Seagulls and Marching Bands
I had forgotten how close-by the hotel was. I walked off to a cluster of obvious taxis and attempted to hire one. It took several tries, as every driver was excited to let me know how close my hotel was. Convenient for me, but not really workable for my father. Duolingo had not prepared me for explaining why I needed a cab to move us 100 meters. Eventually I broke through and convinced someone to take my money and we got to the hotel. The room was nice enough, though I could have done without the forehead-level metal bar that seemed to be holding the shower doors together. When we arrived the room was full of the distant echoes of political protest chants from what I would later discover was one of several small school marching bands that seemed to have swarmed the town for the day.
Kristiansand had only one major landmark my father was worried about finding, and unfortunately (and he already knew this) it had some time ago fallen to progress. A small collection of houses once stood on a street called “Frisk Jensens Gate” (“Gate” pronounced “gah-teh”). My great grandfather (whom I had never met) Nils Olsen (later Nils Frevold) had lived in this place before moving to America. I took some photographs and walked around a bit of the surrounding area, finding a hiking trail called Baneheia. I went down the path a bit and found a rocky hill with an old bench sitting on top of it. I decided to go up and see if any exciting things would be revealed from that higher perspective.
I could see the apartment building from there, and a bit of the cityscape, but not much else other than a nice park. Did my ancestors trod this same hill at some point? I’ll never know for sure. I half expected I should feel some primal urge to scream into the aether to echo in the same spaces of some unknown viking ancestor, but the reality was far more calm. There’s something oddly comforting about the thought that some distant part of my family might have walked over these same rocks.
I wandered around a bit more, finding this to very much be a walking-person’s sort of town. I took a bunch of pictures along the way and then went back to the hotel. We eventually got dinner and slept, but I was awoken around 4am by the chaotic sounds of every seagull on the planet. Apparently that one jerk bird in Voss had told his friends and now they were here for revenge. That’s definitely what happened.
Later in the morning I took another walk around, discovering on Google Maps that the street went on a good deal farther than I expected. Traversing the whole length of the named street, the oldest thing I found was a probably 50~70 year old cluster of homes, but nothing that looked like it was still standing for the last 135 years. I took some photos anyway, eventually reaching the end of the line: the back of some manner of businessy looking building with a collection of boulders that appeared to be a chunk of hiking trail preserved rather than being cleared out for more parking. Progress had consumed the whole rest of the street.
I continued on, finding a variety of odd things to document. I’ll take this spot to grumble about crosswalks. There’s a surprising amount of waiting if you want to get across the street. Usually you’ll see a signal box of some kind. They’re all shaped like tall boxes, and while they seem to have some kind of thought put into them, such as the inclusion of a tactile illustration of the crosswalk for seeing-impaired folks, the button placement is completely inconsistent from town to town, and even from street to street. I an a group of others were baffled when the cycle just skipped us twice, even though we had prodded at the thing in every way possible.
After asking our taxi to the station to make a brief detour just to poke around the area a bit, we went to the station for our next layover: 3 hours in a train station that didn’t have much, bit it did have couches. Our train to Oslo was marked as being canceled past a place called Kongsberg, ensuring that not a single train ride would happen for us on this trip without incident of some kind. It would get us there most of the way, at least, after which a bus would get us the rest of the way.
A Walk in the Park, Among Other Things
The train-to-bus transfer had been complicated by my attempt at good planning. The app I had purchased the train tickets through had, some time earlier, warned me that the train would be disrupted and offered me an ultimatum, demanding I rebook the ride stopping in the last available station and then booking a bus for the rest of the trip. That wasn’t apparently the normal way of doing things. For the locals, they just shuffle you onto a bus to complete the trip, but whatever system the app was using didn’t care to tell me about it. We managed to get around to the other end of the transfer station to get on our bus and finally arrived in Oslo fairly late in the evening.
While going through that attempt at good planning, I had thought to book the bougiest place last, assuming we would be fairly worn down from the rest of the journey. I had not anticipated being quite as correct as I was. We stayed at the Clarion Hub, which felt sort of ridiculous, all told, but I was thankful for the comically large beds and access to good food. Once again, we came in at the wire for getting anything to eat, scarfing down what they had on offer before getting to sleep. The next day we had our boat tour and followed it up with a taxi tour of the area, the driver taking us past the Royal Palace, Parliament (appaerently also called “Stortinget”), and a few other landmarks.
Once that was done, I set off on my own a bit, naturally checking out the local edition of the same game store chain that I had found in Bergen. Apart from the odd store here and there selling board games, Outland appears to be the only game in town for this kind of stuff, and the Oslo location was packed with tabletop gaming and weeaboo junk. Naturaly I had to go looking to see how the stock of Final Fantasy Magic cards were in this location, and found a slew of starter kits I didn’t need. Amusingly my ear for Norwegian was good enough to overhear a customer asking the woman at the counter about the availability of the commander decks, lamenting how difficult they were to get hold of. Alas, outside of what little sealed product had already been cracked open, the whole supply for the country seemed tapped.
I gawked at things a bit, but finally moved on to do some more traditional sightseeing. I walked to the Royal Palace, getting more time to stop and aim the camera at some locations we had driven by on our taxi tour. The city was full of people enjoying the fleeting summer sun. The palace is surrounded in a public park full of people lounging around. And statues. All over the city. Apparently when you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to get health care, you start making statues.
Seriously. Statues are everywhere in this country, and even just in Oslo there were too many to list here, though there seem to be efforts elsewhere on the Internet to catalog everything in many cities. The palace park includes a whole section for statues based on childrens’ drawings, which I thought was particularly good.
Our journey back through airports and their various hurdles were thankfully uneventful. At the very last moment we finally got ourselves some brown cheese and waffles, the apparent staple touristy food for the country.
It turned out that, by accident, the wooden trolls I purchased in Bergen were made by the same company that had made the one my father had been keeping since the 1950s. Henning Engelsen and his company had been carving these things long ago and I happened upon what was apparently the only outlet selling them in Bergen. Maybe I just have an eye for quality, but they certainly stood out among the hoard of cheaper-looking alternatives. So now, after 70 years, the old king finally has a partner.
James Gets Through 