Off to Oslo

If you had told me years ago that my mom, sister and I would be holidaying together in Scandinavia one day, I would have scratched my head and wondered how the heck that would ever happen. But life is funny—and awesome—that way. 

One of the biggest perks my sister got from her assignment in Oslo by her Norwegian telco employers was a free business class ticket for my mom. Getting my mom to overcome her fear of flying and finally agree to fly to Europe was a battle and a half, but the free ticket definitely sweetened the deal. 

The last time my mom visited both of us was when we were still living in Singapore and my sister in KL. My sister accompanied Mom on the flight to Singapore and spent the weekend there, establishing a new sort of family tradition we now call "the handover." So on my mom's last weekend in Oslo, Marlon and I  decided to fly up and do the handover there. 

Oslo in May felt to me like Amsterdam in March: cold and windy. Fortunately, our first day there was gorgeous. We went out to the harbor, and it felt like the city was doing its best to welcome us by mustering up some blue skies and sunshine. Still, the breeze was stiff and chilly and I had to get used to having different parts of my body be prickling with cold and sweating profusely at the same time.

The Oslo harbor has some of the most coveted residential real estate in the city, and it's easy to see why. 

It felt like what Robertson Quay in Singapore aspires to, or maybe even a Serendra or Bonifacio High Street with the sea.

It's so clean-lined and modern, it feels kind of like an architectural rendering or mockup of a future development. 

We waited at the ferry terminal while my sister went to pick up our Constitution Day parade tickets at the Radhuset, or City Hall.

Our plan for the day was to hop on a båt (ferry) to Bygdøy, one of the islands within Oslo's harbor, to see the Viking Ship Museum and Folkemuseum. While waiting for the ferry, my sister taught us how to pronounce the special letters in the Norwegian alphabet. For example, "å" sounds like "wa", so båt is pronounced "bwat." Alexander Skarsgård is "Alexander Skarsgward." Very Pinoy swardspeak! I like!

The ferry to Bygdøy took just around 10 minutes. From the dock, we walked another 10 minutes to the Vikingskiphuset, or Viking Ship Museum. In Dutch, it would read Vikings Chicken House—kip is chicken!

I went through a phase when I was completely obsessed with Greek mythology. One of the books I read was Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which combined both Greek and Norse mythology in one volume. It was easy to get into Norse mythology from there. So I've always been fascinated with the Vikings. In my boy-crazy adolescent years I used to picture them as hot blond conquerors. Oh, how hormones can distort history.

So the Viking Museum pretty much blew my mind. It contains four (mostly recreated) Viking ships excavated from burial mounds in Norway. Vikings were buried with their ships and possessions for the journey into the afterworld, revealing the dramatic "burial at sea with flaming ship" to be a Hollywood trope. This graceful ship was buried with a Viking queen, with all her worldly goods: everything from jewelry to weapons to cooking tools to clothes to four of these massive, intricately carved wooden carts. Parang SM lang: we've got it all for you!

The scale and power of these ships are truly impressive, revealing the might and skill of a supposedly primitive civilization. You sail, sometimes row, for hundreds of miles across the world's coldest seas, subsist on dried scraps of meat (basically, tapa) without a roof over your head, exposed to the harshness of the elements. Then when you get there you have to do battle, conquer bloody everyone and sack bloody everything. That can't have been easy.

After the Viking Ship Museum, we walked to the Norse Folkemuseum, a sprawling open-air conservation area that features recreated buildings from different regions and periods in Norway's history. What is Nayong Pilipino?

I keed, I keed. This is the oldest open-air museum in the world, so we can safely assume Nayong Pilipino ang nanggaya. I thoroughly enjoyed wandering through this museum, which had everything from houses to schoolhouses.

I love the clean lines and unadorned simplicity of their architecture. And I was delighted to learn that the Scandinavians were into roof gardens long before being green was chic.

Nothing looks touristy or kitschy. Buildings are recreated with careful attention to detail. 

Some, like the Stave Church from 1881, were bought, disassembled and rebuilt here piece by piece. 

We arrived just before closing time, so we were only able to catch a fleeting glimpse of the museum hosts in their traditional folk costume. 

One thing I liked that we rarely get to do was take a nice family portrait. Our last one was during our New Year's trip to Bohol, and before that, at my wedding. Luckily Marlon was there to play photographer.

The four of us took the bus back to the harbor for dinner at Solsiden, one of Oslo's best seafood restaurants, where we discussed... my sister's future. Haha.

She'd warned me that eating out in Oslo is expensive, but I didn't realize how expensive until we actually ate out. Marlon and I have dropped our fair share of cash on meals, but masakit talaga sa wallet ito. We had a similar meal at Restaurant Red here in Amsterdam, and the value for money there was significantly better. With the exception of two lunches, we had all the rest of our meals at my sister's apartment after this one. At least this particular dinner was worth it. The seafood was indeed excellent.

Anyone who would have looked over at our table would have laughed to see four Filipinos working furiously to scrape every last speck of meat from those lobsters. Thank goodness we come from a seafood-eating culture na marunong maghimay at magsaid. Ang mahal kasi eh!