soaking in oslo

Summer time is a time for most Scandinavians to take a vacation. Most... but not all. Construction workers kick into overdrive over summer, building new roads, tram tracks, and unfortunately for us, performing train track maintenance on the route from Göteborg to Oslo. After an increasingly confused 10 to 15 minutes at Göteborg Central. Wondering where in the hell train platform 54 is? We was decided that perhaps "buss" actually did mean a bus, despite our train tickets definitely saying "tåg" (train).

No problem, replacement coaches were taking us to somewhere in the country where the train would meet us. Belle and I were off to Oslo for the weekend!

We arrived in Oslo around lunch time. After checking in, we went to the restaurant next door which advertised traditional Norwegian cuisine. Whale was on the menu... and I ate it. A tough meat, I think it's kind of like kangaroo (if kangaroo was tough, which it's not), but doesn't taste as good.

After lunch we headed out to explore Oslo. It's a compact city, which makes it perfect for tourism on foot. The main street, Karl Johans gate was packed full of people and street performers. I was reminded again how much Scandinavians celebrate summer compared to Australians. Then again, Australians never have to suffer through Scandinavian winters. It does make the cities have a great vibe in summer.

We were able to check out Central Oslo's main sights in one afternoon. The old castle / fortress, Akershus Festning, provided a good vantage point to look over the city and the harbour. We also were able to get a crash course in Norwegian history.

Wandering back down the hill we visited the Nobel Peace Prize museum. It currently has a thought provoking exhibition about slums. It was a multimedia display where you could "walk into" various slum houses. These houses were projected onto blank walls. Audio recordings would play and the inhabitants would tell their stories.

It was quite interesting; some who were interviewed had always lived in the slum area, and enjoyed life there. These people were usually disappointed that their slums were always slated for demolition. Others were educated people who couldn't get jobs. They were justifiably annoyed at the prejudice against them just for where they live; it makes it harder to get a job.

In Jakarta, entire families live under bridges and have to be careful not to fall into the rivers below. These families tell their cousins in the country: don't visit me, my house is small and very far away. I'll visit you.

It was also interesting because these people don't have any property rights. While the slum areas aren't a good way for people to live, at the same time, when governments are encouraged to do something about it, it usually means ignoring the people inside the slum areas. The lack of property rights, leads to a lack of any opportunity to claim compensation for the dislocation they will endure.

The slums outside Mumbai have a gross economic output at around $1 billion a year - including an impressive plastic recycling industry. Yes, of course, it has significant water supply and public health issues too, but it will be interesting to see how the Indian government handles improving the area, as well as maintaining the industry.

Also at the Nobel Prize museum, there was a display on global warming, with an inventive way to visualise it: a model of Oslo with a melting ice block suspended above it, slowly drowning the city. It seemed only appropriate that after that, we visit Oslo's newly redeveloped docklands area, right on the water, and have a coffee - and to marvel at the price of steak in the steak houses. About $60 for the cheapest. Well over $100 for the most expensive! We finished off the day with a walk up to the Royal Palace (very nice) and cocktails and dinner down town (also... very nice).

What did the next day have in store for us? In one word: rain.

What the hell? It's summer damn it!

The rain was here to stay. Like in Copenhagen - there's no such thing as a passing shower in Scandinavia. It just kept getting heavier and heavier. Should we have brought wet weather gear? Maybe. Should we have at least bought an umbrella that morning? Definitely.

It didn't stop us though. First thing on the "Oslo Plan" for Sunday - our handwritten scrap of paper with sights to see - was a trip to Frognerseteren. Almost 500-metres above Oslo, at the end of the #1 metro line. The plan was to hike to the TV tower, and get the view from there. As you can see from the photo above, there was no good view to be seen on this day.

We abandoned that plan, and took the metro down a few stations to Holmenkollen. This is home to Oslo's most famous sight: the Holmenkollen Ski Jump. Again, it would have been a lot better with some visibility of the city below. We climbed to the top, and it's quite horrid inside. Graffitied. Rusty. Leaking.

The current jump is slated for demolition, and a newer, bigger, and hopefully nicer, one will be built in time for the world championships in a few years.

After stopping for coffee - with the wishful thought that maybe if we give it 20 minutes, it'll stop raining - we pressed on. All the way back down the mountain to Vigeland sculpture park. The brain child of Gustav Vigeland and the Oslo city council, the park is full of Vigeland's naked statues. There are people in all sorts of poses, of all sorts of ages, and of both sexes. Kind of like an older version of the Bodies exhibition. You might realise by now that the weather was oppressive, so we made a quick decision to head for cover in the near by museum dedicated to Vigeland.

The decision was a good one. I thought it was a lot more interesting to know a bit of history about the statues than to be oblivious of the stories behind them if we'd simply wandered in the park. For instance, he was well known before 1905, but when Norway gained its independence, he was in a fortunate position to be able to accept a number of grants from the newly independent government looking to establish Norwegian identity. The park itself was guaranteed after the Oslo city council wanted to demolish his house to make way for a library. He argued to have the city give him a brand new studio, and a section of Frogner park. In return, the city owns all his works, sketches, models, etc.

The sculptures are quite evocative - showing all emotions and stages of life. His most famous sculpture is one of a toddler throwing a tantrum. I'd recommend a visit if in Oslo.

We couldn't stay at the museum all day, nor could we stay in Oslo forever, so it was back into the rain for us. Jealous of umbrella carrying sensible people. Annoyed at wet feet, soaking jeans, but all in all... having a great time.

next stop: københavn

Next stop on my long weekend was Copenhagen. It was a bit gloomy when I arrived in town, and as I read the hotel guide book to the city I began to worry. It had a list of common phrases in English, with the Danish translations, such as:

Excuse me, which way is ___? Undskyld, hvad vej ligger ___?
and
How much does this cost? Hvor meget koster den her?

... but that wasn't what worried me... it was this phrase that worried me:

Does it EVER stop raining here?? Holder det NOGENSINDE op med at regne her??

Yup, even the emphasis was included in the guide book. "Meh" I thought, "how bad could it be?", and so I continued on my merry way to grab some brunch. I have no qualms about recommending BarBar Bar for brunch either, the food was excellent. By the time I'd finished brunch however, it had begun to spit with rain. "Nevermind" I thought, "it'll just be a passing shower", and so I set off on a four hour self-guided walking tour. This is me at the half way mark, just before giving up:

Cold. Wet. Slightly miserable.

Consulting some more guides I decided to go back to my hotel, grab a change of clothes, and head indoors to some of the museums around town.

On my way back I passed some May Day protests, they seemed to be tame enough, but given the police presence, complete with protective head gear for the constables, I wasn't sticking around to find out. Trekking further towards the hotel I walked down a street that the Danes claim to be one of the longest outdoor shopping strips in Europe. That's fine... except when it's raining! BYO umbrella!

The Danes are masters of modern design. The Danish Design Centre provides some museum-esque exhibits of the history of Danish design, as well as an exhibition space for some of the latest pieces. Danish and Scandinavian design, whilst being modern, also tends to include a lot of wood. To force modern-ness on such a natural material they developed methods of steaming, bending and moulding wood.

It seems that the Danish design ethic is to be functional, aesthetically pleasing, and without ornamentation. From a computer-science view of the world, I like that this usually means that the objects have Affordance: that is, how the object looks, implicitly suggests how to use it. Sometimes, however, the objects were slightly abstract:

Looking at this jug reminded me of something... The beer is cheaper in Denmark than in Sweden! Time to head to a bar for a few brews.

Not content with only modern product design, I visited the Arken Museum of Modern Art. It's well worth the visit. Most of the pieces in the museum were created after 1990. Frustratingly they don't allow cameras inside. Some of the pieces in the museum were definitely worth a picture or two. I could describe them, but they really are visual things, so I wont.

The museum itself looks like a ship anchored to the nearby lake. Here's a view from the front:

That concluded my short, and somewhat soggy trip to Copenhagen. Two and a half days of long weekend still ahead of me, it was back to the airport, to fly to Berlin.

a netherlands teaser

This was always going to be ambitious. One weekend, three cities. Den Haag, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and a visit to Kinderdijk thrown in for good measure. It was good, tiring, and fun. And in the end it was easy to conclude: you've got to spend more than just a weekend in the Netherlands!

I arrived late in the evening on Friday, and met up with Carmen, Cynthia, and Roland. We had our own personal tour guide as Roland is from Rotterdam, but now lives in London. They'd been touring around before I got there, and so they met me for drinks in Den Haag after I arrived. Since the weather was good there were plenty of locals out drinking too. Den Haag has some old squares where you can buy drinks in the bars, and then take them out into the square which has tables and chairs set up. It's all very cool.

Saturday was reserved for Amsterdam. We took a canal tour that let us travel around the city at our own pace. We hopped off at the Rijksmuseum, home of many Rembrandt paintings. In addition to its' most famous images, the museum also documents a lot of the Netherlands "golden age": when trade, rather than a monarch or a religion, ruled the land; when the Dutch East and West India companies were trading and bringing back treasures from around the globe - either that or stealing them from the Portuguese!

The detail in the paintings surprised me. Some of the paintings depicted scenes with shiny metal objects, and the painter went to the effort of painting the reflection of other objects in the painting on the shiny surfaces. It made me laugh as I thought this must have been the equivalent of 18th-century gamers: always aiming to get more and more rendered realism, more pixels, more detail.

What better than to follow up a museum visit on a nice day, than with a walk in a park. With spring well and truly established, Amsterdam locals were out in force. It was so nice to see people cycling, lounging around, drinking, and generally not being in any kind of a hurry. Not hurrying also applied to the waitresses at lunch... slowest service... ever... Did we mind though? Nah, it was nice sitting in the sun.

It would have been nice to do what these locals were doing. Having wine and cheese in their very own canal boat.

The conundrum of the how long to spend at lunch - and when to get back on the tour boat to see more of the city - pushed us to keep moving on in the end. We sailed up to Anne Frank's house. This was a far more sombre affair contrasted with the Rijksmuseum. The later celebrated the Netherlands golden age, where as the former commemorated some of the Netherlands darkest years. The house tells the story of Anne and her close friends and relatives. It also explains the story of all the Dutch Jews. Of around 100,000 Jewish residents in the Netherlands, a puny 5,000 survived world war II. The quote from a holocaust survivor in the guide book accurately sums this up for me:

One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.

First impression of the house is that it is bigger than you imagine it would have been. Then it dawns: this was Anne and her seven relatives and friends home/prison for two years straight. The windows were blacked out, so there was no sunshine. And when it all came down to it, after two years in the dark, they were betrayed and sent to concentration camps. So it goes.

By the time we concluded our lap of Amsterdam by boat the sun was starting to dip in the sky.

At night the landscape changes... to a wonderful shade of dodgy red. You may have heard of the Amsterdam red-light district. Well, it's not so much a district, more like... most of the alleys and lane ways in the centre of town. Fun. Strange. Dodgy. Tourist attraction. Drug dealers. Drunks. Tits.

We didn't stay too late in Amsterdam because we wanted to avoid having to catch the night train back to Den Haag (which stops all stations).

The next day took us to Rotterdam. The most modern of the three cities, mainly because the Germans destroyed most of it in 1940 when they invaded. This has liberated Rotterdam from heritage that might have stopped them building interesting looking things like these apartments:

Bizarre aren't they? I'd love to return and see more of Rotterdam's modern architecture. Time constraints meant we had to move on, catch a boat, and see the most quintessential of all Dutch symbols.

That's right, no whirlwind trip to the Netherlands would be complete without a trip to see some windmills. We visited Kinderdijk, a world heritage listed collection of 16 windmills including one we could go inside and check out 17th century engineering.

Ingenious design really: the wind turns the wheel, which turns a drive shaft through the middle of the building. This turns either a worm drive type arrangement, or a water wheel, to move water from lower ground to higher ground. This allowed the Dutch to move flood-water out of the fields into the canals and rivers quicker that it would naturally drain. Fields were back in production quicker after heavy rain. If only Australia had this problem! You can solve flooding with 17th century techniques, but there is no solution to drought.

All too soon it was time to head back to the airport, with a vow to return.

hanoi's cultural sites

Work today (Sunday) has been cancelled!. I took the opportunity to sleep in : ) The hotel had an Easter Sunday brunch, which was good because it didn't start until late in the morning... making it quite compatible with sleeping in! This afternoon, one of the local engineers is going to take Mark and I out somewhere in Hanoi. But for now I've got some time to write about yesterday's touring.

Yesterday I went and toured some of Hanoi's cultural sites: the Temple of Literature, the Museum of Fine Arts and, the Army Museum. Along the way I also walked through Lenin Park. I quite like the way Hanoi has parks and lakes scattered throughout the town. They provide some relief from the busy streets. Lenin Park, as the name suggests, is named after Vladimir Lenin. It has a statue of Lenin, which the local kids were climbing all over. I missed getting a photo of them all over him, but here they are afterwards, posing:

The Temple of Literature, or Văn Miếu, also had nice gardens. It was founded in 1070 as a Confucian temple, but 6 years later became Vietnam's first university. Some of the architecture is from the 11th century. It is probably the only place in the country that has architecture that old.

Of course over the centuries the temple has had a few additions. The most historically significant addition is the stone steles which record every doctor laureate who graduated from 1484 onwards. These steles are mounted on the backs of stone turtles - one of the symbolically important animals in Vietnam. Turtles indicate stability, and the king of the time recognised the importance of having well educated subjects.

This reads "... virtuous and talented men are state-sustaining elements: The strength and the prosperity of a state depend on its stable vitality and it becomes weaker as such vitality fails. That is why all the saint emperors and clear-sighted kings didn't fail in seeing to the development of men of talent and the employment of literati to develop this vitality."

Over the next 300 years the names, and birth-places, of 1,306 graduates were recorded on these stones. The kings themselves set the questions of the final examinations. I saw some paintings in the museum I visited next, which showed the joy of the villagers when a graduate returns to their home town.

These days the temple is used for ceremonies, and hosts (according to the taxi driver) around 1,000,000 tourists a year. Out the front of the temple there is a stone commanding horsemen dismount before entering. These days however, there is motorcycle parking inside the grounds, and they don't have to dismount before entering!

Next I wandered over to the Museum of Fine Arts. This is housed in a massive French colonial building. Unfortunately camera's were not permitted inside the Museum, so again the quality of the photos is not so good as I had to surreptitiously use my mobile phone camera. I visited the ceramics exhibition first, but I found that pretty boring and moved on quickly. Next I visited the exhibition of native Vietnamese costumes. These were slightly more interesting, but didn't hold my attention for long. Then I came to the contemporary art exhibition. This was fantastic! Of course war has heavily influenced the previous 2 or 3 generations of Vietnamese, and this was reflected in the paintings and sculptures exhibited.

In the late 1940's and early 1950's the Vietnamese fought the French, in an attempt to gain independence. The above painting illustrates the jungle on fire, with an anti-aircraft missile chasing an unseen French aircraft. Below is a painting that depicts Việt Minh tanks rolling into Saigon in 1975. The paintings were quite compelling, and I'd recommend going to see them. There are easily more than 100 items in the contemporary exhibition.

Lacquer is a traditional Vietnamese material used by artists as there are native trees that produce lacquer. Most of the the paintings, old and new, were lacquer paintings. The sculptures were all made of bronze, and this was also a traditional Vietnamese material.

Before leaving I also visited an exhibition of some uncommon Buddhist sculptures from the 1800's. Uncommon because instead of depicting religious figures, they depicted ordinary people. It has been suggested that the artists used the religion as an excuse to produce sculptures, and maybe obtain funding. In actual fact they wanted to do their own thing, so it was only very loosely tied back to Buddhism. Luckily for the artists, the king at the time (who was Buddhist) really liked them and used them to decorate his court. The king was on to something too, I quite liked them as well!

Moving on now to the Army Museum, I arrived at the same time as three bus-loads of young army recruits. As part of their training they must have to learn about Vietnamese military history. There's plenty to learn too! While the museum focuses mainly on the war with the French, there are significant amounts of captured American hardware, as well as smaller exhibits of ancient weapons. In this photo the recruits are being told about a captured French artillery piece:

I suspect the communist party had a fair say in the exhibits of the Army Museum as everything always pointed to Vietnamese victories. Furthermore I was surprised at the emphasis placed on the war with the French. It seems that this war was more important in the minds of the Vietnamese. Sometimes some of the translations might have been a bit askew, such as the caption on a French helmet riddled with bullet holes: "a steel helmet - evidence of the failure of the French".

I'd always (mistakenly) thought that the war between the Americans (and Australians) and the Vietnamese was between well equipped armies and guerillas. I hadn't realised that the Chinese and Soviets had equipped the Vietnamese too, and that it was a war between two well equipped sides. The Vietnamese had MiG fighter jets, tanks and anti-aircraft armaments. They shot down over 2,000 American aircraft. In addition they captured more aircraft when they took airfields along the way. In a funny kind of communist way, people can be heroes of the republic, but so can pieces of equipment! This MiG-21 fighter is a hero of the Vietnamese republic for shooting down 14 aircraft:

The museum also featured some war-based artwork. There were some paintings inside, and a few sculptures scattered around outside. One sculpture was a massive combobulation of different pieces of destroyed French and American aircraft. Below is a photo of just one jet engine amongst all the different parts:

Outside the museums, I had to tell a few enterprising locals that I didn't want to take a motorcycle back to the hotel, I'd much prefer a taxi. It was well after lunch time, and I was pretty hungry. After 2 weeks of having Vietnamese lunches I really really wanted a sandwich. Hence I used room service for the first time, and ordered a club sandwich and a coffee. It was pretty good : )