The first impression I got is that the most expensive city in Europe features a surprising number of junkies, beggars and tramps rummaging in rubbish bins. They've recently outlawed prostitution, ruining the business for the hordes of Nigerian hookers formerly active in the city, so I've narrowly missed seeing these as well.
From the last paragraph you might get the impression that Oslo is a bit of a lawless city. And you would be right. There are no policemen to be seen anywhere, save for the accidental lonely couple on horseback, minding their own business and filling the streets with manure. Laws are conspicuously not enforced, and for someone coming from Airstrip One, CCTV is shockingly yet blissfully absent. I guess it's basically just like any other normal city. London must've nibbled at my brains somehow.
Visitors and locals alike all agree on one thing about Oslo: public transport sucks. Not just because it's criminally expensive. Trains work when the planets get aligned in the right order. There is no public transport at night to speak of. There are some night buses that will take you to the suburbs, for the Guinness-world-record-breaking price of 100 NOK one way (a whopping £10 at the current exchange rate).
Trafikanten is the Oslo equivalent to Transport For London. The main office is situated just outside Oslo Sentralstasjon. Check out this picture.
See all those people hanging around, bottom-right, on top of the stairs? As you get out of the train station you'll have to walk past them. At this point any number of jolly fellows will approach you and greet you with one word: "hash?", "speed?" or "cocaine?", marking their stock in trade. In a situation of exquisite surrealism, the traficantes (drug dealers) of Oslo are all clustered around a Cyclopean column covered in red neon that shouts "Trafikanten".
With English and a few words of German in your linguistic toolbox, deciphering written Norse is fairly easy. On the other hand, when spoken it sounds like the bastard offspring of Finnish and Hindi. I constantly made life impossible for any Local who would be so polite to answer my questions. Like a hyperactive kid lost in an exposition of exotic interestingness, I kept poking my finger at random words and cooing "Whassat mean?". Tons of fun for me. I wish I could say the same for the poor victims of my geekiness.
The one inescapably unique thing in and about Oslo is Vigeland Park. The more I think about it, the less I can understand how it could ever be built, and the happier I am that it was. Naked statues everywhere? Naked boys and girls together? A huge phallic monument of intertwined naked bodies? Go build that in Spain in the 1940s, see what happens.
Central Oslo aside, people in Norway don't live. They camp. They don't have houses. They have bungalows. They all live in the forest, surrounded by the sounds of chirping birds and the smell of wood fire. I kept humming to myself that tune that goes "Little boxes, on the hillside" while beholding the ultimate suburban utopia.
Norway is of course not representative of all of Scandinavia, and Oslo is hardly representative of Norway as a whole. And yet, I did manage to get a fleeting glimpse of Scandinavianness, and two aspects of it have impressed me strongly: the houses and the people.
I'm on my knees in love with Scandinavian houses. I've finally found houses that are just the way houses are supposed to be. Or the way they teach you they're supposed to be when you're a kid. When you learn how to draw a house, you don't paint an appartment building in red brick exposed, nor a crumbling brown-bricked Victorian façade. You draw a roof and big square windows and a door and you paint it in screaming bright colours and add a green garden and smoke coming out of the chimney and maybe a tree or two. That's your basic Norwegian house.
Not only do I love them on the outside. The inside inescapably strikes you as a photo springing out of an IKEA catalogue. Don't tell the owners that (I did); IKEA is just as much despised for its cheapness as it is popular for its low prices. And it's not just the way they look. They just feel right. Having electric heating under your floor just feels right. Having a whole wall of your living room open to daylight just feels right. (Having your toilet always by your front door, this I do not quite grasp.) The lighting is great; the furniture is comfortable, practical and design-conscious; everything feels the right size and shape and position. I reckon Feng Shui is practiced most in the top end of Europe.
From my limited exposure to people in pubs, the impression they made on me was one of proverbial loud, boisterous, back-slapping, good-natured Vikingness. Manly slaps on the back and brotherly handshakes keep coming as glasses keep clinking to the chorus of "Skål!". After a few half-litres they tend to mix and match, always open to meeting new people to invade, pillage and rape, with a slap on the back and a belly-booming laugh. They are quite jolly-spirited, not easily offended (I've tried), and generally quite a fun bunch. Thumbs up.
I'd love to sprinkle this post with some nice panoramas of Oslo, but it has proven impossible. It's just not a pretty city. The best views of Oslo are from the top of the Opera House, because from there you can't see the Opera House.
So what about the experience? All in all, I've had a blast. Yet had I visited backpacking on my own, I wouldn't have had a tenth of the fun. Isn't it good to have friends. To friends! Skål!
