A Whole Vacation in One Weekend
Monday, 4 August 2008 -- 7:57 pm
As mentioned earlier, my best friend Erin came to visit us last week. While we were at work, they did some of the usual touristy things like taking the ferry over to Bygdøy to visit the museums. Over the weekend, we decided to do some things around town together that Lucas and I haven’t done yet ourselves.
We started Thursday afternoon with a trip up to Holmenkollen. Lucas and I haven’t been up to the top (though we have been to the stands to watch a competition), and this may be our last chance before it closes for the planned reconstruction.
On Friday, I took the day off of work, although we made a trip up to the office to pick up Lucas and ended up playing a few games of table tennis. We also made a pinhole camera so that we could see the solar eclipse. In the afternoon, we went down to explore Akershus Castle. I would have liked to do the guided tour, but we didn’t make it there in time and just explored a little on our own. Afterwards we took advantage of the sunny weather on a walking tour of some of the pretty streets around the Gamle Aker Church. On the way back to town, we passed through Vår Freslers Gravlund to see the tombs of some of the most famous Norwegians.
On Saturday, we caught a bus over to the Norsk Teknisk Museum (Museum of Science and Technology), where we had fun exploring the Klima X exhibit on climate change in our yellow galoshes and playing with all the hands-on exhibits in the science center. After that, our technical exploration continued with a tour of the high-tech Nobel Peace Center at Aker Brygge, followed by dinner downtown.
Sunday started with a guided English tour of the Viking exhibit at the Historical Museum that we all quite enjoyed. I’m very glad we arranged to be there for the tour since the exhibits were all in Norwegian. This was our first visit to the Historical Museum, and while we didn’t see much more than the Iron Age and Medieval exhibits, I was quite impressed. Especially considering admission is free! After the Historical Museum, we headed up to the Royal Palace for a tour of the interior. While it was interesting to see inside, and I learned a little more about the history of the royal family, it wasn’t the most exciting part of the weekend. We ended the sightseeing with a quick visit to the National Gallery, but we didn’t stay long since it was a bit hot and very crowded!
When I came back to work on Monday, even though I’d only taken one day off (and had even come to the office for a few hours that day), I felt like I was returning from a small holiday! With all the sightseeing we did, it really felt like we’d been out of town! Also, with all the touring and food (in Norway) for two extra people, we spent so much money over the weekend that Lucas pointed out we could have actually paid for a vacation!