The Most Expensive City in the World, OSLO, NORWAY!

Sunrise from our cabin

Monday we sailed into the beautiful city of Oslo, Norway after a rather choppy couple of hours in the early morning while crossing the opening to the North Sea.  It is a flat and beautiful approach to the city through a fjord wooded on both sides and dotted with colorful houses.  At the beginning of the fjord we picked up a pilot to guide us through the three-hour passage into Oslo, which is also a tiny fishing village.  We were not scheduled to arrive until noon so we had a leisurely brunch in the Grand Dining Room, which was awesome and then up on deck to observe our arrival while pounding out our 3 miles on the fitness track.

Entering and floating up the Fjord

It was like glass!

Jill and her dad pause from their round and round walk

Gordon plays ping pong, while

Jill and I lounge and watch.

A tiny lighthouse

The Oslo Opera House

The city of Oslo

Approaching the castle

Tall ships!

A Viking Ship (sorry, my pictures kinda got messed up here)

Check out the awesome blue sky!

Back to the Viking Ships, beautiful.

The ships on display here were used for burial

Oslo is beautiful and is THE MOST EXPENSIVE CITY IN THE WORLD!  Really.  Our shipped docked right in front of an old castle on a hillside and very close to town.  We got off and hopped a small ferry over to a peninsula of land to go to the Viking Ship museum.  There are three ships inside dating to 960A.D., which were burial ships.  One of the vessels had an elderly woman and a younger woman buried in it and they have a case, which has what bones were found inside the burial sight with a shadow of what the size of the women would have been.  They were very, very short and stout individuals both the men and women.   It was an interesting museum.  I now know quite a lot more about the Vikings.  They were not very nice!

Many of the houses on the coast had these glazed black tile roofs.  Really pretty.

The Grand Hotel

The Castle at night

You can just see the moon rising over the city and castle

Later we walked the old city enjoying architecture and parks and fountains.  Gordon headed up to the Castle while Jillian and I stayed along the seafront and found a restaurant for a quick bite to eat before our late sail-away at 9:00pm.  We spoke to our server at length.  He is from Sweden and told us that average temps in Oslo range from 27 celcius to minus 25 celcius!  Ouch! 

Our Suite had the perfect sail-away view of the Castle and city at night and it was quite a magical evening.

Yesterday was our second cruise day and we left Oslo to head into the North Sea.  This could have been a dicey day, as the North Sea is not known for calm smooth sailing but it was good.  We dined on the back of the ship outdoors for breakfast under partly cloudy skies with just a light sweater on and enjoyed watching seagulls flying behind the ship.  We walked our three miles again and went through a required immigration station on-board.  We read and napped and then dined in Jacques.  Jill threatened us with Karaoke in the lounge but she petered out!  Today we arrived in Amsterdam, a port Gordon and I’ve wanted to see for some time.  Red-light district, coffee houses, a tour of the Anne Frank house but that story and tomorrow in Brugges will have to wait.  Running out of our horribly expensive and lame internet minutes!  Suffice to say we had a great time and have a lot of fun memories of Amsterdam.

PS I haven't been proofing these so please forgive punctuation and spelling errors!