Oslo, den Viking hordeless adventure!

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So we totally were down to the wire with printing, packing and making our way to the airport. We got a great deal on a flight to Europe via Norwegian air and their dreamy dreamliner, seriously it's a nice ass plane. Check in was a breeze, but international terminal one at JFK is abysmal. The food options are a fucking joke: the Chinese place Chop X (that X is made from chopsticks. Shakes my head) is literally cup o' noodles. Seriously? Anyhoo, get your food BEFORE you get there or have enough time to eat in a different terminal. Moving on, the plane is beautiful! It was also delayed over an hour and Norwegian Air takes economy international flights to a new level and doesn't even give you water. Do bring WATER or it'll cost you 4€ for a tiny bottle onboard. Also, your mileage may vary, but we had a crazy stewardess whose failing relationship and lack of desire to be at work was loudly and vocally relayed for the entire flight. I couldn't sleep because of it. Susan got several winks. Flight wasn't too bad otherwise. We had a seven hours layover in Oslo before our flight out to Munich. The airport was very pretty, lots and lots of wood! so much wood l so IKEA-ish I convinced myself we were in Sweden. No joke.

But it is so easy to get into Oslo we definitely day tripped instead of hanging out there. We took a train into the city. Feeling time pressure and not having done our complete due diligence we took the first one out which was the express Flytoget train. DO NOT DO THIS! The train was $70! And we even had one student ticket! (180 adult one way, 90 one way student and no roundtrip discount). DO Take the local transit, it's only a 5 min difference and saves you a ton. At least the guy could have told us to get a one way and then take the local back. Yeah, so we got off at the National Theatre stop and walked over to the water. Very walkable city- the map on the train made made us think it would be long walks, but it was like 5-10 mins to the water from the National Theatre stop. Wish we had time to take a ferry over to see the Viking ships museum, but we didn't want to risk it. It was kind of windy and drizzled, but was mostly sunny. despite the sunshine I was cold. After figuring out the exchange rate was against us (100 krone = 12 USD) and taking in the coast views, we looked for a grocery store and found one over in the same neighborhood by the water called ICA. We got a bang of local vittles, meats, weird brown cheese, this beet mayo salad thing, fear factor local juice that turned out to be Swedish and also just wheatgrass, bread and a delish baguette pizza thing plus paprika chips! for 202 Krone (remember this number!) then made our way over to the royal palace and hung out out on the steps and had lunch. Susan walked around the palace and gardens, which were very small, but I stayed with our bags while she did this. Ominous clouds started drifting in and we decided to walk down the main pedestrian strip and return to the airport via the central station stop. Unfortunately, this is when I started developing foot/ankle pain and we had to start slowing down :[ The station was pretty big and you probably could do left luggage there, but it's probably super pricey. Just as we got back to the airport it started monsooning! Here's a tip: let everyone else proceed through the double revolving doors into the airport! Its fucking a Indiana Jones Temple of Doom obstacle! I almost lost a limb. No joke. People are pressing forward and there's only like a foot of space between these large and fast rotating nonsynced doors and it was a clusterFuck of death and dismemberment waiting to happen. Yeah. So proceed with caution. Once back in, we had to clear security and get back to our gate. Refilled our water bottles with cold delicious Norwegian H20! and did some price comparing on food once we were back in the airport (oh, they are serious about you removing your bag of liquids from your bag for security check!) and a sandwich was 249 krone and a pizza hut pizza was 286. That's $24 bucks for a sandwich and $36 for pizza. Full stop. But despite the crazy sticker price, we enjoyed ourselves and would definitely recommend taking the day trip into town if you have a longish layover.

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