The evening of the first full day in Oslo brought something surprising, if not shocking. I wasn’t exactly sure, but some of the people moving slowly in a stream across the back portion of the stage appeared to be some form of naked. The form of naked was something involving fabric, but unmistakably simulating nudity. There were some in the stream simulating intercourse in a variety of forms. It was the opera, La Traviata, by Verdi, staged in a contemporary way to translate the theme into a 21st century experience visually. There were no sets other than a platform on which everything took place. Clothing was contemporary, and other than the leads everyone was dressed the same. The opera asks meaning of life questions contrasting a profligate and hedonistic lifestyle with something more noble. It was an attempt to reach a new and younger audience. Judging from the makeup of the audience, it was working. Two of the leads, a soprano and a baritone, were as good as I have ever heard.
After the mild shock that first evening, the rest of the week was filled with wonder and awe at what I was seeing. I found the coffee shop I was urged to seek out in Oslo. I greeted owner Tim Wendelboe on behalf of Holly and Pete, my friends of coffee world fame. I managed to find my way back to the train station to buy the ticket for the next leg of my journey on the following Monday (that’s today; with great difficulty I am trying to hit the keys of an onscreen keyboard while the train is wobbling on the tracks).
The weather was nice on Thursday, so Bjorg got the car out and took me to places that elicited some wonder and awe. It began with a trip to the Munch museum. He was a Norwegian contemporary of Van Gogh. There were rooms filled with dozens of their paintings clustered around subject matter or approach. The awe increased as we moved from room to room, ending with Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Munch’s Starry Night hanging next to one another.
From there we went to an almost Central Park sized park in Oslo where there are rows of life sized sculptures showing bodies of all ages, often intertwined with one another, leading up to a tall obelisk with hundreds of bodies wound around one another, carved from one stone. Before entering the park we passed by a bronze statue of Sonja Hennie.
We visited the Olympic ski jump, inspiring some awe. Without snow it is bright, shining metal gleaming in the sun. From there we went to the Viking museum where there are three boats from the early Viking era, two of them in remarkably good shape. Larger ones like them carried the actual first people from Europe to visit North America. Then came the Kon Tiki Museum. I need to see the documentary and the Hollywood version. That was an adventure! It was a great day. Bjorg was an excellent tour guide. She took me to just the right places.
Break: Outside my window on the train are snow covered mountains, one covered with ski runs. Now there is a frozen lake nestled among them. The mountains are growing and multiplying as we go. The sky is mostly a soft blue with scattered patches of clouds, puffy in the middle and thinning at the edges. The snow from the train to a few hundred meters out has melted in places revealing mounds of black rocks and dormant vegetation. There are nearby pools of melted snow, some the size of small lakes. Occasionally there are clusters of small dark colored houses, some are barn red or light blue. We have been traveling not only around but through mountains. Some of the houses are covered with grass roofs. We are currently at about 4000 feet above sea level. The landscape is now almost totally snow covered. It is so bright that each time we emerge from a tunnel we are struck by total blindness. We are now almost even with the puffy clouds. We stopped at a small mountain village with a group of skiers standing outside. We have now been in what is obviously a very long tunnel, five or ten minutes (had to stop writing due to blindness) long. It is painfully white! We have most definitely ascended into the clouds.
Before we left for the train station today, Henning told me that they had just cleared the last section of the tracks of snow early this morning. I guess the passengers were being shuttled by bus around the blocked area. Nobody mentioned that when I purchased the ticket – not that it would have made any difference.
The tops of some of the nearby mountains melt into the clouds so there is no way to distinguish between cloud and mountains. We passed a rushing mountain river of turquoise colored melted snow tumbling through and over rocky narrows. Now there is a wide river like it beside us. It is hard to know who is moving faster. Moss just starting to turn green is covering the ground, more moss than snow. The fresh spring green of the deciduous trees is mixed with the dark green of the conifers. We are transitioning to more green than white even on the mountains. They are slowly diminishing in size. We just passed a house with a tiny patch of blooming tulips.
We’re passing through a lush green valley many kilometers long where there is a large town lying against a background of snow covered mountains like the ones we came through. We ended up delayed by almost an hour and a half. I am not complaining. It was a great place to be delayed.
The Call to Live 