Tag Archives: Norway

The Baboon Congress, Travel

A Slow Slog In Oslo

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Today’s guest post comes from Jacque.

​Hallo Baboons, from Norway.

This  blog comes to you from our apartment in Oslo after a somewhat miserable stay in this city.  

We have experienced an Oslo tour of various kinds of construction:  buildings from the ground up;  road construction and reconstruction, and some big mess of construction near the beautiful Oslo Opera House.  This construction tour in combination with the Norwegian Easter Holiday (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday and the following Monday) disrupted our time here–Museums are closed for re-modeling, transportation lines in vital areas are closed and sidewalks are gone which is rendering our beloved Rick Steve’s books useless.  
 
​We arrived Monday on a bumpy flight from Amsterdam which left me dizzy and nauseous.  Then we found a broken elevator in the building in which we rented a fifth floor apartment.  Climbing the five flights of stairs with luggage also left us dizzy and nauseous.  This will result in my request for a partial refund from the apartment owner.  Lou contracted a cold on Tuesday.  By Thursday, I had it as well.  

Oslo Opera House
Viking Ship Museum
Folk Museum
Construction!
Folk Museum

We had a somewhat frightening encounter with a mentally ill man on a tram.  He chose to rant in clear, understandable English about the Norwegian government, about refugees, about his music which he was blasting on a small, entirely too portable speaker system capable of maximum volume!  This Tram Driver stopped to reason with the guy, prompting most of the passengers to flee.  I swear the passenger was channelling the Norse Rush Limbaugh.

This experience was the ugly underbelly of travel!
 
​We did, however, have several wonderful days sightseeing: On Friday we took the train over the “top of Norway” from Oslo to Bergen.  This 300 mile trip was scenic and thrilling.  We travelled above the tree line through a glacier into ski-resort country. The Norwegian Folk Museum was interesting and detailed about the regions of Norway.  They also had a beautiful display of Norwegian Folk Art that seemed so….familiar.  And we met a Tram Driver who really should have been a tour guide somewhere.  He gave us an informative and knowledgable recap of Oslo on his break, which he chose to spend talking with us.    
 
 
​How would you create a great tourist experience for visitors to your town?

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Royal Treatment

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It turns out I am going to be in the same room with Royalty today, but I don’t think Bubby knows that. Still, this breathless message arrived late yesterday:

Hey Mr. C.,

Everybody at Wilkie High is talking about the King and Queen of Norway being in town, and how cool is that? Some of us were daydreaming how we might grab a bus downtown and maybe run into them, be our super extra charming selves, and maybe get deputized into the royal posse and brought back to Norway as sort of their pet Americans.

Kinda far fetched, I know, but when Mr. Boozenporn lectured on Norway yesterday, it sounded so cool! It almost made me want to find it on a map, but then I decided it would be more fun to learn about that later. Maybe after I arrive. Did you know that they have jobs there? They do! Because they produce oil and stuff. So if me and my friends were Norwegian teenagers, we might actually be thinking about getting jobs when we’re done with school instead of just living in mom and dad’s basement, maybe.

Then last night I had this dream that I went to Norway and became a Scandanavian Oilwegian, and I sent thousands of dollars back home to my folks to help them pay for their health care.

Don’t get me wrong, I love America. But I love money too, and it sounds like in Norway they’ve got some that ordinary people are allowed to have. A lot of the people speak English too, and the countryside is like Minnesota, so I’d feel pretty comfortable right away. Even a lot of the stuff is the same as here. Somebody told me if I go to Norway, I had to ask somebody to show me all the Fords. Don’t know why that’s so important, but apparently they’re all over on the west side of the country!

Anyway, if you happen to see the King and Queen of Norway and they say they’re looking for some American Youth to take back with them, please spell my name right.

Your friend,

B-U-B-B-Y

I told Bubby it was not likely that the Norsk Royals would adopt him or take him home to work in the oil fields. They are not here on a mission to accumulate stray American youth. And if he thinks he might someday move far away to a place where there are jobs so he can send some money back to his poor old mum and dad, he should start in a place that’s more reachable and less exotic, like North Dakota.

What kind of Queen (or King) would you make?