airport security was crazy and it took us forever to get through. but we eventually made it on the plane and flew an hour and a half to "oslo." i put that in quotation marks because really we flew in to oslo/torp. ryanair is a great cheap airline but often then keep their costs down by using airports super far away from the actual city. thats what happened here. we flew in to oslo but really we were in torp which was an hour and forty minute bus ride from the actual city.
we came in to oslo pretty late - around midnight. we then checked in to our great hostel (sentrum pensjonat) and some of us went to smack and others went to bed. smack is a restaurant/fast food place that was two blocks from our house. on the way home i noticed that the streets weren't busy with late night partiers...they were busy with hookers. thats when i realized we were in a great part of town. actually, we were super central which was nice, but the area wasnt the greatest.
on friday, we got a late start to the day but we took a ferry to a different part of oslo and visited the cultural center and viking museum.
this is a view of oslo from the ferry. we had gorgeous weather! the ocean and sky were incredibly blue and clear.
the cultural center is a place where cool traditional houses and structures have been shipped in. we then walk around and look at what norway used to be. the houses were cool looking...almost hobit like.
here are johnny and milissa posing in front of one of the hobbit houses. i really like the grass on the roof...i think it adds a nice decorative touch.
for some reason, i thought it would be cool to pretend like i'm running up this ramp towards the house.
we then walked to the viking museum where we saw some very cool boats from the viking age. this boat was a queen's boat. she was buried in it with some of her stuff. now, when i say buried i mean that one day some excavators were digging into a small mountain and noticed a boad. aka, the small mountain was the boat. all three of these boats were buried in the same way. 
oh those vikings!
that night we went out to a real norway dinner. unbeknownst to us we went to a ritzy norway dinner. we ended up sitting in the coat room (the coat rack was next to our table and the podium where you ask for a table was on the other side of our table). i think they put us there becuase we were loud and under dressed. but, as it turned out, the owner of the place was our waiter! jorn was great and ended up being our friend by the end of the night. he told us that oj robbed a hotel room...we shared a special affinity with him because we were american and he had spent several years in florida working for disney as a norwegian chef.after dinner, we were prowling the crazy streets of oslo when milissa decided to ask a group of girls where they were headed. so we followed. we ended up at a sports bar which wasnt that cool but we did make some really cool friends with the norwegian girls that we followed. i have pictures of the girls, but they are on the computer that is dead. i will post more when i get a chance.
the next day (saturday) we woke up super early to catch a 6:30am train to voss in order to see the fjords. this is one of the train conductors scoping out the situation. he thinks the people on the bikes are crazy too!
the train ride there was 5 hours long and we went from beautiful sunny green land to frigid ice lakes.
but the crazy thing is that the snowier it got outside, the more people there were on the train! these crazy norwegians were actually travelling to th
e snow in order to ride the
ir bikes through the cold wasteland. and they were excited about this as they peeled there multitudes of layers off their bodies. crazy, but we think this is part of the reason why they're so thin - they are very active and eat lots of fish.
we made it to myrdal where we caught the fram railroad that took us back down the mountain.
here we are on the fram. the guy on the left is richard. he became our friend on the long train ride from oslo.
along the way we got off the
train and took pictures of a w
aterfall.it was kind of a fun ride because there were a lot of asian tourists and whenever we would come around a bend and see something cool they would make loud "oohs" and "aahs" and rush to the side of the train where the wonder existed.
once we got to fram (the city is called fram and the train is called fram...all
very confusing!)by the water's edge, we were supposed to catch a ferry that would take us through the fjords. but we missed our boat so we ended up going on a later one. this ended up being a good thing (even though we were mad at the time because missing the boat meant we wouldnt make it back to the train on time to make it back to oslo that night...this meant we had to make emergency accomodations in voss) because we caught up with some of our school friends that had gone to bergen for the weekend (western part of norway). all ten of us enjoyed the boat and gorgeous scenery!
it was a wee bit cold on the ferry. none of us were very prepared for the frigid ice rain water. but the hot chocolate definitely helped!on sunday we traveled back to oslo, checked out of the hostel we weren't able to stay in that night and traversed the city to the nobel peace prize museum. this was a very cool experience. the exhibit showing was about the grameen bank and the guy who started it (they split the prize for 2006). there were a lot of photos, plaques describing what they do, and videos. the videos circulated through many different topics - all touching on people and events that have led to peace and freedom (e.g. martin luther king).
from there we traveled to the airport and then home to london. john and i didnt make it back to the house until 3am! we missed the train from the airport to central london so we had to take a bus. since it was so late we opted for a taxi which meant we made it home about an hour sooner than if we had taken the bus.
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