After depositing our luggage at Oslo Sentrastasjon we went to check out the very cool (iceberg cool) opera house, after which we split up. It’s very much quieter today along Karl Johans Gate but there are still quite a few people out enjoying this beautiful weather. I wish I was wearing shorts or a dress or something, this sun is great.
The others went to the harbour to take the ferry to the half island of museums and I went stragitht to the Nasjonal Museet (Kunst). I already wrote about seeing Edvart Munch’s Scream but turning around (from a Munch self portrait in a separate impressionist(?) room) and seeing Vincent Van Gogh’s self portrait was really was chilling. I don’t know what it is. Hopefully it’s not just because of a premenstrual screening of an episode of Doctor Who themed for last year’s Musee D’orsay exhibit (if I ever go to Paris I think that’s the gallery I want to see more than the Louvre). I think I’ve seen the Scream before though… perhaps as a child if/when it visited the AGO. I’ll have to ask my mom. Otherwise I must have done a school project on it or something, maybe.
I am now camped out at a cafe across the street. These galleries are all surprisingly small (housed in older buildings likely erected for different purposes). I also visited the design museum (kulturindustrie/applied arts) which had a very cool exhibit on a century of Scandinavian desgin. Everything else was not curated in a particularly interesting fashion, unfortunately. The fashion section was like that of the permanent collection at the V&A in London.
Bergen had fewer than a quarter million residents and Chloe said that Oslo has a population of just about six hundred thousand. They’re small for cities (although everything is relatively small after a semester in Beijing) but they’re still such happening places!). Je les aime beaucoup. Au futur il faut que je retourner. (Je faudrais retourner?)
Chloe was born in Oslo but her mother is a pied-noir and they speak French at home. Chloe went to French school in the embassy quarter and her mother still teachers there. Their living room was full of gifts from students, family photos and keepsakes, and souvenirs from travels all over. Je suis trop jalouse. Her mother was super warm and French and wonderful but not like the French with their upturned noses whom she also profiled. She went out to meet friends but us young folk were so exhausted that we all just went home to sleep. We’ve yet to have any nights out in Scandinavia. All of our days are long, though I’m not exactly sure what they are full with. We’ve planned to go out on several occasions but every time we fail.
I told them I’d wait at the cafe until 4:10 at the latest. Otherwise we meet at half past in the train station. There were blankets on our fjord tour, also laid on chairs at resto terraces in Bergen and Malmo. There is a stack of folded blankets here too [and this is where I got cut off by Michaela and Srishti on either side of me and Jose and Chloe in the window staring at me] — I think Scandinavians must make good use of terrace season.
