Bygdøy Peninsula, Oslo
July 16, 2023
For our last full day in Oslo we took a ferry to the Bygdøy Peninsula. (If you can pronounce a French ‘u’ and a German ‘ö’, you might have a shot at pronouncing "Bygdøy" in a way that a Norwegian might be able to guess what you are trying to say.) It is just across the harbor from downtown. We had bought Oslo passes, which covered public transportation and museum entrances, so a bargain. It has long been a fashionable and expensive area to live, and has a park with major museums, some of which we visited.
I can't recall how old I was when I read the book Kon-Tiki. I do remember that it was popular with guys my age then. Now I was visiting the Kon-Tiki Museum and seeing the actual boat as well as the Ra II, on which Thor Hyerdahl sailed to prove that ancient civilizations had the technology to sail across oceans. (OK the first Ra sank. But did that stop Hyerdahl?)
In building the Ra, they forgot to include some major bit of Egyptian technology, so it sank. The Ra II included whatever that was, and sailed successfully across the Atlantic. Hyerdahl purposely chose a racially and ethnically diverse crew. The boat was lost for a while, but was located and is now in the Kon-Tiki Museum.
Next we visited the Fram Museum. (No, it is not a collection of oil filters.) The Fram was a ship Amundsen and his crew used to explore the Arctic and the Antarctic. It was powered both by sails and by steam.
The Viking Ship Museum is closed for a few years to be expanded, so we missed that. We then split up. Lee headed out into the rain to explore some of the 35 acres of the Norwegian Folk Museum. I opted to stay dry and view exhibits that show what life was like in various centuries mainly from possessions of wealthier people. The plaster ceiling included depictions of four continents as they were viewed by seventeenth century folks, such as their idea of the Americas shown below. Also here are a few pictures of odds and ends I found interesting.
Then Lee and I got back together and took the ferry back across and visited the National Gallery until it closed.
