Merry time in maritime Oslo

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Merry time in maritime Oslo

Norway is synonymous with fjords and fjords conjure up a vision of Vikings setting out in their long ships to raid England, or Nansen and Amundsen setting out in their ships on their conquests of the north and the south poles respectively or Thor Heyerdahl setting out in his ship on an expedition in Pacific on his frail balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki. (Thor Heyerdahl actually went to South America on an airplane at the start of the expedition.)
I had read his book ‘Kon-Tiki’ about the expedition while in school.

Some of the greatest navigators of the world have been Norwegians.

In the college, I had read Ibsen and he has left a deep impression on my mind. I think, the seeds of my innate Feminism were sown in my mind by his play “A dolls’s house”.
I liked his other writing too. In fact, I am a fan of Ibsen, and yes, he was a Norwegian.

I really like the comic strip ‘Hagar the Horrible”. May be it is childish. So what? In fact, people all over the world retain a core of the childhood within them, which makes them appreciate comics. Circuses, roller coaster rides, Disneyland are enjoyed as much by adults as the children.

I got acquainted with Munch rather late in life when we visited world’s greatest museums, and I liked his painting “Scream”. I felt like screaming when I read that two armed, masked men stole it from the Munch museum in Oslo in a daring, daylight robbery in front of the stunned visitors.

However, I like sculpture more as an art form rather than paintings. I mean, it seems much more difficult to carve a figure in stone than just to paint it, doesn’t it? Our friends Marta and Rick introduced us to Vigeland’s sculptures for the first time in Oslo when they took us to Vigeland Sculpture Park. The park is full of sculptures of men, women and children in all the moods of every day living. Here is one ‘angry boy’ throwing a tantrum, there is a grandpa dangling a baby on his knee, while nearby a group of young girls are putting their heads together and whispering their innermost secrets in each other’s ears. The most fascinating sculpture in the park is his ‘Pillar of life’, which depicts a struggling optimistic society moving upward through co-operation. The synergy of this sculpture is amazing.

I was reminded of the totem poles carved by the Red Indians that we had seen earlier, but there was a vast difference in the depiction. The society represented by the totem poles seems to be stratified in rigid pessimistic classes, the top layers pressing down upon lower ‘down-trodden’ ones. Hence the expression ‘the bottom man on the totem pole’.

I suppose even the imaginations of artists are limited by the norms of the society which has produced them, and unwittingly, their work reflects the selfsame society.

At least, that is how I interpret it. What the artists actually wanted to convey might be something altogether different. That is the trouble with Art, that it is open to interpretation by all and sundry.

Marta and Rick, our hosts in Oslo, were surprised that we even knew the names of Nansen, Amundsen, Thor Heyerdahl, Ibsen, Munch and Vigeland.

“We are tucked away in a corner of Europe, far from the center and we thought that nobody knew anything about us” Marta told us ruefully. She had a reason to believe that. They had entertained many people from far-off places of the globe, and very few people had done their homework before visiting Norway. As a consequence, they were completely at sea when they visited the famous maritime museums of Oslo (pun intended) - The Viking museum, the Kon-Tiki museum and the museum ‘Fram’. (‘Forward’ in Norwegian. That was the name of the ship in which Nansen went to North Pole and a replica of which is kept in the museum.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo#Main_sights

Rick and Marta’s national pride was touched and with great enthusiasm, they took us to all these museums and the Vigeland sculpture Park as well as the famous ski-jump. It was a sunny summer day and the sun sets in these northern latitudes after 10:00 PM during summer. We had plenty of time to discover Oslo’s attractions and have a nice dinner too.

It pays to do your homework before you visit a country.

Next day, we saw the Palace and the City hall from outside where Nobel Prize ceremony is held every year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel

I have always regarded it as an irony of Fate that the invntor of dynamite, and owner of Bofors (a major gun manufacturing company) should institute these Prizes.

You should also read about the “Ig Nobel Prizes”. Highly interesting stuff !!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

Having giving our perfunctory 5 minutes of attention to the noble, Nobel city hall, we devoted more that 20 minutes of it to the tiny tots boarding their schoolbus. A school teacher was carefully ‘minding’ them. They made a very cute picture with their satchels and their waterbags and their school uniform. We were not very surprised to see that about half of the children were not Caucasian, but were distinctly different in features and coloring, either Mongolian or Negroid, because Marta and Rick had already told us that Norway has a lot of immigrants.

Are Rick and Marta descendents of Vikings? (Rick claimed to have descended from a troll. However, we need not believe it.)

In the ancient times, almost all sailors were pirates. Vikings were no exceptions. They raided where they could and traded where they had to. Physically, Rick and Marta answered the description of Vikings. They were both tall, blonde and had an athletic build, but they were also a very sophisticated, urbane, mild-mannered couple. I could not picture Rick plundering English castles even when I imagined him with a beard and a horned Viking helmet on his head.

We bought three ships (a 6” X 4” model of a Viking ship, a model of Kon-Tiki raft, and a model of Ra-II, a papyrus boat in which Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Morocco to central America ) and triumphantly brought them back to Mumbai.

Now that we have got a navy of our own, we are seriously thinking of going into the piracy business in a big way. It rather appeals to our baser instincts. Even as children, while playing ‘cops and robbers’, we always wanted to be robbers, not the cops.

After all, the blogs are not bringing any money in to us and we have to support ourselves by some other means of livelihood.

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Photos

RaII
Papyrus boat RaII

KonTiki
Balsawood raft Kon-Tiki

Vikingship
Viking Ship

EasterIslandStatue
Easter Island Statue

Framodel
Model of ship 'Fram'

Pillar
Pillar of Life in Vigeland Park

Angryboy
'The Angry Boy' in Vigeland Park

SkiJump
The Ski Jump, Oslo