Day Seventytwo - Aug 1, 2012
Oslo, Norway
Daily Didactic
We started the day slow and grabbed a coffee for breakfast on the way out to our dual destination museum day. Today's targets are the Much Museum and the Norway National Gallery. We toyed with other ideas on getting across town to the Munch Museum than walking. Both the metro and renting bicycles would have saved an hour or so. Ultimately the weather was beautiful and we've come to where we enjoy getting to know a city on foot, so we decided to walk the 45 minutes to the museum and see a little bit of town. Oslo reminds us of Copenhagen a bit, lots of beautiful buildings, easily walked and more of a grid layout than most places we've been. Central Oslo is geographically a little like an amphitheater, with downtown being the stage and the city rising up the hillside behind it. We walked up the hill to the Munch Museum. Edvard Munch is the man that brought you Scream. With a "difficult" childhood and perhaps an unhealthy relationship with women, he produced a fair bit of "tortured artist" work. Not all of it, but a fair bit. That said, it was a great collection and we really have developed a liking for those single artist museums. From the Munch museum, we headed back down the hill to the National Gallery of Art. Again, a very nice little collection. After the huge museums to find a nice collection on one floor of a reasonable sized building is awesome. The museum focused on Norwegian artists and, interestingly, was laid out more chronologically than by genre or period. There was another room of Munch and a really interesting exhibit on the restoration work they had to do on a piece that was filled with holes during the bombing of the city hall that accompanied the attack on the youth camp last summer. After we finished museuming, we took a few hours to do some laundry at the genius Cafe Laundromat, where you can sip a coffee and a beer (cheapest on the menu $10, averaging $15) while cycles spin. We made our way home and watched Michael Phelps do his thing in Norwegian before calling it a good day.
Today's Photos
