Exploring Oslo
The hotel I was in, wasn’t bad, but it was in the wrong position, as the web site said it was ten minutes from the centre. I assumed that was walking, but it was by car or taxi and there wasn’t any Metro station nearby. However I took a bus to the centre and friendly young lady, told me to get off at the National Theatre.
Norwegian National Theatre
It was a good place to start, as a lot of the museums and other places to see are around that area. There was also a customer service centre, where I was able to buy a 24-hour ticket for the trains, trams, buses and ferries. It is also a station from which you get the train to the airport.
One thing about Norwegian and Swedish for that matter, is that a lot of the words can be guessed. For instance the stop for the Nation Theatre is Nationaltheatret. At least the Norwegian National Theatre is more centrally placed than ours in London.
From the theatre, I walked around for an hour or so, until I got to the National Gallery, as I wanted to see the Munch paintings.
Norwegian National Gallery
At the moment there is a celebration of Edvard Munch, so I bought a ticket for the two venues at both the National Gallery and the Munch Museum.
A Crazy Train Ride
it should have been very easy.
I was dropped back at Vasteras station and then all I had to do was take a train to Hallsberg, where I would get a fast train to Oslo, where I would arrive around nine o’clock. The aim was to then spent a day in Oslo, coming home on the Wednesday to London by British Airways.
The first part of the journey was uneventful, except that to me it seemed that no-one had adjusted the heating system on the train I got to Hallsberg. But it was in time to get my connection to Oslo at 17:06.
Hallsberg was a station that was the mix of old and new and had a wide bridge over the tracks like Reading and other rebuilt stations in the UK.
Hallsberg Station
But the train that arrived to take me to Oslo had seen better days. But if I thought that was a bad train, we were then informed that we’d be changing to another train to continue our journey.
Changing Trains
The new train was one of the worst I’d travelled on in the last couple of years and I’ve even been on a Pacer that was in better condition. None of the toilets were working.
No Toilets Were Working
All of this game of musical trains was because there works on the lines and they had to get the passengers through on only one line.
Eventually, we got to Kongsvinger, where Swedish Railways had assured us the fast train to Oslo would have been held.
But it hadn’t been held, so about fifty of us gathered in the waiting room at about eleven. Luckily, I had details of my hotel in Oslo and was able to get them on the telephone to assure them I was on my way. But I know others weren’t so lucky, as they hadn’t any rooms to go to in Oslo. They’d just hoped they’d get there early enough to find one.
Customer service was non-existent and even the toilets needed a credit card. Luckily a forceful Swede knew how to fix them, so everybody could have a much-needed pee.
Eventually, a train arrived and although it was fairly new and very clean, it wasn’t the fastest, as it crawled its way to Oslo.
A Train Arrives
It was an enjoyable journey though, as the Swede was handing out beer to fellow passengers, who included a teacher from Devon and his German girlfriend. Just as we did on that memorable night in Venice, we enjoyed ourselves and put the world to rights.
I got into Oslo about midnight and wandered around for perhaps half-an-hour until I found a taxi to take me to my hotel.
Rape Justice – Dubai Style
This story is horrific.
Why anybody would want to go to such an awful place, I do not know. I went once with C and we we found it a hot concrete jungle with no soul.
Now This Is What I Call A Tunnel!
This story from the BBC web site is more significant than you think. Here’s the introduction.
The Norwegian government has backed an ambitious plan to create the world’s first ship tunnel. But why has nobody tackled this engineering feat before?
At 45m high (148ft) and 36m (111ft) wide, the Stad Ship Tunnel will be the only one of its kind – a passage through solid rock able to accommodate 16,000 tonne freight and passenger ships.
Ship canals have long been used to make journeys more direct and safer but the Stad peninsula is a mountainous divide, peaking at 645m, between the Norwegian Sea to the north and the North Sea to the south.
it may or may not go ahead, but it does show how confident engineers and tunnellers are in their hole digging.
And that is the significance of the story!
Crossrail in London is being dug in soft ground, but it shows how by-passes can be created under London with relative ease.
We shall be seeing a lot more tunnels in the next few decades, as the technology is just getting better every year.
Goats Cheese Closes Tunnel
This story from Norway, could almost be read as a classic spoof, like London bus found on the Moon from the Daily Sport. This is the first three paragraphs.
A road tunnel in Norway has been closed – by a lorry-load of burning cheese.
About 27 tonnes of caramelised brown goat cheese – a delicacy known as Brunost – caught light as it was being driven through the Brattli Tunnel at Tysfjord, northern Norway, last week.
The fire raged for five days and smouldering toxic gases were slowing the recovery operation, officials said.
I wonder if Waitrose stocks this cheese? Brunost sounds so dangerous, that it could be used as a substitute for Semtex.
The North East Passage Is Open
This story about a gas tanker going from Norway to Japan on first glance looks to be a good news story. At least for Norway, who were probably paid a lot for all that gas!
But am I right in thinking, that the trip is only possible because the world is warming and the ice has melted?
Has anybody asked the polar bears for their opinion?
What Should The Norwegians Do With Anders Breivik?
We have had three massacres in recent years in the UK; Hungerford, Dunblane and Cumbria.
These three are different to the shootings in Norway, in that all three of the perpetrators killed themselves. Even Raoul Moat did this after his horrendous crimes.
So does this mean that they understood the enormity of what they had done in some bizarre way? But we do often hear that the gunman has killed himself or themselves after this sort of case.
So this is the unusual thing about the Breivik case, in which his fate is decided today. Most criminals or terrorists of his kind usually commit suicide. The nearest we have to Breivik in this country is David Copeland, who was a neo-Nazi, who killed three, but it could have been so many more. He was considered to be mentally ill, but was tried for murder and will serve at least 50 years in jail.
I suspect that Breivik is the one person, who if released would either be murdered by his countrymen or do it again.
Beware the Leo Pig
Roy Hodgson is just seven days older than I am. So that makes us both Leo pigs. For more on this explosive mix of Chinese and European signs read this.
I know it’s all a load of old rubbish, but it seems to give them luck and end up in the right place at the right time.
We also all stick together. So here’s wishing you luck Roy. Not that Leo pigs need it.
The Case of Anders Breivik
In my view, whether Anders Breivik is sane or not is irrelevant. And the British courts generally take that view as multiple murderers are either declared criminally insane and sent to places like Broadmoor or just sentenced to spent the rest of their lives in jail.
I suppose that in many ways Broadmoor might be preferable from the murderer’s point of view, but in truth the result is the same.
But still the Norwegians persist in a trial, that gives Breivik the ability to expound his views.
Heroic Lesbians
A friend pointed me to this story entitled Heroic Lesbians; wherefore the silence, on a Luxembourg web site.
It describes how a married lesbian couple, got in their boat and rescued dozens of teenagers, who were swimming away from the guns of Anders Behring Breivik on the island of Utoya.
The article questions why the story has not been picked up by mainstream media.
My view is that it wasn’t because of their sexuality, as suggested in the story, but because the rescue was carried out by two women and that just doesn’t fit with those that run the average newspaper. One heroic woman is front page news, but two show up men in a bad light!
The Anonymous Widower 