I jinxed us by posting about the great weather we had in Oslo. The next day it turned bad, heavily overcast, cold, windy with drizzle and the threat of heavier rain.
We decided to go to the Fram ship museum. It is a pretty interesting story, and the original ship Fram is in the museum and you can board it and look around. The Norwegian explorer Fridjof Nansen commissioned it in an attempt to reach the North Pole. When some wreckage from the USS Jeanette, which was lost in the ice north of Alaska, washed up in Svalbard, the northern islands of Norway, this gave Nansen an idea. He theorized the ice flowed across the Arctic ocean, and if you got stuck in the ice in the correct spot it would carry you across the North Pole. Many people thought he was crazy, because even if the theory was true, no ship could withstand the incredible pressure of miles of ice. The Fram was designed for this journey. It was built extremely strongly, but the key design feature was its round smooth hull, which cause the ship to be squeezed up and out of the ice when the pressure increased instead of being crushed.
Nansen and 11 other crew set out on the Fram in 1893 with 5 years of supplies. They successfully got stuck in the pack ice and slowly drifted north. After 18 months Nansen felt like the path of the drift wasn't going to take them close to the pole so he and one other man took a team of sled dogs and left the ship to head for the pole. They had to turn back before reaching it, but they were to that point the closest anyone had come to the pole. In 1896, after three years bring stuck in the polar ice, the Fram came out near the Svalbard islands.
After looking over this relatively small ship that they were trapped in the ice with for 3 years, Yanmei told me that she would like to do this type of adventure if she were born in that time period. This is one of the most flabbergasting things I have ever heard her say. She hates the cold, and she feels cold if the temperature is below 25C. She wore a sweater in Egypt for goodness' sake. Yet she wants to be stuck in the Arctic ice for three years!
The museum had a simulation of what it was like, which I'd explored while she was using the restroom. Basically it was a meat locker that is decorated to look like the inside of a ship, with shifting groaning decks, it is a little dark and spooky, then you can exit through a small tunnel of ice. To see how serious she was about doing something like this, I sent Yanmei in and then waited by the exit. After a couple minutes she came out and she wasn't too happy with me. 🙂 I couldn't help but laugh. Later she could laugh at herself.
After the museum we braved the weather to take a ferry back to the center of town.
The next day we had the train from Oslo to Copenhagen. There is no direct train, you have to switch in Gothenburg, Sweden. We had two options, take the 7am train and have 6.5 hours in Gothenburg to look around, or we could take the 1pm train and have a short 30 minute layover. Based on the weather forecast for heavy rain in Gothenburg we decided to sleep in and skip the whirlwind tour. Of course when we got up the next day it was sunny in Oslo again.
Anyway the 1pm train turned out to be overcrowded. There was no reserved seating, and there were are large number of school girls lining up to board. Several groups in different uniforms, so I guess there was some girls soccer tournament or something they were all going to. I wanted to get seats on the coastal side, but we couldn't and we were lucky to get seats at all. Some people were stuck sitting in the corridors. There were some nice views on the coastal side but we weren't able to get any pictures. Actually the landscape reminded me a lot of Northern Ontario from our train trip across Canada last summer.
When we got to Gothenburg it wasn't raining, but the weather wasn't as nice as Oslo and we could see a lot of water on the ground, so maybe we made the correct decision. We just had time to use the restroom and grab a sandwich at the Subway in the station before boarding the train for Copenhagen. The toilet cost 10 Swedish Crowns to use, and I had no Swedish currency. Luckily they accepted credit cards. The guy was very serious about it, asking to see my ID and the whole deal, for a ~1€ charge. I really don't like the pay toilets in international train stations. They are common in Europe. The one in Gothenburg is the first one I've seen that takes credit cards, so I was lucky. Normally even if you thought ahead and have some local cash, you won't have the coins needed to pay the fee. Sometimes there are change machines and sometimes there aren't. Overall it is a bad first experience for people arriving in the country.
Anyway we got on the train to Copenhagen. I thought there might be some good pictures when we crossed the bridge from Sweden to Denmark, but all I got was the wind turbine farm.
We arrived in Copenhagen on time at 8:40pm and got to our hotel shortly thereafter.
-David
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