I'm back in Ottawa following our trip to Norway and apologize for the lack of posts following Canada Day! The rest of our trip was excellent - we spent July 2nd with Alf Olav and Roy Kristiansen, who I have had email contact with but had never met in person. The four of us visited a few quarries, including 2 which were relatively ignored from a mineral point of view but had excellent rock samples. It was great to see Alf Olav again and I hope we get the chance to visit again in the near future. Maybe at the Kongsberg Symposium?
On July 4th, Glenn and I dropped the 4 buckets of rocks off at the Larvik harbour for their trip by container ship to Montreal, then truck to Ottawa. Bye bye rocks! We'll see them in 6-8 weeks. I tell you, a sports car is not the best way to transport 300 lbs of rock, all your luggage and 2 full-sized adults! That car was LOW to the ground coming out of the campground!!We drove to Oslo and attempted to find our way through the narrow, winding, one-way streets to our hotel. It was one of the more frustrating experiences, certainly the only truly bad bit of our trip. But we did finally find the hotel, Thon Hotel Stefan, parked the now disabled and abused Alfa Romeo for the night, and checked in. We were both exhausted and wound up spending some alone time in our respective hotel rooms, watching a bit of TV and napping. After a bit, we went out and wandered the streets of Oslo and found a cafe/pub on the harbor and had lunch and a beer.
Oslo isn't that big, as we found out, and the downtown core is compact. It's a beautiful city but we were really too tired to do much other than enjoy the sunshine, have a beer, then head back to the hotel for a bit of a rest before supper. On the way, we did stop at a few tourist shops as well as a deli that sold moose, reindeer and elk salami and other dried meats and cheeses - it was great! We both bought some reindeer salami but it was confiscated at customs at the Ottawa airport. Shit. That's what happens when you are honest!
We also found a postcard with the most disturbing picture of an angry, naked baby statue on it. Not knowing what this was, but being slightly fascinated, we investigated and discovered that it was one statue in the Vigeland Statue Park, northeast of where we were staying. We decided that after supper (Brassierie 45 - excellent!) we would take a long walk and find this park.If you want detailed information on Vigeland and the sculptures, check out this website: http://www.vigeland.museum.no/en/vigeland-park . It has more information than I could ever provide here, and certainly better written and more accurate!!
But the long and the short of it is that all 200 sculptures in this park were created by Gustav Vigeland - bronze, granite and wrought iron. The park was completed between 1939 and 1949. The bridge after the main entrance contains bronze sculptures which depict men, women and children, and the interactions between them. Here is where the Angry Baby is, and also the man kicking the babies statue! After the bridge is a fountain.
Around the perimeter are carvings which (apparently) depict the endless cycle of life. There are images in here that disturbed even me!! Pictures of children being eaten and kicked by animals, skeletons, etc. Very, very weird!
At the end of the park is a granite monolith comprised of 121 bodies which represent man's search for the divine. It's pretty cool actually, and given the light and clouds that we were having that night, it looked really neat against the sky. The granite statues around it however, very weird. Granted, all of the positions were normal, everyday positions for people to be in. But the people were all naked, so it looks a bit more strange. I think Glenn was more weirded out than I was!!
After a long walk through the naked penis park, we decided to hit up Lorry's, which is apparently an Oslo icon. It's a bar and restaurant which has a HUGE beer menu. The food reviews we checked were horrible so had decided not to go there for supper, but a last beer sounded good! After finally getting some service, I wound up having a Finnish beer and a Chang - Norway, Finland and Thailand all meet in beer form! Not bad!!
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