Oslo is amazing- absolutely beautiful and we picked a great time to get there. The Christmas Market was in full swing and the country side was covered in a fresh dusting of snow. In fact, it snowed most of the time we were there. It was also dark almost the entire time we were there. Our plane landed around 2:30pm and the sun was already setting. By the time we got our bags and on the train to the city, it was dark- and it was only about 3pm.
Even the airport was beautiful, it felt like being in a giant, airy ski lodge. While we waited for our luggage we watched drug dogs being trained. There were several dogs who each took a turn walking up and down a row of people, sniffing them and trying to figure out who had the drugs. When they correctly picked the lady with the drugs, they got to play with a tennis ball. They all took a turn, sniffing and correctly identifying the lady with the drugs… until the last one. He definitely cheated and watched the other dogs because he ran right to the lady with the drugs when it was his turn.
Oslo has a great train system from the airport to the main city center, a 70km distance. For a mere $20 there is a high speed train that took us right from the airport to the city center train station, passing the snow covered country side, oh man it was so beautiful. The snow was clinging to the branches of the trees, it looked like a Christmas card. We walked from the train station to our hotel along winding streets with a curiously little amount of traffic. We did see a bunch of parking for electric cars, complete with plug ins!
Oslo central train station
Our hotel was a very basic room, but it did come with one amazing luxury: heated floors in the bathroom. Oh man, that was so luxurious!!
There was one thing that made Oslo less than perfect, and that was the prices. They were absolutely outrageous! We went out to get some dinner and found several places that looked good, but we ended up blowing them off because of the prices. Let me cite an example: we found a cute little pub type restaurant where a hamburger and fries cost $25. That is not an exaggeration, that was the actual price. We ended up a deli where for a mere $17 we got a pizza roll and a calzone, no drinks. We literally couldn’t afford ourselves.
Next up was a stop at a Christmas market in the center of town. Not quite as big as the ones in Berlin it was still very cool. There were a lot more wool sweaters, mittens and slippers here- and for good reason, it was really cold and misting. We did decide to splurge on a few novelty (well, novelty for us) food items- we split a waffle covered in chocolate and almonds (so delish!) and, because we had never had one before, a moose and wild boar bratwurst which topped the “weirdest foods we have ever eaten” list for about 5 minutes. Then we walked past a stall where we tried samples of Smoked Whale. And smoked whale rocketed to the top of the list leaving something as mundane as a moose bratwurst in a very distant second. I would definitely recommend the moose and wild boar bratwurst which was phenomenal but the smoked whale I wouldn’t recommend- it had a very strong, very off putting flavor (at least I thought so, Nick liked it).
Because it was absolutely freezing and drizzling a bit (and we couldn’t afford anything else) we called it a night early. We stopped by the grocery store for some yogurt for breakfast and went back to our room.
The next morning we woke up (late- our alarm didn’t go off and even when it’s light here, it’s still pretty gray and dark) ate our yogurt and walked back to the main train station where we stopped by 7-11 to get a reasonably priced lunch of pizza slices for a mere $5! Hopped on our train to the airport and 15 minutes and 70km later we were back at the airport. The airport itself deserves a post, it is so beautiful and so efficient. We flew Norwegian Air. To check in we went to one of the many kiosks, scanned our credit cards and it not only printed our boarding passes, it also printed our luggage ticket! We strapped our luggage ticket to our bag and took it to the bag drop off. At bag drop off, we scanned the luggage tag with a little scanner gun and the conveyor belt started up, we tossed the bag onto it and sent our bag on its way. It was pretty fun, my only regret is that Nick hogged the luggage ticket scanning gun. But it was pretty awesome and, even better, our bag showed up in Helsinki!!
It was a short but sweet trip to Oslo and we will definitely be back again, someday!!
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