I think I know why A-ha, the most famous Norwegian band in history, wrote a song called “The Sun Always Shines On TV.” It’s because it never shines in Norway.
This morning—the day I had freed up to play tourist—the city was hit with a snowstorm. Not a big one, but enough to make things miserable for the locals—and the tourists, of course. But when am I ever going to be in Oslo again? I had to push on. Having been confined to the hotel and the venues in the surrounding six square blocks, I was a little anxious to get out for a look around. Call it pining for the fjords.
Several people had ordered me to visit Fronger Park, the city’s largest bit of green space and famous for its hundreds of statues of naked people. Hey, what better time to see that than in the middle of a blizzard.
Navigating the decidedly non-English-friendly ticket purchasing process for the tram system (ATTENTION TTC: THIS IS HOW YOU RUN A STREETCAR NETWORK! COME TO OSLO AND LEARN!), I ended up with a half-dozen crazies at Fronger Parken in the Vigelandsparken. Here’s what I saw.
Strange for such a prim and conservative nation, no? And is it just me being prudish, or are some of those statues a little creepy?
For lunch, I schlepped through the snow to the new opera house, a gorgeous building on the downtown fjord (Satisfaction), which features a very nice restaurant overlooking the water. Unsure of what to have, I ordered the mixed herring plate (Hey, like I said: When was I ever going to be back in Oslo.) I was delivered a plate featuring three types of pickled herring, each in their own little jar along with some raw onions, a bowl of mayonnaise and some black bread. It was fine, but my breath still smells like Opus the Penguin.
The rest of the afternoon was filled with record shopping (had to get that Bjorn Hellfuck album) and bumming around in a bookstore. I almost bought that coffee table book on Norwegian black metal because—well, because it was a coffee table book on Norwegian black metal. But at $100, it was a little too dear for my tastes.
The only seminar of the day that I was interested in seeing featured Steve Knopper, the author of Appetite of Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Culture.
Steve, a contributing writer to Rolling Stone and other major publications, turned out to be a really good dude. He joined me and three new friends for pizza at a place called Hell’s Kitchen. There was Tim from Scotland, Mathias from the Netherlands and, er, the beardy bloke from Iceland who works for a creative agency in New York was and was on his way to Milan for a pitch to Lamborghini). It turned into a fascinating international roundtable of music geekiness.
Fortified by thin crust pizza and stories of rock star excesses, it was time to crawl the clubs one last time.
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