Page 5 of 10
Oslo, Norway
Trap door, trap door, through the ceiling and the floor
My time in Oslo was short, it was more time than I spent in Metz but half as much time as I spent in Bergen. And there's a lot more to see and do in Oslo. Even if I was there for a whole week, I'd probably still complain about not having enough time. But I had been to Oslo before, so for this trip I tried to concentrate on places in Oslo that I had not yet seen, and that all starts with the Opera House.
Opened in 2008 and designed by local guys Snohetta, the Opera House is located on the water at the very end of the Oslofjord and as the anchor of a newly developed area of downtown. All of that may be interesting enough, but that's not what makes the Opera House special. What Snohetta did was to create a roof that slopes and folds and turns and is entirely walkable. It's a wonderful urban experience, even as the building waits for the city to catch up around it. And actually walking the ramps at the Opera House is far more fun than it really should be. Truthfully the view isn't all that much better from the top of the folded roof than from the shoreline, although along the way you do get the chance to stick your face up against the glass to get a birds eye view of the lobby, through all of the reflections of the reflections.
Even in the short time that I had in Oslo, I visited and walked the roof of the Opera House twice, once during the clear morning and once during a cloudier afternoon. Luckily there was no rain or ice, since all those smooth stone, railing free ramps with occasional trip hazard strips just don't seem all that safe, even in perfectly dry conditions.
The last time that I was in Oslo might have been before the Opera House but it wasn't before this building. This is Oslo City Hall, designed in 1950 by a bunch of Norwegians that you probably never heard of (Arnstein Arneburg and Magnus Poulsson). It features an amazing central hall with all sorts of decorations and awesome socialist murals, and once a year the Nobel Prize people take over and hand out the peace prize in this very room. However if you win one of the other prizes in physics, medicine or literature and you fly to Oslo, you're out of luck- those prizes get handed out in Sweden.
This is Holmenkollenbakken, a ski jump in the Oslo suburbs, reachable by a long ride on the Oslo Metro followed by a long walk up a very steep hill. When you finally get there, you'll find this view, halfway in the hill with an even steeper hill to look up to.
The ski jump at Holmenkollen is famous, at least to ski jumpers. It's been here since the 1890s, although it's been rebuilt a few times since then (nineteen times to be exact). The ski jump has a museum at its base and a really slow angled elevator that takes you up to the top to enjoy views just like this one, which suggest a much, much faster way to get down to the bottom of the hill.
