We woke up in Oslo this morning, so there aren’t any pics of the sailing-in sunrise today. Instead, we went to brekkie and headed down to our tour bus.

Full disclosure: neither Rob nor I really like bus tours. We both prefer walking tours and we thought that since Oslo is a walking city and since we were docked right in the city centre, we wouldn’t have a bus today, but alas, we did.

Happily, it ended up being one of the better tours on the trip - even though I got very few decent pictures out the window. It seems that nearly everything worth seeing was on the wrong side of the bus from where I was sitting.

We saw the opera house, and I had initially planned to walk back over there and get some good pictures of it, but when we did see it, there was a lot of construction around it and renovations going on, so photos wouldn’t be great. The building is stunning, however, and it’s supposed to appear like an iceberg.

Here’s a pic from the internet, without all the construction cones and such:

From there, we drove through the city, ironically past many of the sights Rob and I walked past yesterday. One of the new areas was Frogner, an upscale neighbourhood. We stopped for awhile at the park with the Vigener Installation, a massive collection of sculptures from Gustav Vigeland, a famous Norwegian artist.

I’ll admit, I had never heard of this guy.

I’ll also admit that I found much of his work creepy AF.

I’ll also admit that as much as I found it creepy, I’m still thinking about it, so HEY, that’s art, right?

There’s a statue of the artist at the entrance to the park, which I didn’t photograph (but now wish I had) and he seems really cross. Or pissed. Or at the very least, upset. That seems to be reflected in his art. I don’t think anyone would describe him as ‘jovial’.

The park contains a staggering number of works - more than 200! - depicting more than 600 figures.

That bridge alone contains as many bronze sculptures as many entire museums. I’ll admit that the man had talent. The figures are very well done.

I especially liked this one:

And this one, of a father and son:

Yeah, the father & son piece is nice. The sea creature vampire-biting the guy on the pedestal…. Not so much.

The basic theme of the works (according to the tour guide) is “the circle of life”.

And I can certainly see that.

In addition to lots of works that progress through babies to elderly folks, there are also literal circles represented in many of the works:

The tour guide said that all of the figures are nude because “as soon as you put clothes on them, you give them a status, a time frame, a religion” and he wanted them to be free of those constraints.

Fair enough, but you could (ahem) easily tell that none of the guys were Jewish.
Just sayin’.

The main sculpture in the park is the massive monolith, carved from a single piece of granite and depicting 121 figures from all stages of life from babies to corpses.

The park paths lead to the monolith quite dramatically from every direction.

Family is also an important theme in the works here, with many depictions of husband, wife and offspring.

Interestingly, there are also a few depictions of same-sex pairings (and trios and more). A few involve conflict, but most of them portray affection.

Now… the tour guide touched on the ‘circle of life’ themes as well as the ‘importance of family’ theme, but it doesn’t take much study of these works to realize there’s another theme that runs throughout:

“Kids are evil and they will ruin your life.”

Behold:

That boy baby using mom’s hair as a rein is the stuff of nightmares. He genuinely looks evil, and both the kids seem to take delight in mom’s dilemma.

But the clincher is the most famous of all the sculptures in the park, and it legit gave me the creeps in a thousand different ways.

Have a gander at the Sinnataggen:

Yeah, I know it’s super-famous and touching it is supposed to bring good luck, but when I look at this, my first thought is “OMG I’m sooooooooo glad I didn’t have kids!”

By comparison, the pile of bodies in the monolith was positively uplifting!

On a lighter note, I asked the guide why so many houses were flying a pennant-shaped flag that was clearly supposed to represent the flag of Norway, but wasn’t actually the flag of Norway, since it only has the horizontal strip and not the cross.

🇳🇴

She said that the official flag is only supposed to be flown by residential buildings on special occasions. But Norwegians like to display their pride in country at other times as well, so they fly this symbolic flag which is allowed to be flown any day of the year.

We left Vigeland behind and headed up to the ski jump.

LOL, wut?

Honestly, when I heard we were going to see a ski jump, I thought they were really grasping for things to see.

I looked it up. There’s been a ski jump on that spot since 1892. OK, that’s impressive.

It has been reconfigured and/or rebuilt 19 times. Ok, whatever.

But in 2010 it was completely rebuilt into this - and holy crap, it’s amazing.

The end of the jump and grandstands are below ground level to block the winds and make it more comfortable for the spectators - brilliant!

The upper part uses the natural terrain so that the tallest part isn’t massive out-of-scale with the surroundings. Nice.

But looking at it from this angle isn’t the best. Have a look from the side:

It’s massive, it’s gorgeous, and it’s an engineering marvel. It’s like functional sculpture.

And best of all, it’s sculpture that serves a purpose that doesn’t involve creeping me out and making me uncomfortable around children.

Take that, Vigeland!

Back to the ship just before the rains came and lunch at the buffet. The special today was pork adobo - not Mexican adobo, which is super-spicy, but Philippean adobo - cubes of pork in a soy, garlic, and vinegar with peppercorns. Lordy, Lordy, it was good. After having a small sample of it, my first thought was how good it would be on spaghetti.

So I hit up the pasta bar for a plate of plain spaghetti and then spooned more adobo over it.

It’s one of the best things I’ve had from the buffet. Delicious!

Dinner was good as well, with Rob having an artichoke soufflé as an appy

And me having Arctic char tartare

The mains were carbonara for Rob and salmon for me. Both good.

Afterward, we headed to the theatre for cellist Wendy Law who was really good. She played love songs from Bach to Gershwin and everything in between. It was a nice evening.

Tomorrow, we’re in Denmark - Århus - and a mid-afternoon walking tour. (We dock at noon)

Until then….

On to the next day!

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