20230616 Oslo Natural History Museum

That evening I slept well and woke at a normal time as if I was finally feeling over the jetlag. Ja made beet smoothies for breakfast (a dangerous food for a toddler and white furniture) and we started planning the Bergen leg of our visit.

Mass transit in Oslo is awesome. A bus pass is $4 and they're good for 2 hours with stops everywhere. At one point we found ourselves two blocks from home but with tired feet and it was easier to just hop onto the next passing bus for the short trip. I understand they rarely check passengers for tickets but because of a rock festival in the city (tons of rock with pantera and guns and roses), we were approached two separate times by plain clothed ticket checkers and asked to show our tickets.

On this Friday we decided to visit the botanical gardens and natural history museum and our trip into the city started with a walk to the Sagene bus terminal. We missed our stop but it wasn't far to the next one so got off there and walked back to the gardens. On the way we came across a huge slide and stopped to try it out. While waiting for Amanda to climb the hill a school group arrived and she had to hurry before it was swarmed with children.

We toured the botanical gardens before visiting the museum, the sprinklers showering us with icy water as we read the placards. The plants and running water attracted birds and Amanda took hundreds of pictures. The gardens were split into various habitats and with some beautiful water features.

Before visiting the museum we walked through the Victorian greenhouse. The doors to the building were surprisingly heavy and it was so crowded with overgrown plants the effect was claustrophobic. It was so difficult to pass other people in the narrow corridors I began to wonder if people were smaller back in the day. I can't imagine how crowded it was on opening day.

The kiosk to the natural history museum was flanked on both sides by two large stone buildings and we followed the crowd to the left into the natural history museum. This two story building was full of stuffed animals in dioramas. They had stuffed primates and more taxidermied fish than I've ever seen before.

All the bears were stuffed in gentle attitudes. It was a weird little difference from the US where bears are always stuffed with bared fangs and poised claws. Now I think about it, it's weird you never see an animal stuffed in the attitude it had a few moments before it was killed. They really should have some scowling taxidermied men carrying rifles, fishing poles, or steel animal traps to balance it out.

I tried to take a video of the capercalle and record it's crazy call. The recordings sounded like a series of clicks followed by a man saying "harumph". You can get a better sense of the bird and it's call from this video

We paused in the small courtyard behind the kiosk for a quick snack. The other building seemed more like an administrative center filled with private offices but when we pulled open the surprisingly heavy doors we found the geology wing of the museum. The entrance to the dinosaur skeleton room had a speaker that would play an anemic tyrannosaur roar when you walked through but it was turned down so low it just sounded like a weird squeaky machine that acted up at irregular intervals.

I neglected to take pictures of the excellently reproduced statues of Lucy the hominid and when I tried to go online and find other pictures of this display I could only find some horrible bronze statues from some different park in Oslo.

That evening we walked a few blocks to Grandma's house for dinner, wheeling the kid there in the bike carrier. Grandma lives a 10min walk away in a beautiful three story shared townhouse with a large cherry tree out front. The house was filled with eclectic art and was three stories which seemed hard on the knees.

For dinner we had 4 different salmon dishes. Grandma always pronounced the 'L' in salmon.

Salma - sashime salmost with sesame seeds
Gavlaks - Cut and cold smoked salmon with dill
Salty warm smoked salmon.
Baked salmon

Each dish had a specific side dish and for dessert we had strawberry cake with marzipan. We had this marzipankake again in Sweden a week later and I promised I would try cooking one when we got home. While writing this report I realized I'd forgotten this promise. Here's a few recipes you can try. I followed the first of those recipes substituting homemade peach jam and strawberries instead of raspberries and the result was delicious but it quickly degraded, the marzipan melting into a skirt around the base of the cake.

After dinner Lukas spent his time running back and forth in the living room, singing songs, shooting spiderman webs, and throwing game tokens off the back steps into the yard.

Back at the house we finished packing for our Runde trip and tried to get to bed early. We had to catch a bus at 5:45 the following morning. We were taking ja's tent and sleeping bags.