July 28: I Discover the City

While Mark was off giving his talk at the conference (yay carbohydrate chemistry!), I set out to explore the city. Since most of the museums were closed on Mondays, I decided to walk about to get my bearings. I found the train station (where we would be heading out from for the mountains four days later), the office for the hiking association (where I picked up the key for the hut we would be staying at), happened across the new opera house (which I had read about on the plane, but didn't know where it was located), walked through the grounds of Akershus Fortress, and visited the lively shopping/restaurant/condo area of Aker Harbour.

Along the way I sat and read for a few hours in a park, and also inside the opera house (seeking out the only cool respite from the blazing sun) and dangled my feet in the ocean, and in one of the many fountains that were throughout the city.

The opera house was a very exciting building. It is designed to resemble an iceberg, which is fitting for a northern country like Norway. Its exterior created very welcoming public spaces which people flocked to at all times of the day - it was a beach sloping into the water, a plaza gradually sloping up to become the roof of the building, a look-out over the city. And that's just the exterior - the interior had beautiful curving warm wood and luxurious fur-covered benches, with a cafe, constant visitors, and an expectation that people would spend time congregating there, even if they hadn't come to see an opera performance.

And when Mark got back to the hotel, we did it all over again! Well, not quite. But we did head down to the train station, where we picked up some groceries for a picnic. Then we walked up on the roof of the opera house (which is part of the same sloping plaza that extends into the water), where we watched couples strolling in the warm evening light (not a sunset, as the sun wouldn't set until about ten at night).

Further impressions of Oslo: strangely intense sunlight that goes on forever.

Photos: fur-covered bench at the opera house, the opera house 'beach', the opera house interior, sunset on the opera house roof