Part 2: Norway, the land of ships

My first real day in Norway, I decided that I would dedicate it to museums. And so I embarked on a trip to the sort of peninsula like area of southern Oslo called Bygdøy. Now, I just had to take the number 30 bus all the way from outside the door of my hostel to the end of its like, but during the summer one can also take a ferry, which is infinitely cooler.
It seems like that whole area is dedicated to museums. I actually think that the road that the bus drives on is called Museum Road…but I might be just making that up. That’s for the nit picky people of the internet to answer. So, since I like ships, and I also like Vikings, the first museum I decided to stop off in was…the Viking ship museum!
Entry was 60 nok for an adult, which is fitting considering that the museum was relatively much smaller than the next two I would visit. Everything is in one building, which houses the ships that were discovered in excavations of Viking burial mounds. Two are in surprisingly good shape, as are the artifacts and skeletons that were found inside of them. There are a few balcony like features that you could climb up to as well, to look down over the tops of the ships. All of the burial artifacts are on display, along with the skeletons of two female high ranking Vikings, a chieftain, and another guy…I forget what he was on about. All in all, a cool museum, didn’t take more than an hour to visit, not a necessity though if you’re running low on money.
Museum number two was called the Norwegian folk museum, and was definitely the most different of the three. It has a few indoor exhibitions, including one about the Sami that I really enjoyed, but the thing that really makes this museum unique is its extensive outdoor exhibition. They recreated or transported a whole bunch of traditional Norwegian buildings, include churches, farm houses, town halls, even a tenement building and alcohol shop. It is quite large and quite easy to get lost in. Many of the buildings were not completely open, due to reconstructive work being done in their roofs, but it was cool nonetheless. It cost me a reasonable 80 nok, and took me a good portion of time to explore.
And now we get to my favorite museum of the day, the Fram museum. It’s located right by the last stop on the 30 bus, flanked by two other museums, the Maritime and the…Tiki? Something along those lines, I can’t quite remember. It costs 85 nok to enter, and it is, in my opinion, the best museum of the three. It contains two polar exploration ships, the Fram and the Gjoa (?). The Fram is the first ship actually designed to withstand polar ice, and the first to do it successfully. The museum is filled with information, cool exhibits and even has a movie you can listen to in any language. The icing on top of the cake is that you can actually walk on, in, and around the Fram, and see exactly how the men used to live on the ship for years and years. It was totally worth the money, totally recommended.
Now I must cut this post short. Matt and I have just gotten ready, we’re drinking some tea, and we’re going to head out and do some stuff!