This is the third article in The Arctic Adventure series. 1 2
On the morning of January 1st, after having bread, butter & jam for breakfast, we set out to exploring the city. We took a bus to the central station and walked to the Opera House. It was a wonderful morning with lots of sun light (temperature was more than 0 degree Celsius, yay!) and Oslo was beautiful.
Outside the Central Station. PS: No, I don’t know what she’s doing.
On the way to the Opera House, we found a few swings. The pictures will tell the rest. 😛
Oslo Opera House
We did not go inside, it was closed for New Year’s Day. In fact, almost all the shops and restaurants are closed on New Year’s Day or any other public holiday. So, be wary of it if you are planning to visit Oslo. Anyway, the view from the top of the Opera House was amazing. There were quite a few people, trying to capture it.
Again, no idea 😛
Then, we walked back to the Central Station, had hot chocolate from a 7-Eleven for half the price, thanks to Danvarsh’s student ID card. They have nice muffins too.
Next stop was Holmenkollen. We wanted to see the ski jump, a famous landmark in Oslo. It was a 30 minute train ride from the central station. We went through Oslo’s suburban regions and it was scenic.
The one with the entire gang, on the way to Holmenkollen.
After getting down at the Holmenkollen station, we had to walk for 10-15 min to reach the ski jump. As it was on top of a small hill, there was a strong breeze and it was freezing cold, at 2:30 in the afternoon! I was cursing myself for wearing just a fleece and not taking my down jacket. Luckily, Bharathi and Rukmani had their jackets. Meanwhile, Danvarsh, being the Superman he thinks he is, was walking around in a t-shirt without even wearing thermals.
The Holmenkollen Ski Jump
Rukmani, the wannabe photographer.
The 4 o’clock sunset.
Around 5 o’clock, we started back from Holmenkollen. We reached the central station and went for walk and grocery shopping, again, for making dinner. Chef Harikumar made the most awesomatic (I know it’s not an actual word) pasta ever. All 5 of us sat around a small table in the kitchen and gobbled it up directly from the vessel (I’d badly missed such things after moving out of college). After another round of endless chit chatting, we decided to call it a day and had another night of peaceful sleep. And the temperature was dropping, fast.
Next day, we woke up a bit early and had an eventful day planned. We were going museum hopping first and planned to go for a ferry ride, if we had time.
We visited three museums.
- Viking Ship Museum
- The Fram Museum
- Kon-Tiki Museum
Thankfully, all of them were in the same neighborhood and there were frequent bus services to the area.
The Viking Ship museum is home to 3 Viking longships found at burial sites across Norway. These ships are said to be the best preserved Viking ships in the world. The museum has a lot of information about life during the Vikings’ time.
Fram museum houses Fram, the world’s first ice-breaking ship and the last one made out of wood. This ship has been to the both North and South Poles, many times. The museum has detailed information about it’s voyages and gave us an opportunity to explore such a historic ship.
Kon-Tiki museum is dedicated to Thor Heyerdahl, a famous historian and explorer, and his voyages across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
And, since we had an Oslo pass, we had free entries to all the museums!
We were done with the museums around 2PM. We had enough time to take a bus to the pier and take the last ferry ride for the day at 3. Fortunately, we found a food truck selling Mexican food and had some yummy burritos and nachos for lunch.
Hahahaha!
The ferry ride began promptly at 3. We were allowed to stand on the deck and enjoy the scenery. The sunset was beautiful. As soon as the sun went below the horizon, it got chilly, especially with the breeze. We had to go inside soon enough, after capturing the sunset and taking some pictures of ourselves.
After the ferry ride, we wanted to try out Oslo’s trams. And we found a tram line to a place called Frognerstadion, which has an ice skating rink. Though we were not sure if we would actually do ice skating, we wanted to go there and check it out. Once we were there, all of us were tempted to give it a try. We rented skates for NOK140 (or NOK100, not sure). And we spent around 2 hours trying to become pros. 😛
That was the best 2 hours I’d spent in Oslo. Yes, all of us fell down, a lot of times, but it was just too much fun. Bharathi fell on her face once and Danvarsh actually fell down more than 15 times!
In the end, all of us managed to cover some distance without falling down (except Rukmani maybe, sorry dude). 😛
How NOT to do ice-skating – Danvarsh
After exhausting ourselves completely at the skating rink, we started back to the apartment and had another round of freshly made pasta, thanks to Chef Kumar again (Okay, Bharathi helped him both the times, happy now?).
That was the end of our time at Oslo. We had an early morning flight to Tromso, the next day. Finally, we were actually going to go into the Arctic!
Stay tuned for the next one! Thanks! 🙂
Travel With Naren 
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