Shopping
On Thursday, ja left at 5am to do his field work and I stayed behind to catch two more hours of sleep before wandering the city looking for gifts to bring back. I waited until nearly 10:30 to leave the apartment and still had to wait for shops to open.
My little shopping expedition was unsuccessful - things were too expensive and I couldn't find the shop Celine recommended. I ended up checking out the murals and statues at the city hall, revisiting the opera house, and wandering into the large waterfront castle to check out the old stonework and cannons.
The city hall was covered in weird metaphorical imagery and surrounded by other statues and sculptures.
At the edge of the bay is a modern building of white stone with sharp angles and weird slopes like a pile of broken glass. One side of the building slopes down into the water of the bay and a little farther out in the water but still close enough to be part of the architecture, there's an artificial glass iceberg. It's the Oslo opera house.
We walked around it on the first day I arrived and I wish I'd taken more pictures. The sloped grounds are built with an irregular selection of rectangular slabs and there were small steps and short drops where the sloped surfaces met. We wondered how dangerous the slope would be covered in sheets of ice and whether it was possible to ride a bike or skateboard down to the water.
The castle was interesting and if I'd had time I could have taken a tour of the interior. The stonework was sometimes haphazard and contrived. I saw evidence of bricked off corridors, and places where old masonry was reused to patch up walls.
Around the back of the castle there was a more modern military complex and I wandered through this before returning to the apartment at noon.
Less than a half hour after I returned to the apartment (Celine had lent me her key) ja returned from his field work and we set off again to find some gifts for the family back home. It was difficult. The culture in Norway isn't as foreign as something you'd find farther east. As far as souvenirs went, we were stuck choosing traditional clothing, troll dolls, and reindeer and moose products - most of which were prohibitively expensive. After another exhausting day walking through the city, we bought reindeer and moose meat sausages and a bag of salted liquorish for Dad, a couple of books on trolls and Norwegian history for Mom, and a pair of moose leather mittens for Shamara.
I sent out emails to mom and my sister asking for the others foot size because we were thinking of purchasing them both some traditional red felt slippers. My sister never responded and the shoe size my mom said Shamara wore was absurd. There was no way anyone could have feet that big and since the slippers were priced according to size, we ended up getting her the gloves instead. I thought my mom might have made a mistake converting US sizes to European but when I returned and asked her about it I was shocked to discover her feet really are that freakishly large.
We tried to relax that evening, Ja had been walking since 6am and I'd been up since 8 but we had to get ready for our trip. Celine invited Emeliano and Luisa and decided we should drive out that evening rather than waiting for Friday morning.
We carried the roof carrier from the car to the apartment, awkwardly hauling it up the three storey spiral staircase. The carrier was empty and light but it was still a bitch maneuvering it up those twisting stairs. Ja said it was horrible when they carried up their washing machine and nearly killed the friend he enlisted to help him.
As we went up the stairs I wondered if there was a minimum radius you could place your feet from the center shaft. The stairs grow thinner towards the axis but remain the same height. More specifically I wondered why you couldn't just step on the tiny metal lip where it meets the axis and walk straight up spinning in place. I tried this but lost my balance as I got nearer the central shaft. If I had to live at the top of a huge spiral staircase, I would practice every day until I got good enough to go on television.
Apart from walking all day, packing for the trip, and packing and unpacking the car, ja cooked dinner and drove on our four hour journey out of the city.
