Oslo Thus Far

So it's been a couple of days since we've made it in to Oslo. The flight as long, as expected but the sights of the fjords as we flew in were pretty breath taking. When we arrived we were welcomed by the norse, a generally polite and mellow people.

We notice almost immediately how expensive Norway is compared to the US. Coke's cost about 5 bucks and dollar menu items are close to 10 dollars, but we sucked it up and caught our 28 dollar train ticket into town. The train was super fast and pretty advanced, in fact many things here are. It's all technology we have, but don't implement unless you're rich.

On our first day, we checked in, got settled, then went to check out the conference center where IPY will be hosted. You can almost see the whole city and harbor from the top of the opera house, it was quite extraordinary.

The weather thus far has been really nice. Yesterday we went to the viking museum, which was awesome! On the way out there we got to see some of the geology in the region. It looked to be a uniformly heterolitic fine grained sandstone and mudstone unit with some evidence of bioturbation (sorry all you non-geology folk translation=a mixed rock)

The viking museum contained some of the oldest ships ever found, dating back to 700 to 800 AD. it went in detail about how to create a ship, which seems like a lot of work even with modern technology. The vikings would create the keel (using oak) then build up and around that, religiously leaving no voids. What's most impressive is that there were no blueprints or notes and all the measurements were taken by eye! The ships were designed to be beached easily as so the vikings could sneak on land fast, pillage then get back in the water fast. They were also used as "graveyards" for nobles and warriors alike, which is why many of them got preserved so well.

The decorations we saw were quite incredible as well. Incredible amounts of detail went into wood working and sail making as well as tapestry design. Silk linens and tapestries were woven with incredible detail which probably added in their preservation. Unfortunately, we weren't able to take photo's of the fabrics, so a woodwork picture will have to do:

After the viking museum, we went to the Museums of natural history for geology, paleontology and zoology. There we saw incredible minerals, and fossils comparable to the Smithsonian, I think. They even had a section on forams! The zoology museum was nice and had many taxidermied animals.