Oslo Really Is EXPENSIVE

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Oslo Really Is Expensive

Everywhere we’ve been in the last few weeks we’ve heard the same thing when we mentioned our upcoming trip to Norway, “Norway is really expensive!!” The guys who fitted my new backpack in Copenhagen recommended renting a car in Sweden because, “it’s twice as expensive in Norway.” The girl behind the hotel check out desk in Helsinki said, “…even a beer is really expensive in Oslo.”

By time we actually arrived here I was completely freaked out that everything would be immensely expensive. I even had talked to Kel about it because I figured that some of the places we’d stayed must have measured up. How expensive can it be in comparison with the richness of Dubai??

Well, the reality is that Norway is expensive. To give some idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll use guide books as a reference point. We recently picked up a copy of an English version of the Lonely Planet for Eastern Europe. The price for this book in Helsinki was about US $32 which is about $4 dollars more expensive than it would have been in the US. While that is a considerable markup, one has to take into account that all of these Scandinavian countries have a 25% tax, so $4 makes at least a little more sense. Then we take a second to look at the same book in down town Oslo. Here the book cost US $54, OUCH!!

I tried to do some research to explain why Norway was so expensive and came up with almost nothing. What I did come up with is pretty interesting though. Norway has one of the highest GDPs of any country in the world, higher than Switzerland, the US and England. A large reason behind this high GDP is money that is made from oil which comes from the North Atlantic. All of the money the government gains from oil is put into a fund for the citizens of Norway which is presently the best funded retirement account in the world. All of this adds up to a country full of very happy people. Based on a fairly recent UN survey, Norwegians are happier with their native country than any other people in the world. This happiness and strong sense of patriotism plus the aforementioned strong economics all add up to the reason why Norway has thus far voted to remain independent from the EU, a choice unlike any other Scandinavian country.

Enough background on to our time in Oslo. Our plane trip from Helsinki was uneventful other than the fact that we flew on the smallest jet aircraft I think I’ve ever flown on. No matter how small, it’s always better to fly a jet than a prop plane. We caught a bus into Oslo because cabs are expensive here, noticing a theme yet?

Oslo is a pretty small city for a capital city and has very few tall buildings. For such a rich country, they really have a small, almost quaint, capital. Thankfully this meant that the walk from the bus stop was a short one. We checked in and decided to get out and see a bit of the town before dinner.

Kel had read about a photographic exhibition at a nearby museum. Thanks to our recent interest in photography we’ve found ourselves more interested in other people’s photographs. After a walk of about a mile we found the small out of the way museum in the Vika section of town and got a chance to enjoy the works of Sally Mann. We found it more than a bit ironic that we were thousands of miles from home and enjoying the work of a professional photographer from Lexington, Virginia (about three hours drive from our home). Her work, while amazingly good, is very controversial because it involves naked pictures of her children. While the work was amazing in its quality and innovativeness, it made us a bit uncomfortable. But, unlike when they were originally done in the mid to late 80’s, time has eased the impact of the work a bit. Somehow it is a bit more comfortable to seeing edgy pictures of naked children knowing that they are now adults who are your age or older. It was still strange, but much less so.

We grabbed dinner on our way back to the hotel. There is a huge eating area located around the main part of Oslo’s harbor. The people watching was great and Kel always enjoys being outside near water. Dinner came to close to $100 dollars for a meal that was merely so-so. In continuing with our blog’s theme, Norway is expensive!!

Our Only Day in Oslo and the Weather Was Amazing

Thanks to our earlier rain in Scandinavia, I always take a moment to say thanks for beautiful weather when we get it. The weather was a bit cold and cloudy when the day started but by 1pm the clouds broke and the sun came out to play. It was an overall splendid day!!

After our free (read free here as included with our room) breakfast in the hotel we headed down to the harbor to catch a ferry across the fjord on which Oslo is built. We decided to start the day with the open air folk museum. Similar to Skansen which we visited in Sweden, this museum is dedicated to buildings from antiquity and cultural exhibits about the people and customs of Norway’s people.

Since we were pressed for time we rushed through the folk museum pretty fast. The museum itself is much better laid out than Skansen. While Skansen feels like it was built for children and put together in a piece-meal fashion, this museum feels very continuous, contiguous and well thought out. We really enjoyed a lot of the old buildings and actually got a bit involved in this museum. I spent some time making a fool of myself on stilts while Kel got to dance in a folk dance. We rounded off the museum with one of Kel’s favorite activities, a carriage ride. For a mere pittance we rode around the park and got to see more of the park in a much quicker fashion than we could have otherwise.

With the folk museum behind us, we took the twenty minute walk to the maritime museum. We decided to skip the Viking Ship museums because neither of us have much interest in Viking ships. (I find Viking history more interesting than Viking artifacts.) Our interest in the maritime museum was due to a decent movie that is showed twice an hour. This somewhat queasy-inducing film of a helicopter flight over beautiful Norwegian towns and sights was definitely worth the admission to the museum. On top of the movie we also enjoyed the model ships and as the pictures show, Kel enjoyed clowning around with the figureheads from the front of some of the old ships.

Since we were hungry, we stopped and got a, you guessed it, expensive lunch (hot dogs and fries, who knew they could be uncheap?) before heading by bus to the exact other side of town. Our destination this time was Frogner Park. This huge park just outside of the main section of downtown contains some of the greatest work by Norway’s greatest sculptor, Gustav Vigeland. In 1921 Vigeland made a deal with the city of Oslo to design the park and all of the sculptures in it in return for a studio and state support. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

He spent the next twenty years, until his death, building the park and all its statues. Throughout the park are tons of amazing bronze statues, all studies of the human form. The 600 statues throughout the park are all of naked individuals and groups which are all very accurate and very, very evocative. There isn’t one statue that you look at in the park that doesn’t immediately convey an emotion. The final, and grandest, statue is the 50 foot tall tower which is made to appear like bodies stacked on top of each other. The struggle of some to reach the top while the peril of others who appear to be on their way down is incredibly captivating.

We spent a good amount of time in the park because it is incredibly interesting. But, after a while, we had to move on and head back towards downtown. This time we caught a tram to get back towards our hotel. The tram rounded out our day’s transportation methods: one boat, two busses and a tram. Isn’t public transportation great!

Once back in the city we pretty much went straight back to the hotel in order to drop our stuff to head back out for dinner. Dinner was, once again, not that great and very expensive. It seems that across all of Scandinavia, the food in Norway is the worst. This is based on limited experience and an unwillingness to spend gobs of money on dinner, but that’s our impression. If you have the money I’m sure you could find some good food. For the average budget, don’t expect to find much that’s tasty.

After dinner we returned to the hotel for an early evening. Tomorrow starts our trip into the Norwegian fjords. Unfortunately this tour starts at the crack of dawn, so we must get some rest.

Hope you are all doing great back home! Thanks for reading!

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Photos

My Beautiful Wife
Oh, That's Oslo Blurred in the Background.

Gustav Vigeland
Sculptor from Frogner Park

Statues from Frogner Park
This is the famous Sinnataggen, the hot headed little boy. Rumor has it that Vigeland stole candy from this child to get this reaction.

Statues from Frogner Park
And love goes round and round...

Comments

[albert]

oslo really is expensive
Hello,there I can't realize that Oslo is expensive but Paris and London are very expensive cities too,for example in Paris you can pay your coffee up to 5 € about 6 or 7$!In oslo the city is clean but in paris it's dirty for example! Albert