A Good Tourist in Oslo?

 Every adventure should include a messenger who provides the lesson of your visit.

Oslo is on a hill. From the central train station, it climbs steadily. Four miles up is Frogner Park— a grand stretch of green. Advancing to the pinnacle, we passed a mass of bronze, iron, and granite, naked, ordinary, people across the age span, with distinctive Nordic features. Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943), is the sculptor responsible for the statues depicting several thousand figures.

Vigeland Park struck me as unusual in three ways: 1. A single artist was given a claim to fill the entire park with their muse. 2. The statues are modern. 3. The people depicted are not kings or princesses. The statues include individuals, small groups, and spires of dozens of bodies. Some of the groupings made me uncomfortable. Is something abusive going on between this naked adult and this naked child? Others felt like freedom, especially children playing with each other and elders with sinking bodies in various forms of embrace.  I saw figures breathing together. To make stone breathe is genius.

Playing among the statues were people from southern climates speaking Arabic, Spanish, or Nepalese, escaping July heat waves.  Not used to the Norwegian cool, they dressed in jackets and hats—a contrast to the statues that made me smile.

Further down the hill was the Supreme Court building, which stands out in modern Oslo due to its age and grandeur. Facing it was a Palestine solidarity encampment. A Palestinian-Norwegian man staffed a large tent. Inside were exhibits, tea, and fruit, and a dozen chairs in a circle. He told me, “We had sixty tents all winter and spring. Right now everyone is on vacation. It will grow again in August. During the spring, Norwegian school children joined us and drew pictures to send to children in Gaza.”

 

On May 28, Norway joined 143 other nations in recognizing Palestinian statehood. Ireland and Spain did so at the same time, chipping away at US  hegemony over Europe’s Middle East policy. The Oslo activists focused on getting the Bank of Norway to divest pension funds away from Israel. There was a precedent: the Bank had divested from Russian assets in 2022 after Putin invaded Ukraine.

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At the foot of the Court building was a circle of Muslim Uyghurs, demanding that China stop detaining and oppressing them. It took me a moment to think of why they might choose a park in Norway for such a protest.  I remembered the Nobel Prize, a chance for people everywhere to advance local causes to the global stage.

The Nobel Prize Museum is another mile down the hill and closer to the water. For $16 a ticket, we learned of the life of late bloomer, Alfred Nobel, the son of a wealthy man, a loser who failed at all he endeavored.  He was also unsuccessful in love, but the woman he desired became a lifelong friend. Bertha von Suttner was a peace activist with a radical bent who convinced  Alfred to do something for world peace with his treasure. The woman behind the prize.

There was a room where you could press buttons, learn about each prize winner, and wonder at the contradictions. Martin Luther King and Henry Kissinger—close in the chronology— and a galaxy between the deserving one and the war criminal.. I thought about the money–life-changing for the likes of King, meaningless for Kissinger.  The great part of the museum was the bookstore.

Around the same latitude is the Norwegian National Museum of Cultural History the goofiest national history museum I ever did see.  The exhibits of Egyptian mummies, peepholes with which to observe farm implements, rooms displaying ancient coins, and quotes about how money can’t buy happiness, had no rhyme or reason for this chronologically-blinded visitor.  It has treasures, surely. It’s displays seemed more like a small town museum with an everything-we-got and-the-kitchen-sink- thrown together. I did like the way they gave the top floor to Master’s degree students and I enjoyed the bookstore, which had a pleasant table with seats and cheap cups of tea that my sore body greatly appreciated.  I was tired. Go see for yourself what you think.

At the bottom of the hill, along the coast, we passed two empty iron chairs with no seat, a moving homage to Jews lost, 1940-45. On the water side were bars, a line of taxis, and a stadium with a large screen playing the Spain-England soccer match.

As we rounded the bend at the bottom of the hill we passed a cruise ship on the dock. There,  we met our seer, our muse, our messenger.

He accosted us.

“I hate tourists like you! I bet you’re from  the Netherlands.”

I hesitated a minute. Technically, yes, we had just come from the Netherlands, and we have no other home….

I answered, “No…worse. We are from the US.”

He seemed not to hear me.

“People come from the Netherlands because they are worried about the rising sea levels. They buy up land on our hillside until there is nothing left.” He glanced back at me, “You, from America must come to escape the chaos. You ride in on cruise boats and pollute our waters.”

He pointed at the horizon. “See those two buildings? Those are all that is left of old Oslo. The rest has been gobbled up by tourists.”

I considered explaining we were just walking past the boats. We weren’t on them, but I figured we deserved his shellacking in other ways.

“Norway is supposed to be so rich,”  he went on. “The government is sitting on billions. We see none of it. Everything goes to the tourists.”

He walked on ahead of us, but a few moments later he encountered a young woman, well dressed, who appeared to be African, crying on the phone with her father, speaking English. “You leave me stuck here in Oslo.”

The man hesitated. We caught up with him and hesitated too.  Suddenly we were on the same team, seeing another human in distress, not knowing how to help.  She stepped away from us, showing fear.  The three of us moved on, exchanging a word with each other, hoping she would be alright.

At the train station, we noticed a leaflet plastered on a post that said:

Cruise Tourists: We hate you. Become a good tourist.

What is a good tourist? I don’t know for sure, and I know we’re not there. (I use the phrase ironically in this title.)

In Oslo, they would like people to stop cruising. They pollute the water and transform the waterfront. Cruise ships support international companies. They would like us to spend locally at independent businesses.

They would like us to not buy up their choicest land, or stay in places that don’t raise the rent for them.

They would like us to ride trains and buses. They would like us to know Norway is extracting oil in the Arctic, destroying their northland to fuel our airline adventures, and  —contrary to popular perception—the government is not spending their oil fortune on the people as much as they need to.

With our seer’s eyes I looked out on the port. The glass sculpture on the water, designed to look like a sailing ship, it looked garish. The opera house with its roof that you can climb looked like a tourist gimmick. The high-rising Munch Art Museum looked positively ugly, blocking the view of people living in apartments in the back of it.

We came back another day. This time we followed other tourists to the top of the roof of the Opera House. Then, for sun relief, we took the elevator to the 13^th floor of the Munch Museum. Oslo was hard on our budget. Selfish as tourists can be, we skipped the art ticket, sat near the fancy bar and bought nothing, mooched free rest, free bathroom, free water from the bathroom sink, and a free view of the harbor, We were high enough to see the whole fjord and green hills surrounding Oslo.

On our last day, on our way to our seven-hour train to Bergen, Norway, where we would catch a plane to London, we had an hour to picnic on the port. The weather was perfect: cool,  partly cloudy,  no rain. We watched children swimming at the beach in front of the Ferris wheel. Sun and clouds, boats and buildings gave the water a painterly look. The glass sculpture resembling a sailboat that seemed garish a week ago was changing colors, shimmering and blinding when the sun hit it, mossy when a cloud drifted by. I loved it.

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Across the water a parade of runners and bicyclists passed, holding green, red, black, and white flags and shouting Free Palestina!