Oslo, Norway – All in all, these are good times in this Scandinavian capital.
“The Scream,” Norway’s best-known painting – stolen in 2004 – is back home in the Munch Museum. The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony took place recently at City Hall. And thanks to oil discovered in the North Sea in the 1970s, Norway projects a state budget surplus of $59 billion for next year.
On a recent visit to Oslo, I found a vibrant city of interesting contradictions and surprises. It’s a mistake to think of it as a homogenous city of blond, blue-eyed Nordics. Immigrants make up almost one-quarter of its 540,000 population. The once-seedy area of Grunerlokka is being revitalized with ethnic markets and cafes. When I was there, about 100 Afghan refugees seeking asylum had pitched tents outside Oslo Cathedral, staging a hunger strike to protest deportation.
As oil spews kroner into the Norwegian economy, most Oslo residents enjoy an enviable quality of life in one of the world’s most expensive cities.
Sticker shock might hit first on the $95-or-more cab ride from Gardermoen Airport to the city center. Still, I found ways to save. The Flytoget express train whisks passengers between the airport and the central station in 20 minutes for $25 each way. The widely available Oslo Pass saves money on museums and sightseeing tours.
Families flock to Vigeland Park, an 80-acre, in-city oasis with an outdoor museum of 192 granite and bronze sculptures by countryman Gustav Vigeland. The statues, with life-sized nude figures of men, women and children, portray a range of emotions and stages of life.
I made a point of visiting the Munch Museum, which had just reopened with added security following the heist of its star attraction two years ago. There, I picked up information about Edvard Munch (pronounced Monk), a troubled soul who battled alcoholism, suffered a nervous breakdown and was shot in the hand during a lovers’ quarrel.
To me, the surprise of the museum was the diversity of the artist’s works: the hauntingly dark, nude “Madonna,” the charming and cheerful “Girls on the Bridge.”
I saw a pastel version of “The Scream” – one of four created by the artist. The stolen “Scream,” an 1893 oil that had been ripped from the museum wall in an armed robbery, was recovered in August, after my June visit.
Munch’s study in human angst can be found on mugs, T-shirts and inflatable dolls. If that is not enough Munch, visit City Hall. Upstairs is the tapestry-adorned Festival Gallery and the Munch Room, which houses “Life,” a Munch oil painting confiscated by the Germans during World War II, later bought at auction by a collector and ultimately acquired by the city of Oslo.
Celebration of muralists
The ceremonial hall holds huge murals depicting facets of modern Norwegian life. The building, which was under construction when the Germans occupied the capital in 1940, wasn’t completed until 1950. Several muralists, interned during the war, returned at its end to finish their paintings. One, Alf Rolfsen, who lost a son in the war, scrapped his plan to paint a landscape and instead created a dramatic frieze depicting occupation, resistance and liberation.
The 16,000-square-foot ceremonial hall was the setting for the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony last month. Wanting to learn more about the award, I booked the Peace City Tour and found I had guide Carola all to myself.
We began at the Nobel Peace Center, which opened in 2005. Here visitors can watch televised speeches of all Peace Prize winners since 1960.
A room is devoted to the prize’s founder, Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and stipulated in his will that his fortune fund five prizes to reward those who had “conferred the greatest benefit on mankind” through chemistry, medicine, physics, literature or by promoting peace. The economics prize, funded by the Bank of Sweden, was established in 1968 in Nobel’s honor.
Although born in Stockholm, Sweden, Nobel directed that a Norwegian committee select the Peace Prize laureate and that the ceremony be held in Oslo. No one is sure why he chose Oslo. One theory is he wished to keep it immune from the politics that might have come into play in more powerful, more political Sweden.
In the tradition-rich ceremony last month, which was held on the 110th anniversary of Nobel’s death, Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist and “Banker to the Poor,” was honored. He shared the prize with the Grameen Bank, which he founded to fight rural poverty through collateral-free loans to small businesses. The other five laureates were also honored in Stockholm the same day.
Carola, my guide, had keys to Villa Grande, a 46-room mansion on the verdant Bygdoy Peninsula to the west. Villa Grande contains the recently opened Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities. In 1940, the mansion was confiscated by Vidkun Quisling, a Nazi sympathizer who was briefly prime minister during the German occupation. From his former study, I noticed a fine view across the harbor to Akershus Fortress, where, in 1945, Quisling was executed as a traitor.
The Kon-Tiki Museum on Bygdoy is home to the balsa wood raft from Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 expedition. A bit the worse for wear, it is amazingly primitive, fashioned after rafts of pre-Columbian Indians of South America. Heyerdahl’s nearly 5,000-mile voyage, with a crew of five, took 101 days, drew worldwide interest, spawned a book and a film and proved the plausibility of Heyerdahl’s theory that the Polynesian Islands were settled by people from Peru.
Viking ship tombs
Nearby is the Viking Ship Museum, which displays three excavated wooden craft that were hauled ashore centuries ago for use as burial chambers. The centerpiece is the reconstructed 72-foot-long Oseberg, a dragon ship excavated in 1904 about 50 miles south of Oslo. The ship is thought to be the grave of a queen and her servant, part of the richest Viking burial mound ever found, with a trove of wood, metal and leather objects now displayed in the museum.
The Fram Museum pays tribute to Fridtjof Nansen and the crew of the Fram, the wooden sailing ship on which they attempted to sail from Bergen to the North Pole in 1893.
The plan was to get the ship trapped in ice so it could drift with the floe to the pole. When that didn’t work, Nansen and a colleague set off for the pole on skis but ran short of supplies and had to turn back. Unable to find the Fram, they holed up for the winter in a stone hut, then sailed down the coast in two kayaks lashed together and were picked up by an English ship and returned to Norway. Roald Amundsen sailed the Fram on his celebrated 1910-11 flag-raising expedition to the South Pole.
Nearby, the open-air Norwegian Museum of Cultural History has 155 buildings dating from the Middle Ages to modern times. The jewel is the Stave Church, its 13th-century interior pretty much original. Norway has 28 of these churches, which take their name from the staves, or posts, supporting their pagodalike interlocking roofs.
Norway’s cold winters don’t keep people indoors. Situated at the head of Oslo Fiord, Oslo has water and green space aplenty, and Norwegians love the outdoors and skiing. One day, I drove up to woodsy Holmenkollen to see one of the country’s top tourist attractions, the Holmenkollen ski jump. For visitors wishing to experience the thrill without the risk, there’s a jump simulator – or they can just take in the view from the top of the 200-foot jump tower.
Back down the hill, I joined families promenading on the broad Karl Johans Gate, where buskers, balloon vendors and street artists plied their trades, then headed to the Hotel Continental for lunch at the grand Theater Cafe. Here the elite have met to eat for more than a century.
Cheap food in Oslo means ethnic cafes – the city has 54 Indian restaurants – or a $2.30 hot dog from a street vendor. Breakfast is usually included at hotels, and it’s a good idea to eat heartily and skip lunch.
Browsing one day in a boutique near City Hall, I noticed that a blouse I liked was made in Denmark. It was designed in Norway but not made in the country, explained the clerk. Since the nation became oil-rich, “we don’t do anything for ourselves anymore,” she said.
As those North Sea rigs keep pumping, Norwegians are enjoying the good life.
