impressions and Adventures 

1. Being in Norway.
   
   

   

   We didn't want to leave!

   
   We are each, in a large part, Scandinavian-American, so we’ve dreamed of taking a trip to Norway at least as long as we’ve dreamed of living in London. My first impression was somewhere along the lines of, “The weather here is a lot like Chicago’s, and the forests remind me of Wisconsin...No wonder my people ended up in the Midwest!” I enjoyed seeing rosemaling around, not as a fun cultural accent, but as a normal part of decor. Soren was thrilled when people would speak to him in Norwegian, as if he belonged. He was also grateful that they could switch to English when he told them he didn’t speak Norwegian. 
   
   

2. Being in Oslo.
   
   

   

   Admiring the architecture.

   
   I loved Oslo’s landscape–it drew my mind back to Cape Town, where you dwell in the warm embrace of the mountains and the sea, but the hills were further improved by endless swaths of evergreens. Soren fell in love with the city right away, delighted by the neoclassical buildings and their cheerful pastels that reminded him so much of St. Petersburg.
   
3. Discovering the Moka Pot.
   
   

   

   The best.

   
   Shortly before we left Chicago, Soren’s brother and his fiance invited us to help them settle the question, once and for all: What is the best way to make coffee? How do the espresso machine, the drip coffee maker, the French press, and the pourover stack up next to each other? The only real consensus was that the drip coffee maker loses big-time, but that was before we were introduced to this new contender. I’m sure we would have discovered it here in London eventually anyway, but the Moka Pot was our airbnb host’s coffee maker of choice, so that’s where we found it, and that’s where we fell in love with it. It seems that we’ll have to do a retest. Mmm, Moka Pot coffee.
   
   
4. Visiting the Norsk Folkemuseum.
   
   

   

   A storehouse and guest space, all in one!

   
   Our Norwegian and Danish ancestors came to the US fairly recently, since the turn of the 20th century. Therefore, I loved the opportunity to admire Norwegian farmhouses, storehouses, and barns (every village was some combination of these three) that were originally built in the 1700’s or the 1800’s. My great-great grandparents may well have lived in buildings that looked very much like them, topped with grass and heated by the fire in the center of the room, or later by the fireplace in the corner. When I see a stavkirke originally built in the 1300’s, I know that for centuries, some of my ancestors would have worshiped in such a place, where the eye is drawn ever upward. History is what I share with the people of Norway, whether I can truly lay claim to being “Norwegian” or not.
   
   

   

   Note the dragon carving.

   But then, I can walk through an apartment building built in the 1890’s, and see how different people might have lived between its walls in the decades since, and know that I have cousins who may have lived there, too. I see how Norway has grown and changed since my dear ones left, and appreciate the beautiful, widening gap between my own experience and that of those who stayed. On that day, I was Norwegian, and I was American. There are other parts too, other heritage sites to explore, other stories to come alive, but this was a wonderful way to start. 
   
   

5. Spending a day in Vigeland Park and Frognerseteren.
   
   

   

   Frognerseteren.

   
   Every moment I spent in the city’s center, my eyes were drawn to the surrounding mountains and their verdant forests, and all I could think was, “Why aren’t we up there?” I was not made for the urban existence, believe it or not, and I have an insatiable craving for trees, or rather, to be surrounded by them. So, when holiday closures and expensive internet drove us to unearth a guidebook, my heart leapt when I found a cafe that looked to be surrounded by the forest and boasted an unparalleled view of the city, and then went on to discover that it was right at the end of a Metro line that also went by Vigeland Park, a famous destination that we’d been planning to go to anyway. With that discovery, our plan was set: We would take a walk through Vigeland, and then continue on to Frognerseteren.
   
   

   

   Motherly love :)

   Given that Vigeland is an outdoor gallery full of statues depicting domestic life “au naturel”, we didn’t have spectacularly high expectations. Thus, we were pleasantly surprised when we found ourselves taken in by the complex and beautiful web of familial relationships displayed in the sculpture series, with nurturing mothers, playful fathers, wrestling brothers, moments of discipline and tantrums, moments of affection hoped for or found… We enjoyed a hundred snapshots of the story of life and the relationships that make it full, and came away grateful for the fullness with which we’ve been blessed in our families.
   
   

   

   Be careful!

   From there, we took the Metro train up, up, up the hill, past Holmenkollbakken, the historic ski jumping hill, past many neighborhoods and a house with what was once a grass roof, but has since become a tree-sapling roof. At our stop, we disembarked and walked through the trees to emerge next to a traditional-looking Norwegian building. Inside, we decided to play it safe, given that we knew nothing about Norwegian food, and I had a superb quiche, while Soren had some delicious meatballs. We managed to grab an upstairs table next to a window overlooking the city, and marveled at the view, laughing, as we ate. When we were finished, we found a trailhead and hiked in the snow until Soren’s sister could join us. The aroma of the evergreens was completed by the scent of a recently burned campfire, and I was giddy to take even a short walk through the woods. [Soren interjects: Janel was practically running down these icy paths. I didn’t know I could be that worried…] Since we had enjoyed our lunches so much, we decided to stick around for dinner, and at Soren’s sister’s recommendation, I had rømmegrøt (a traditional Norwegian sour cream porridge) and Soren had a dish featuring Norwegian reindeer. All I can say about that meal after such a wonderful day is that if it had been possible, we may well have stayed at Frognerseteren forever.
   
   

6. Our wonderful Norwegian hosts.
   
   

   

   Brunost: Brown Cheese.

   It’s great to see the tourist sites, but there’s always that nagging desire to get a taste of how the locals live. We had the amazing fortune to spend half of our time in Norway with a young family (the parents are similar in age to us, and have three little kids). Anticipating our first kiddo, we were eager to meet them and to get a picture of Norwegian family life. We were not disappointed. They were wonderfully welcoming and we picked up several useful tidbits about how to raise a Norwegian baby, like using bibs with sleeves and a lovely wooden high chair that adjusts as the baby grows! They also lovingly provided us with ample Brown cheese and reindeer sausages. ;)
   
   

7. Paske!
   
   

   

   Welcoming Spring

   
   
   While Easter (or Paske, as Norwegians call it) did make our touristing a bit difficult, we enjoyed the window our hosts provided into Paske traditions. In anticipation of the new leaves of Spring, one of these traditions is to hang painted eggshells on trees. We experienced this as a public children’s craft, drawing on paper eggs, but our hostess showed us how it’s really done with this dramatic display of gorgeously colored eggs. The other highlight of Paske was the Paske egg. This delectable chocolate egg is filled with marshmallow fluff that leaves you asking “Cadbury who?” We need to find an importer.
   
   

8. Family.
   

   
   

   Of course, our driving motivation and best times were chilling with my (Soren’s) sister. I hadn’t gotten the chance to spend much time with her since I left for university seven years ago, so it was fun to see how much she’s matured and come into her own. She gave us the “inside scoop” on all things Oslo and brought us to some of the more famous sites in the city (like the Royal Palace, the Akershus Fortress, and the Opera House) as well as some of her more local haunts in the Drammen area. Plus, she liked hanging with us so much, she came out to London just a few weeks later! What a gift!
   
   

   

   Overlooking Drammen.

   
   

The Expectant Traveler: Oslo via Ryanair, Part I

It has been exactly one month since we returned to London from our trip to Oslo, so we are commemorating the occasion by telling you about it!

Part I: Our Hard-Earned Wisdom

Are you as excited to hear about our trip as I was to get on this plane?

As we’ve mentioned before, one of our major motivators for moving to London was our love for travel. After all, we are anthropologists at heart–hungry to see the world, understand it, and offend as few people as possible in the process! Obviously, our mental picture of “travel” is still heavily shaded by our youthful idealism, but now it’s time for real talk, friends.

We decided to take the jump over to Oslo so soon after relocating (nine days after landing, to be precise) primarily because Soren’s sister was only there for one more month, and we really wanted to see her and what her life has been like for the past year. Well, that, and it was Easter, and Easter is much better spent with family than alone in a city that is not yet home.

We decided very early on in our inaugural intra-Europe trip that it should be categorized as “a learning experience”. You see, if you call it “a learning experience”, you don’t cry when you realize that you’ve made an expensive/time-consuming/idiotic decision (or two, or five) because of your inexperience. Instead, you write it down and share it with all of your closest friends and the rest of the world. So, these are the things we learned on our trip to Oslo:

1. Getting to the airport is part of the cost of the flight.
   
   This may seem obvious, but we’ve lived our adult lives in Chicago, where the round trip cost from the Loop to O’Hare via public transit is only $10, and a round trip to Midway is $4.50. Neither price is anywhere near what you’d pay for airfare, and the price difference between the two airports is likewise insignificant. London and Oslo each have a handful of airports, most of which require special express trains or coach buses to reach if you don’t have a car. The total cost of going to and from airports for the both of us was roughly $115. We could have saved $10 or so if we’d taken a different coach bus to Stansted in London, but if we’d chosen an airport other than Rygge in Oslo, we could have saved $30 or more to get into the city, which is definitely enough to consider other flight options.
   
   
2. Ryanair is simple enough to deal with, if you’re prepared.
   
   We had done our research on Ryanair, so we had an idea of what to expect. The key differences that you need to know about are: Ryanair’s luggage limitations (their carry-on size is tiny, and companies make adorable little suitcases that fit those dimensions), the exorbitant fee for printing your boarding pass at the airport (do it beforehand), and the fact that you have to do a “visa check” at the check-in counter before going through security (but you can “check-in” up to a week beforehand online). None of these things are a huge deal, unless you’re at Stansted and there are 20 Ryanair flights leaving within two hours and there are hundreds of travelers with multiple bags. Then you might wait in line to get your visa checked for nearly two hours and end up “voluntarily” paying a small additional fee to go through their express security line so that you don’t miss your flight.
    

   

   This is a picture of the line you had to stand in to get in line. #holidaytravel

3. The local “internet cafe” may actually be the back office of a convenience store.
   
   At least it still had a printer. The point is, don’t forget to print the boarding passes at work or at the library if you don’t have a printer at home, because your options at 10pm might be a bit comical, if not shady.
   
   
4. Stansted requires you to power walk for 20 minutes to get from security to the gate.
   
   My pregnant, tired self was not amused by the fact that I had to wind my way through a labyrinth of duty-free shops to get to the other end of a massive room that is reminiscent of a sunlit warehouse, at which point I could go up an escalator and then along another winding hallway to reach the entrance to the terminal, which was only another 5-minute walk from my gate, all while running late after standing in line for two hours and paying that express security fee.
   
   
5. Do your research on the local holidays.
   
   Of course we knew it was Easter–that was part of our motivation in going that weekend! However, what we didn’t know was that Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Monday are all public holidays in Norway, and that half of Oslo shuts down for a week–including many museums, grocery stores, and coffee shops–while the locals travel to the Mediterranean. We discovered this when Soren walked over to a coffee shop on Thursday morning in order to conduct an important business call using their free WiFi, only to find out that it was closed. After frantically adding more vodafone credit and vowing never to leave ourselves without cheap internet in a foreign country again, we found that one of the museums we’d wanted to visit was still open, and we had a lovely time there.
   
   

6. 

   The Oslo Transit Map. What a beautiful thing!

   Guidebooks and transit maps are your friends, but if you don’t have them, you need to have internet access.
   
   I don’t know what we were thinking (well, I was probably thinking about moving to a different country at 6 months pregnant...), but we didn’t acquire a guidebook prior to arriving in Norway. We decided long ago that guidebooks are the way to travel, and yet we seemed to have completely forgotten this for our Oslo trip, relying instead on top-10 lists that we found online. And, of course, we then booked an Airbnb that didn’t have WiFi, so when our plans hit that unforeseen holiday snag, we were dependent upon vodafone and its international rates to find out the information we needed. Luckily, we eventually found an old guidebook, along with a transit map, on our host’s bookshelf, and it led us to one of the coolest restaurants in Oslo, but that only served to confirm that guidebooks are the best and we should never leave home without one.
   
   
7. If you’re pregnant, let go of your idealistic dreams of walking everywhere and buy the transit pass.
   
   
   After our early-morning flight and our expensive coach bus ride into Oslo, I was in a bad state of sticker shock, so I refused to let Soren talk me into buying a bus pass straight away. The bus station was only a 30 minute walk from our airbnb, so we could do it! And it’s true, we could make that vaguely-uphill walk. Once. Afterward, I couldn’t move for the rest of the day, because I hadn’t been accustomed to walking distances, and the baby had entered a stage of rapid growth and my body was a bit behind. Of course, this prevented us from doing any touring on the only non-holiday day we were there, and we ended up buying a pass the next day because everything that might’ve been within walking distance was closed for the holiday. The cool thing about Oslo transit, though, is that all forms of transit within the city proper are included in the 24-hour pass–including the ferry–and while transit is fairly expensive per ride, a 24-hour pass is only about $10, and a 7-day pass is around $30, which is competitive with other cities that I’ve seen. And, they’re pretty easy to purchase, because every Deli de Luca and 7-11 sells them, and Deli de Luca is everywhere (and it’s open on holidays!).
   
   
8. Don’t stay overnight in an airport while pregnant. You will regret it.
   
   
   Rygge is a nice little airport, but if you take a flight at odd hours, it’s a nightmare. As I mentioned, the transit to get there is expensive, and there are no hotels a free shuttle ride away. For us, that meant that, in order to make our 6:30am flight, we either had to wake up at 3am and cross the whole of the Oslo metropolitan area during the wee hours of the morning, or spend the night in the airport. We elected to spend the night in the airport. What a bad idea.
   
   The thing is, I actually got a couple hours of sleep, because the seats are arranged in a bench-like formation and I could lay down, but they are also made of wood, so we had to pull out every sweatshirt and scarf we had in order to provide the necessary padding. No, Soren was the one who suffered the most, because I had to use his lap as a pillow. That meant that he was sitting up on a wooden seat all night. Poor guy. The pain of the situation was further deepened by the cost of airport food–we spent about $45 on a light dinner and pastries for breakfast. Soren still cringes every time it comes up.
   

   

   For reference, this is how pregnant I was when we were in Oslo.

   Part II, comprised of the highlights of our trip, is on its way! Stay tuned!