Our first day in Oslo we decided to explore on our own. So first we had to master the rapid transit system. First of all it is an excellent system and really not that difficult to use. We were able to buy a pass for our entire stay so we didn’t have to keep buying or paying each time we used rapid transit. With the help of Google maps and very friendly Norwegians we had no trouble with the system. We also had to overcome the fact that it was snowing and had been snowing so we were trudging through 2 to3 inches of snow. Our first adventure was the folk museum which is also called the open air museum. There is a hall that has artifacts from older times including clothing, guns, etc. Most of the museum however was outside consisting of homes and other structures that were brought to the museum site and reconstructed. One of the buildings was a stave church. It was on top of the hill so on my way down I had to do a controlled slide. The snow did make the buildings very pretty though. There are only 28 of these churches remaining in Norway when there used to be thousands. We saw a number of these churches when we were on the cruise. They are made out of wood so many have burned down. Because Norway was a very poor country until the recent discovery of gas and oil off the coast, people didn’t have a lot of money to build churches so wood was all that they used. Now Norway is a rich country. It is amazing to see the amount of construction going on in Oslo. They are rebuilding a number of the museums here. Unfortunately one of them is the National Museum which is currently closed and we were unable to go to it.

Here are pictures from the folk museum.



After lunch we went downtown to explore and do some shopping. Elaine wanted to go to the troll store. Trolls play a very important part in Norwegian lore. The following pictures are taken of street scenes during all three days that we’ve been here. In spite of all the new construction, there are some nice older buildings. The architecture is quite varied.