Norway

Another trip from the vault. In the summer of 2004, Ray and I flew north - he from Berlin, me from Eindhoven - to Oslo for a week exploring Norway while warmth remained. We stayed three nights in Oslo, three nights in Bergen, and one night in transit in an overnight sleeping car over the mountains between the two. The weather held most of the time for a great merge of urban Oslo and fjord fording on the coast. Two years have passed and my memory grows foggy of some of the exact names for the buildings. Anything factual I culled from the excellent Rough Guide to Norway. All of these photos were taken by my adventurous brother and fellow traveller Ray.

Norway at Night. The Stortinget or Parliamentary Building	It's the Aula at Oslo University. Few students are around. Are they all studying?	Oslo is sleepy at night.	Det Kongelige Slott or Royal Palace. The equestrian statue depicts Karl XIV Johan, better than the other thirteen.	This hunk of blocks is the Domkirke, a cathedral that dates from the late seventeenth century.
Ye old Oslo	Streets the way they used to be. Such a wonderful summer's day that even the penguins were on vacation.	Women are quite scarce in Norway so the Scando lads make do with worrying startled reindeer.	I can't even figure out the street signs	The entrance to the Nasjonalgalleriet, the national Gallery of Norway.
A lot of these paintings are Norweigan but two years later and I can't remember their titles	So enjoy a look through the collection courtesy of my brother's camera	This is not the museum from which Munch's Scream was stolen in 2004, but it was stolen here in 1994 when someone climbed through a window and grabbed it.		Ahh, a simple game of chess
		Patron arist, Edvard Munch's Madonna	The sick child
	Such wintery fjords	Hotel art or prized kitsch?	Some of the Norweigan bars get rowdy at night	Reminds me of German Romanticism
Johny, you shouldn't have pulled the boat's drain plug.	Don't mind me if I - ummm- take off my clothes and lay here on this pedestal		Ooow, oow, so modern	Probably in the top five of most recognizable paintings in the world, Munch's Scream has several versions, but this is the original
		Strolling the hustle and bustle of downtown Oslo	Ray can't walk by a fountain without taking a picture of it. He luvs water.	Another fountain, this one outside the Museet for Samtidskunst
I sample the wind from Shanghai	An exhibit that uses two globes to simulate the current humidity and wind conditions in Shanghai. A video projector displays live shots of the Shanghai skyline.	A piece called The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away.	Russian Ilya Kabakov spent over a decade collecting and cataloging the detritus of his apartment, objects that he sent to this Oslo museum.
Stream-lined, pimped ride incongruous in tidy Scandanavia	We climbed the Akerhus complex for a view of the harbor	Ferries leave from here to ports along the city and further along the coast		That day a speed boat regatta jetted through the harbor
A view of downtown Oslo and the twin towers of the Radhus	The Akershus Slott was put together mostly by king maker Christian IV in the 1620s.	Sea gull see gull	The walls of the Akershus Festning were designed to resist artillery bombardment but didn't keep the tourists out	I reflected on the life of a duck