We stayed in an apartment in the old Posthallen building (former post office). Beautiful marble entry floors and stairs that are clearly old and well maintained. There are 200 or so apartments in the building with halls like dormitory hallways with no windows, with the overhead lights turning on as you approach a section. Our apartment was small and filled with light from large sliding doors that opened on to a balcony; we could see other apartments across the courtyard and the roof top shared space garden.
Oslo is a busy city especially around the major tourist sights. It felt a little overwhelming at first on a sunny Sunday afternoon with people crowding sidewalks taking photos everywhere. So we rented the Oslo City bikes and cruised away to some of the lesser known sights along cool shady streets. And, we got on a boat to see some of the waterfront from the water.
I really want to make it up to see that ski museum on our next visit; they have a ski jump simulator! There were loads of sailboats and cruises crisscrossing the harbor. We took in the sights and enjoyed the breeze, surprised at how warm it was walking or biking around. After dinner outdoors at a nice little restaurant, we made our way back to the Oslo Opera House to climb the steep slopes and watch the sunset with many other people.
Will scoped out the floating saunas all along the waterfront, and managed to get us a reservation for early Monday morning. We got our best view of the Opera House before it was open to pedestrians when we were swimming in the harbor and/or sitting in the sauna.
The water was clear and cool, much warmer than we expected. The guy who tended the saunas and stoves told us he’s originally from California, married a Norwegian woman and they have a family here in Oslo. He said it’s a great place to have a family with many social policies that support people with kids.
We liked the sauna so much that we booked to return again early Tuesday morning before our train.
We saw lots of people biking as their means of transportation in Oslo. Some of the bikes were road bikes and it was easy to tell some of the riders were commuting to work Monday and Tuesday morning. Other bikes were like those we saw in Sweden and the Netherlands with seats on the back or boxes on the front for kids, groceries and dogs. There were a LOT of Teslas on the road too; one guy told us Norway has the highest number per capita of them. Sustainability and climate change are mentioned in hotel and shopping information as well as on signs around the city for recycling. Menus in restaurants gave information about where fish came from, how animals for meat were raised, etc. It feels like it’s a real topic of concern and consideration in Scandinavia .Another thing I noticed was that while there are plenty of high fashion clothing stores, there are also lots of vintage and second hand clothing stores that were bustling with shoppers.
The library holds a place of honor beside the Oslo Opera House on the waterfront. It’s an amazing example of beautiful architecture and the value Oslo places on the library as a multi-pronged resource for its citizens. Will and I could have spent days there. It has a gift shop, a cafe, many meeting and read-aloud spaces, an escalator that carries you to the top floors very quickly, The children’s floor is welcoming to kids, families and teens who speak/read Norwegian and many other languages. There’s a mezzanine that has newspapers and magazines in Norwegian as well as English and other languages. We were in the library until closing at 10 one night, and the place was very busy right up til the final call for leaving. There are branches too in other parts of the city.
Artwork was featured or integrated into some corners all over the library. It felt like a very busy museum, even at nearly. 10pm. I stopped in again on Tuesday morning before our train west to write down a couple of books I’d seen on display. There were many people there as soon as it opened.
We’d both like to return to Oslo again, to the library and to many other places in and around the city.
Birdgirl’s travels 