Our trip today
Paul told me that during EuroBSD Conference in 2019 there was the ‘main’ hotel Scandic Lillehammer, which was also the conference venue, and then there was a secondary hotel for those on a somewhat lower budget, a few hundred meters due North, called Birkebeineren. Although the room here is pretty good, we did notice that there’s a few highschool and/or sporting clubs who dropped their kids in this hotel. Kids are annoying in general, but these kids were lollygagging and making noise until 2am in the morning and from 6am in the morning. We are treated to lots of screaming and yelling and overal teenage dumb-assery. Somehow I sleep reasonably well, not quite sure if Paul feels the same.
Well, some nights are better than others, of course. But one thing really is good: we have a great breakfast in the hotel - it’s kind of nice to have a few mornings in an AirBnB (more cozy atmosphere, less hassle), but it’s also really nice to have a fully catered meal with boiled eggs, ham, brie, fresh fruit, and filterbrew coffee.
After breakfast we take off, and the satnav says it’s only 185km and 2hrs of driving, and the car still has plenty of charge. Underway, I notice that there’s also a town called Hamar which seems like the big-brother town of Lillehammer. We decide to make a small detour there, but after parking at the harbor and walking up to the main station (which is also not photogenic), we take a look at the local realestate here, and it’s surprisingly affordable compared to Zurich.
Then, 90 minutes later and on an E6 motorway where we’re allowed to go a whopping 110km/h, we rock up to Oslo. The route here brings us over E18 which is a huge tunnel under the city (and under the waterline, too), and we pop out of the tunnel just along the Color Line docks at 11:41am. The Color Magic is docked and ready to go, and it’s clearly an “entertainment” ferry. We’ll go check it out tomorrow, as we’re not on this boat today, so we wave at it and continue to the hotel. The checkin is less smooth, we have go to reception three times, the parking garage has a faulty parking meter, and they gave us a double room, not a twin. It’s all quickly sorted, and the ladies at checkin are super friendly.
After the belabored hotel checkin, we go for some lunch. I had chosen our hotel to be in the old city center, just across Aker Brygge and the Akershus Festing, so there’s plenty of things to see and do here. Our lunch is at Shufl and we treat ourselves to a small burger with fries. The bun of the hamburger is black, because they’ve infused the dough with squid ink. An interesting concept, we agree. Marina informs me on Signal that squid ink may taste fine, but the sound of it being in my hambuger bun is gross.
After lunch we have decided that we’re not interested in walking the city. I do note that it’s 13:48 and in about 12 minutes today’s ferry will leave for Kiel, and we want to check it out. Seeing large ships like this manouvre through the harbor is kind of cool. So we walk over the Strandholmen, some waterside building project, and it turns out to be a twisty fjord-esque walk. We then bee-line it over the dock just to get stuck behind a cargo building with a closed fence. But, although we’re 5 minutes late, so is the captain of the vessel (clearly not a Swiss captain!) so we manage to see it leave. Then I have a “fantastic” Pim-idea™ as I see a bunch of scooters from Tier and Bolt. To Paul, that sounds like just the right amount of fun, and if we just hop on these guys and scoot over to the far side of the harbor, we can see the boat back out and leave the harbor. Dope!
Off we scoot, but scooting while navigating with a phone is not my forté, so we see fields, dirt roads, some buildings and some more roads, at some point I’m not even sure we’re in Norway anymore. Eventually we see a sign Huk Strand. We scoot there as fast as these little 20km/h scooters will let us, to find that 5.2km and 25 minutes later, that the park is geofenced and scooters turn themselves off there. Parked the scooter, and ran to the beach, only to see the boat as a sub-pixel image waaaay out in the water. So here’s a picture of the Royal Palace instead. ☝️☝️☝️
We’re having a lot of fun on the scooters though. We gently manouvre them out of the geofence and hop back on, scoot over to the Royal Palace and gardens, and see a bunch of really nice views. The palace itself is grandiose, the gardens have a set of sculptures in them, designed by and made for kids. I really like Munnben (the mouth with feet, see below), and Paul prefers Ansiktsløs mann (a guy without a face but with a green sock puppet).
I really need to go to the bathroom at this point, and this is no longer a national park where trees are begging to be watered, so we scoot to our hotel. There, I notice that Google has an office right across the street so we should really check it out! It’d be nice to drink a bottled water on the house but alas, the door doesn’t accept my badge and on an internal website I read it’s open Mon-Fri only, I don’t want to bother them to be an office-tourist.
As we walk onto the city hall Rådhusplass, we see a street food and cultural exchange, but behind that still, we hear thumping music. As we walk up the hill to the Kontraskjæret park, it turns out, it’s Oslo Pride! We hang out with the community a little bit and listen to a speech (in Norwegian, we could only understand a few words), and some music by a guy called Big Daddy Karsten, who crushes it. What we find particularly fun is to see the deaf mimes who are miming the rap and music in a most entertaining way. It was really fun to watch :)
From here, we walk up the hill to the old Akershus Fortress, which has a nice view of the marina below, an old courtyard (which, for once, we visit just 5min before closing time rather than after it’s already locked up for the night), we see the fortress, its row of canons, some sculptures – the one that most impresses me is called Glory Glory with Crutches, which is a one-legged woman carrying all sorts of bags on her back and shoulders, on two improvised crutches. Her face is non-discriminate (so it could have been any of us), but her burden is both physical and mental. Laura Ford did a fantastic job on this statue.
On the way down from the fortress to street-level, I quickly grab a geocache in the fortress wall. It’s good to try to keep up the tempo and get one each day (except when we’re hiking), I’ve logged more geocaches this last two weeks than I have in the several months before. I should geocache more.
We return to the hotel and I continue our scouting for a Japanese place. I’ve been craving a nice Noodle-soup for a while now, and while Paul is happy eating Sushi (et al), and he claims he likes the taste of noodle soup, he does not enjoy the splatter of noodle soup. I have less hygienic requirements, and am in principle happy splattering noodle-juice everywhere. I find a place called Japanese Dining Sato and we (of course) scoot over there, why walk if you’ve already proven you can do that with a 28km Besseggen hike?! And once we arrive, we’re pretty sure this place is classy, because it’s full of Japanese folks eating Nabeyaki and Sushi.
I finally get to slurp my noodles! And they are super tasty. As we decide what to eat ‘for realz’, we nom on some Gyoza, Wakame and Edamame. Paul orders himself a Deluxe Sushi/Sashimi plate (which is very deluxe) and I order my craving: A Sashimi Combo and a Nikomi Udon. This is among the best Udon I’ve ever had. Super tasty broth with lots of veggies, several different types of mushrooms, a scampi, thinly sliced beef, and (not too much a fan ..) squid rings. But, I nom it all, and it’s delicious.
We make our way to the hotel, pay the parking fee for the night, and sign off. Tomorrow morning we’ll have breakfast, charge the car here in Oslo city (the charger is close by to the harbor), make our way to the Color Line docks at noon, in time for our departure at 14:00, at least we know what the ship looks like, and then we’re off to Kiel in Germany.
