September 20 – Oslo – Day 1

We arrived again around 8 am.  After breakfast, we headed out, on our own, to the ferry to various museums.  We missed the 9:55 and during the wait for the next, we went into the Nobel Peace Prize Museum.  We went through the bottom detailing various current human rights issues and then it was time to head to our ferry, so we missed the exhibits on such Nobel Laureates as Yassir Arafat, Al Gore and Barack Obama.

The ferry took us across to the Viking Ship Museum.  The Vikings buried major kings and queens in actual full sized, previously used, ships.  These were uncovered in the early 20th century, and put back together.  The displays included many items which were interred with the ship.  There were also a couple of short videos on the topic.  The portion of the world that the Vikings included in their trade routes was amazing.

We then walked to the Norwegian Folk Art museum and looked at a bunch of different items over the centuries from the 1100’s to the 1850’s.  There also was an outdoor museum to walk around which had many typical Norwegian houses, farms, etc.

We then stopped for tea/coffee and then headed out to the Kon Tiki Museum.  It had the original Kon Tiki Raft as well as the RA II ship which Thor Heyerdahl sailed from Africa to the West Indies.  Very interesting place and person.  DNA has kind of blown away most of his assumptions, but they did find some similarities between the DNA of native South Americans and Easter Islanders.  We then took the ferry back to the ship for a late lunch.

After that, tried to get to the Norwegian Resistance Museum, but it closed at 4 PM, so we walked back to the ship.  Tomorrow is our last day in Norway so we went and got our VAT refund before leaving.