Norge og forældre!

My parents are the best, really.  No sooner did Andy return to Cambridge than Mum and Dad appeared on our doorstep, bearing Luna Bars and some abnormally large birthday cards from the sisters!  I had class for much of Friday, when they got in, but we spent the afternoon catching up over salads (no croutons, please) before catching an evening flight to Oslo.

Norway, or at least its capital, is pretty awesome.  I don't think it's quite as low-key as Copenhagen-- it reminded me of a scaled-down Brussels, for some reason--but we were definitely in Scandinavia and thus it was definitely beautiful.  Saturday began with a walk through the Vigelund Sculpture Garden, which provoked important questions like, "How did one man make so many incredible statues?"  "Do babies really grow on trees?"  and "Why aren't my sisters here to pose in front of the gate with three female silhouettes?"  (Dad has pictures of my attempt to do this solo; tell him to email them to me so I can post them!)

After the sculptures, we attended the Norwegian Changing of the Guard.  The palace, like Amelianborg here, has no fences, just a few guards in slightly ridiculous period costumes.  I never quite figured out which guards were switch with which, but it didn't really matter-- we were treated to a show of very straight marching and standing (and the guards' penguin waddle to maintain their lines) by guys with oversized green epaulets and major hat-feather action going on.

After lunch, we made our way to the Münch Museum.  For the record, it does not house a copy of The Scream, which was a bit disappointing, but it does have numerous other lovely works and a real lithograph machine.  It also has a great little café with tables perfect for a very tired and vaguely sick dad and daughter to nap for a solid hour.  Good times.  We did dinner at a funky place with excellent salads and less excellent chai near the university and were planning to call it an early night until we turned on the TV.  Bored of an endless BBC segment on the horrors of bottled water, we stumbled onto a mostly-English documentary on Chernobyl (Saturday was the 22nd anniversary of the disaster), followed by the movie The Mexican, which among other things answers the question of what happens when you put Julia Roberts, James Gandolfini, and Michael Cerveris in the same car.

Sunday morning, we wandered to the waterfront and caught a ferry across a very foggy fjord to the Kon-Tiki Museum, which celebrates the achievements of Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian best known for sailing papyrus and reed boats very long distances to prove that early people could have done it, too.  It was a fun museum, with a couple of the original boats, lots of memorable information, a walk-through cave, and a very friendly land-shark wandering about.  We followed this with a visit to Oslo's Viking ship museum, which, unlike Roskilde's, did some reconstruction work (and also has much more complete findings).  So two of the three ships had sides and decorations and curlicued hulls, and the back section had a ton of artifacts, including three gorgeously intricate sleds and some thousand-year-old textiles.  Apparently Vikings, like Egyptians, believed that after death you could, in fact, take it with you.

We enjoyed a delicious Passover-breaking lunch at the Nobel Peace Prize Museum's café.  (The goat cheese-on-French-bread salad was too good to resist.)  The museum itself was kind of amazing, too.  A little unnecessarily high-tech, but fun to be sure.  How can a museum be unnecessarily high-tech, you ask?  Try a fiber-optic garden with motion-sensitive displays on all the prize-winners (including Al Gore and the IPCC), followed by a projected, touch-operated 'storybook' on Alfred Nobel, followed by digital wallpaper that sorts and details all the prize-winners' work and the Nobel Committee and awards process.  Nifty gift shop, too!

We headed back to the airport after the Nobel museum, lingered over more chai and Taunte Bev's Passover granola (which is amazing even when it's not Passover), and stopped to demonstrate proper downhill luggage trolley riding technique to an amused Dad and a slightly skeptical Mum.  Then it was back to Copenhagen, which Mum, who studied on DIS in the spring of 1978, now refers to as "our city."