By now I have spent my last day in Oslo and my last on the Rick Steves’ Scandinavian Tour, by testing positive for CoVid on September 13 in my hotel room, again on September 14 at the Dr. Dropin clinic adjacent to the National Theater. We finally bid Norway farewell on Thursday, September 15.
So I will close out my travel story with this blog of two days in Oslo.
The sunset picture of Victoria looking out toward Denmark, portrays our fifteen-hour ferry journey toward Norway. We disembarked after breakfast Monday morning and walked into a guided tour of the waterfront.
The harbor view of a long stretch of pavement fails to show the perspective of the incline to the top of the Opera House, which enabled pedestrians to walk up to its roof and around its upper stories to descend again to the harbor. We had fun taking that stroll.
The floating sculpture looks a little like a ship taking on water. Would you guess it portrays a glacier drifting in the harbor? Well it is. So there.
The plaque and the dark sculpture explain that the bags with two stakes is actually a woman returning from war. Sometimes I feel public sculptures leave a lot to the imagination.
City Hall, on the other hand, looms distinctively as twin towers with the emblematic swans between them. I have forgotten why swans were chosen for this courtyard. 
The symbolism of Odin on his eight-legged horse is more obvious. Odin appeared in heroic literature as the protector of heroes; fallen warriors joined him in Valhalla. He had a mythical horse called Sleipnir, who had eight legs, teeth inscribed with runes, and the ability to gallop through the air and over the sea. Odin was one of the greatest wizards among the gods and was associated with runes. He was also the God of Poets. His outward appearance he was an old man, with flowing beard and only one eye (the other he gave in exchange for wisdom). [https://godofwar.fandom.com/wiki/Odin]
The mural inside the entrance to the City Hall reminds me of the mural “Detroit Industry” inside the Detroit Institute of Art by Diego Riviera. The manual workers of industry are portrayed in their glory, paying tribute to the makers of monuments like City Hall. The Oslo building is said to be inspired by its predecessor, Stockholm City Hall, although I don’t see it.
The featured exhibit of the day was the Fram Museum, a building encompassing the original ship that struggled over water and glacier to almost reach the North Pole and to conquer the South Pole.
The Fram, with its rounded hull, was designed to withstand the pressure of the ice cap, as the ship drifted icebound toward the North Pole. The first expedition lasted three years, two years drifting in the ice toward the Pole and another year returning after the leader, Fridtjof Nansen set out with Hjalmar Johansen on dog sled, March 14, 1895. They later encountered fellow explorer, Frederick Jackson, who provided the ship that got them home just one week sooner than the Fram sailed in.
The Fram made another North Pole (1898-1902) and a subsequent South Pole expedition (1910-12), setting records for a ship’s penetration of the ice at both poles.
The photographs show the upper deck of the Fram at its home in the museum. Surrounding is a 270 degree projection of the ice and stormy seas. There are tighter spaces in the lower decks, including a corner where the story of the Fram’s South Pole expedition is screened. The stories of survival in the harsh North Pole are amazing, especially a year of sledding and hibernation in a stone and earth hut, where Nansen and Johansen were discovered by chance and delivered to Frederick Jackson’s base camp and finally back to Vardo, Norway.
We spent our last full day in the Nobel Peace Center Square near the National Theater.
The “big three” of Scandinavian literature are portrayed outside the Theater: Bjorn Bjornson, Henrik Ibsen, and Ludvig Holburg
[Bjornson] was the artistic leader of Christiania Theatre from 1885 to 1893, and he was the first theatre director at the National Theatre, from its opening in 1899 until 1907, and again from 1923 to 1927. Besides being an actor and director, he also was a playwright.
Holberg is considered the founder of modern Danish and Norwegian literature.[3][4] He is best known for the comedies he wrote in 1722–1723 for the Lille Grønnegade Theatre in Copenhagen.
Ibsen is often referred to as “the father of realism” and one of the most influential playwrights of his time.[2] His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, When We Dead Awaken, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. Ibsen is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare,[3][4] and A Doll’s House was the world’s most performed play in 2006.[5]
