What I did on my holidays (part 1)
Finally I’ve been able to upload my holiday photos to Flickr (warning: there are a lot, not all of them great). So, I can start the tale of our holiday. Don’t worry, I’ll spread it out with current posts.
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We flew into Oslo, and spent the weekend there. The city seemed pretty laid back – not as cosmopolitan as Helsinki (which is what I was expecting). There were sculptures all over the city – loads of them of the human form, usually naked, which was quite refreshing.
Oslo’s right on the Fjord, and this was the view from our hotel:
My favourite part of Oslo was the Vigeland sculpture park, which was just amazing. The city of Oslo gave Gustav Vigeland an apartment and workshop and he created the park for them, with his workshop becoming a museum when he died. The sculptures are all of the human form, and are incredible.
The entrance to the park is over a bridge, which has bronze figures all along it.
This is my favourite from the bridge:
and I quite liked this one as it’s just a bit mental:
After the bridge is a rose garden, and then a fountain with bronzes surrounding it. All of them feature the same tree-like image, with people in different forms in them – at times it’s a tree with children climbing in the branches, in others the tree part is made of skeletons, and in others it’s water. This is my favourite of them:
From the fountain, steps lead up to the main part of the park, a giant monolith of bodies surrounded by other marble sculptures.
The outside sculptures capture people in different stages of life. I could have photographed all of them, and I’m finding it hard to pick just a couple to put in here as this is becoming a really long post, so here goes, my favourites:
(actually this picture has two of my favourites so it’s kind of cheating – don’t they totally capture how girls are at those ages? All huddled up together with secrets and friends at the younger age, and then the adulation of boys in the teenage years (not all, obviously, but we’re generalising here))
There’s too much more to post about the park, that’ll have to do. In Oslo we also went to the Ibsen museum, which was interesting, the Viking Ship Museum, which you might remember from every single history book mentioning the Vikings,
…the Norwegian Folk Museum, and the Kon-Tiki museum, which was obviously run on a shoestring budget but really interesting.
More to follow at some point…