This was our last full day in Norway. Christine and I have been guests in the home of Hege and Jan Cato Bjørnstad since the 11th. The home is located in Maura Norway, a pleasant community about 40 miles drive from downtown Oslo. The high speed train from nearby Gardermoen International Airport delivered the two of us into the center of Oslo in a mere 15 minutes.

Christine and I took advantage of the day for a bit of solo touring. The rain dampened but did not deter us from a bit of wandering. We visited the grounds of the Royal Palace, and the National History Museum.

We also enjoyed lunch under an awning near the National Theater.

We are steeling ourselves for the dining “sticker shock” that awaits us in Iceland. In the meantime, Norway isn’t far behind. Our lunch consisting of soup, sandwiches, and beverages for the two of us was over 700 Norwegian Krone, about $90.00. Prices outside of the central city are a bit lower.

The highlight of our visit was the National Gallery.

It was established in 1842, and has been housed in its current location since 1882. It is an art gallery of modest proportions, but what it lacks in size it more than makes up for in quality. The collection includes works by such international notables as El Greco, Monet, Cezanne, and Picasso. There are also many works by Norwegian masters such as Tidemand, Gude, and of course Munch. Here are some of my favorites:

An entire room was set aside for the works of Edvard Munch, including “The Scream”.

Valued by the Gallery as second only to The Scream is the famous 1848 collaboration work between landscape artist Hans Gude and Adolph Tidemand an artist of the Romantic Nationalism school. This painting, titled “Bridal Procession” attracted quite a crowd.

After our return to Maura we and the Bjørnstad family went out for dinner to celebrate Hege’s birthday. Following that we visited her parents and enjoyed a traditional Norwegian cake, the name of which appropriately translates to “World’s Best Cake”.

We depart tomorrow for a week in Iceland. This would be another sad parting for us except that the Bjørnstad family will be our guests in Kansas City in about 2weeks.

Peace Everyone. Pete

Before I launch into a description of this marvelous day I want to make an acknowledgement in a picture worth a thousand words. Our German “son” Andre’ and his wife Asuka are the proud parents of 11 year old daughter Helena and 4 year old son Moritz. During our time in Berlin I became especially close with the little boy. Perhaps it was because he spoke better German than me, or maybe it was my special talent making “fart” sounds with my hand to my mouth. In any case we shared a bond that is best explained in this picture.

It’s 9 days before my own bed, but who’s counting? (Spoiler alert: me.) As tempting as it is to focus on that future, today put those thoughts on hold.

When I was eleven I read “Kon-Tiki” by Thor Heyerdahl. Its 250 pages chronicled the 1947 voyage of Heyerdahl and his 5 man crew aboard a balsa log raft from Peru to Polynesia. The Norwegian adventurer sought to establish the possibility that such voyages could have populated the south seas islands. The voyage was a success, and in the process of its telling he populated the imagination of an 11 year old boy with visions of travel and adventure. 55 years later that little boy stood in Oslo, awestruck before Kon-Tiki and Heyerdahl’s later vessel, the Ra-2.

Norway has produced many of the world’s greatest navigators, adventurers, and shipwrights for more than 1,500 years. Heyerdahl was just the start for today. The Kon-Tiki Museum behind us, we walked less than 100 yards to the Fram Museum which housed not one but two of the word’s great vessels of early 20th Century polar exploration.

The smaller of the two vessels, Gjoa, measures 70 feet long by 20 feet on the beam. She was a stout ship capable of withstanding the crushing forces of the arctic ice pack. Her Norwegian captain, Roald Amundsen, and a crew of 6 were the first to successfully navigate the fabled Northwest Passage, completing the 3 year effort in 1906. They spent two winters icebound in the arctic but occupied their time engaged in serious scientific study and measurements.

The second and larger vessel, Fram, (127 feet long by 34 feet on the beam) is famed as the wood hulled sailing vessel to have sailed both the farthest north into the Arctic (86° north in 1896) and farthest south into the Antarctic (78° south in 1912).

Each of these ships have been magnificently restored and are exhibited with a wealth of information concerning polar exploration throughout the centuries.

Next, we were off to the Viking Ship Museum. The reputation of these 1st millennium Scandinavians for barbaric savagery has eclipsed their accomplishments as shipbuilders and navigators. Archeologists and Sociologists have established that Viking exploitation extended west to pre-Columbian North America, and as Far East and south as Russia and Turkey. They were as fearless sailing the oceans in their fragile appearing ships as they were in battle.

Their ships were anything but fragile. They were graceful, seaworthy, and at over 10 knots they were capable of twice the speed of the ponderous ships of “more civilized” people.

The Viking Ship Museum features 3 large excavated and restored vessels, together with smaller boats of the time. There are wonderfully preserved sledges, wagons, and carvings that cast an entirely different light on these explorers.

Finally, we drove to Oslo’s Frogner Park to see the work of another famous Norwegian “explorer”, sculptor Gustav Vigeland. He was an explorer of human relationships and emotions. Between 1924 and 1943 he sculpted in both bronze and stone 212 works which detail hundreds of human figures and are exhibited over 80 acres within the park.

The figures are mesmerizing in their depictions of human interactions.

Chief among these works is the appropriately named sculpture “Monolith”. It is a 46 foot tall single block of granite that depicts 121 seamlessly interwoven bodies… men, women, old, young, exhibiting the full spectrum of human emotion. This piece took 14 years to complete! It is surrounded by other larger than life figures arranged in tiers like spectators at an exhibition. It is no wonder that the Park attracts nearly 2 million visitors annually.

Peace Everyone. Pete

After a two hour flight from Berlin we landed at the ultra-modern airport located near Oslo. We were greeted there by Hege who was the third foreign exchange student that we hosted. She lived with us during the 1994–95 school year.

Hege, all 6’1” of her, remains as a bubbly and full of life today as she did 25 years ago. (Here is 25 years ago)

We will be guests of her family for the next four nights. This is Christine standing next to Hege and Jan’s 15 year old son!

She, her husband Jan, and their three children plan on visiting us in Missouri later this Summer. Every member of the family speaks fluent English, however the children seem to make fun of their father’s English which they consider to be less than perfect. We disagree!

Hege and Jan are both teachers in a nearby elementary school. They both have a pleasant lighthearted demeanor that must endear them to their students. Hege has explained that she is assigned a class in the first grade and then follows that class as their teacher for the next seven years. She becomes very close to the class members as if a member of their own families. I asked Hege if she ever had students that she found “challenging“. “Of course,” she replied, “it just means that I have to try harder.” I have no doubt that she does, and successfully.

Norway has approximately the same population but twice the land area (5.2 million and 149,000 sq miles) as the state of Missouri (6 million and 69,700 sq miles).

Norwegians enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world, ranked sixth worldwide in per capita gross domestic product (USA is 11th), and 1st in the International Human Development Index (USA 10th) which seeks to quantify factors such as the delivery of healthcare, education, infrastructure, housing, nutrition, life expectancy, and personal freedoms. Our 30 minute drive from the airport to Hege’s home community visually confirmed these statistics.

We are approximately 400 miles from the Arctic Circle, the farthest north thus far on this journey. We are also nearing the summer solstice. Therefore, it was still “daylight” at 11 pm and it never did get totally dark. At 2 am the brightening skies forced me to get up and pull down the blinds.

Today is a “chill out“ day so we are doing laundry, catching up on a little reading, and I’m trying to figure out how to make my iPad “cooperate“ again. I am currently typing this on the annoyingly small screen of my iPhone. No pictures today, but I hope to remedy that tomorrow when we travel into Oslo to tour the sights that might include the Viking Museum and the Kon-Tiki Museum, dedicated to Thor Heyerdahl’s epic 1947 voyage from Peru to Polynesia on a pre-Columbian raft.

We have 10 nights to go before we are home in our own bed.

Peace Everyone! Pete