Day #6: More Oslo

Today was a lot more relaxed day. I slept in a little after yesterday's quick sprint through the fjords (although, small confession, I did sleep quite a bit on the train both coming and going). After breakfast at the hostel, it was on to downtown Norway. My first stop was City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded. I thought it'd be cool to do a tour there. But it was closed for renovations. Fine, the Oslo City Hall was only built in 1950, so it barely counts as historical anyway.

Undaunted, I went on to the National Gallery to view art. While the National Gallery did have an understandably heavy emphasis on Norwegian artists, it did have a smattering of "big name" artists, including a couple of Monets I thought were lovely.

The National Gallery is most famous for being the home of famed Norwegian painter Edvard Munch's most acclaimed painting, the Scream.

The Scream is the very embodiment of the phrase, existential angst. Munch was famous for this, and similar type pictures, that portrayed the darker, uneasy side of human nature. Then, after a nervous breakdown, he went to a psychiatrist, got better, and started painting happier works. Somehow, the happy Munch never produced a popular painting thereafter. Go figure.

After the National Gallery, I hopped a train to Frogner Park. In 1921, the City of Oslo. struck a deal with Gustav Vigeland, Norway's greatest sculptor who then lived in Italy. In return for a studio and state support, Vigeland would spend the rest of his days sculpting and installing pieces in the city park. And boy did he ever. Over the next two decades, Vigeland sculpted 192 bronze and granite statutes (which were compirsed of over 600 figures, all nude) that stand in the park today. The centerpiece of the park is a 50 foot monolith.



The monolith consists of 121 different people, all seemingly striving to the top (with some succeeding more than others). Vigeland died just after it was installed and left us no explanation of what it means or the message he meant to convey. After 30 minutes of staring at it, I'm stumped. What do you think?

After Frogner Park, my last stop in Oslo was the Norwegian Resistance Museum, chronicling Norway's occupation under the Nazis. One thing I learned at the museum was that Hitler was obsessed with Norway's perceived strategic value. He stationed 400,000 soliders, arimen, and seamen in Norway, convinced the Allies were going to use it as a stepping stone to attack the German homeland.

After going through the museum, it was time to head to the train station to be whisked off to my next destination: Stockholm.