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Oslo is the capital of Norway.
Wrap up warmly. Wear your woollies, your thermal underwear, and your ski clothes. The Norwegian weather is changeable and they have a saying, there's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.
What To Do and See
1 Guided walking tour past the sculpture of a huge cat.
For an overview of buildings, areas, and scenery, extra or alternative tour options, depending on the weather, include a hop on hop off bus, and other land and sea vehicles including bikes, and boats, and a side trip fjord tour
2 Munch museum. The man who painted The Scream and many more.
3 The National Museum, on the waterfront, contains The Scream.
4 Viking ship museum
5 Kon-tiki Museum. (Thor Heyerdahl's boat named after the old name of an Inca god.)
6 Food tour including reindeer, moose, fishcake, whale, waffles.
On a press tour to Finland I opted for steak instead of reindeer, thinking the reindeer would cost more to my hosts, but reindeer meat was readily available, and beefsteak was rarer and more expensive. So check the menu prices. The local speciality might be dearer or cheaper.
7 Royal palace, huge place, neo-classical with gardens.
8 Oslo Opera House. Rooftop walk, suggested sunset.
9 Henrik Ibsen Museum. Playwright.
10 Vigeland Sculpture Park (Vigelandesparken) - sculptures of Gustav Vigeland. Highlights are the boy, the stages of life. (You might wish to visit a second sites of interest, the museum, where he worked in the attic. A third location is the museum of his brother, which contains more artworks and a mural.)
Some of the locations and tours are offered as a two part package ticket.
Weather , Sun, Snow, Rain Skiing
Going north, you could see the Northern Lights in winter. Experience long hours of daylight in summer, but only 6 hours of daylight in winter. Skiing in some areas in winter, swimming in summer.
Flights from the UK to Norway go from London, Heathrow, London City Airport, and Gatwick.
Useful Websites
Flights
https://www.kayak.co.uk/stays?lang=en&utm_campaign=Destination+-+IS+-+Iceland+-+Country
https://www.expedia.co.uk/Flights-Search?trip=roundtrip&leg1=from:LON,to:OSL,departure:
Norway
https://www.visitnorway.com/things-to-do/art-culture/art/museums/the-national-museum-of-norway/
Oslo
https://www.localcityguides.com/en/oslo/itineraries/oslo-in-one-day-top-attractions-day-1
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Oslo
https://wikitravel.org/en/Oslo
https://www.visitacity.com/en/oslo/activities/all-activities
Photos
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Works_by_Gustav_Vigeland
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kon-Tiki,_Kon-Tiki_Museum,_2019_(03).jpg
Updated Monday March 30th.
Yes, it happens on the last Sunday in March in Britain. Sunday so that it disrupts work as little as possible. So you 'lose' an hour's sleep if you wake up when your clocks and alarms are set to yesterday's time. The clocks change after midnight on Saturday, too late for most people to reset their clocks.
Luckily we have one clock set to radio controlled time which automatically resets itself. But you have to check your cooker, laptop. car clock, and watches.
How do you re-set your watch? Either pin the instructions on a kitchen or office notice board or look up online.
Most watches are similar. By trial and error you can find out what happens when you fiddle with each control. Write it down.
Updating Your Watch
On my watch, which has four control buttons, the top left button is the light.
Look closely, with a magnifying glass, and my watch has text in tiny letters saying which button is which.
The left resets the time, minutes and seconds, but you have to press it in.
America, Canada, and Australia and New Zealand, as well as Europe, are on different time zones.
To end on a light note, somebody wrote a post saying they had lost an hour and asking where to find it. I told them, 'You are very lucky. I just had a birthday and lost a whole year.'
Useful websites
https://manualsguru.com/?ads=true&msclkid=c5a67bccd1141e005ec31205dff0684f
https://www.wikihow.com/Set-a-Digital-Watch
https://www.thebesttimetovisit.com/south-africa/time
Please share links to your favourite posts.
Old buildings burn down. Why? Many causes have been reported.
Natural causes. Broken glass is heated by the sun's rays. Dry wood burns more easily. Rubbish collects and becomes a fire risk.
Squatters wire up electricity unsafely. They light camp fires to cook. They want to heat themselves and the building in hot weather. They light fires to create light.
Animals chew through wiring. This happened to my friends' home when they were on holiday.
Rats eat wiring. Rats ate wiring in my car in London.Why? To sharpen their teeth, like cats. Because they don't know if something is edible until they try eating it. (Our son, as a toddler, ate sand on the beach, thinking it was sugar. A nasty surprise!)
Don't the animals know something hard is not edible? No. Nuts are hard. Tasty nuts are hidden inside hard shells.
Sometimes down and outs build fires to keep warm. Children set fires for fun. for the spectacle. Fire-fighters want the credit for rescue. Arsonists enjoy the power. Owners want to claim insurance. Owners want to clear the land quickly to replace with modern, higher, buildings they can sell. Burning is quicker and cheaper than paying for demolition. You cannot get permission to destroy, and/or it takes weeks of waiting. Finally, electricians using sparks to repair, rebuild, replace parts, accidentally set fire.
How can you find the cause?
In Poland I visited the old quarter of Warsaw. The basement restaurants were clean and new. When I asked, I was told that what was destroyed in the war, had been rebuilt in the old style.
The same applies to other historic old styles. I was impressed. We don't do that in England. Or do we? More often we replace the old with new.
But now we have regulations protecting listed buildings. Renovations must be done in similar style.
In England we built new buildings in new places copying old styles. Victorian buildings were often mock Tudor, black and white, a style favoured for some semi detached housing estates.
In Italy I was shown buildings with frontages which were Palladian style. I had never heard of Palladian style. But when I saw it, I recognized it immediately. Two or four or more columns at the front, not just over the doorway, but up two stories or more, to a flattened triangle across the whole roof area.
In the USA and UK, many public buildings are built this style. Called neo-classical. Such as a town hall, even a railway station. Many mansions and homes would be built in this style. In Washington DC, The White House.
In Thailand I visited the home of silk king, Jim Thompson. I learned that i that country, and other Asian countries (borders have changed over time), because of rainy season typhoons and flooding, houses were moved from place to place to avoid bad seasons and bad weather, or simply to relocate.
Instead of metal nails, traditional wooden plugs were used. Like modern Ikea furniture, the building could be flattened, compacted, made lighter, transported more easily. Re-assembled from a picture, or from memory of that building, practise on similar buildings, or skill and initiative. Like a jigsaw.
Buildings were traditionally built from prefabricated panels. Maybe they slotted in. Like modern sliding doors of glass, and sliding windows.
The living areas were above, on stilts, to avoid water below, where animals were kept.
Nowadays Singapore public housing can be built this style, around a central courtyard. Thai buildings had a flowering or perfumed tree in the middle of the courtyard to provide shade. A bit like cloisters in a European monastery, or the quad of colleges in Cambridge, England.
Singapore city, designed by British Raffles, had shaded five foot ways to shade pedestrians (as well as the shops and shophouses) along streets of shops.
Just hope you don't end up with an extra plank or wooden plug, wondering, where did this go? Will my building fall down without this piece!
Singapore early housing estates were built with speed. The story goes that the minister, who had no experience of house building, was told to submit a plan by the end of the year. Instead he started building straight away. At the end of theyear his ony plan was to conitnue cosntructing equally quickly!
In Japan, where historic and important buildings suffer from earthquakes, old buildings are replaced by the same style building, using the construction blueprints which are preserved elsewhere.
Plutarch's ship of Theseus Puzzle
If you replace a ship's planks one by one, at which point is it new? The planks are used to create the building elsewhere, and new planks copy the original indistinguishably in the old location, which is the original building?
One might pose the same question about the Parthenon. If the reproduction is on the old site, but the original is in the British museum. Do the tourists really care which is old and which is new? Children might not know nor care.
Do we need an original photo, death mask, skeleton? Or will an AI image work as well?
I want the original skeleton of a living being because it contains DNA. It could prove murder, inheritable disease, lifestyle, diet. Or even create a clone.
With cloned animals and plants more questions are raised.
Useful Websites
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15686631/Absolute-inferno-Grade-II-building.html
What food can you take to hosts who are Jewish or a dinner party where one of the guests eats kosher?
If all else fails, ask.
A year or two ago I had to attend a festive Jewish occasion and knew the hosts were strictly kosher. My solution was to order wine from a shop supplying kosher wine. But what if they don't drink, are driving, and say they already have wine?
Pesach, or Passover, around Easter time, adds another layer of opportunities coupled with restrictions, because of the ban on leavened food, no bread, only matzah, and this affects cakes and biscuits. Your supermarket may have stocks of wines and food labelled kosher for Passover.
Another place to look is a mini supermarket or gift shop which specialises in Jewish or kosher products. The assistant can probably help you to find something suitable in their shop or direct you to another nearby shop.
You can often buy kosher chocolates or cake from a supermarket or an Israeli restaurant or kosher salt beef bar. Just ask. Or look online.
I recently was at a lunch party and was surprised to see that one of the guests who kept strictly kosher at their home had brought Green & Black's chocolates which had no kosher symbol or Hebrew or English wording saying that the product was kosher.
I was told that the main concern for a Jewish guest would be whether the chocolates contained gelatine. Gelatine is an animal product. (Although there are non animal substitutes). What could contain gelatine? Jelly babies? Turkish Delight? (That is the brand name now used in the UK for the Greek and Turkish and other countries' confection of that style).
Some wines have the debris removed with egg white which attaches to bits of twig and grape skin so that it clumps together, flats or sinks?, and can be removed.
My informant additionally told me, "Almost all chocolates imported from the USA, US brands, are kosher. Look for the symbol or two letters OU, O for Orthodox."
Now you know what to ask about.
I asked a hostess if she would prefer food, drink, flowers, a pot plants, a piece of clothing, such as a scarf, or an accessory such as a scarf ring or ear-rings. She said, chocolates, kosher for Passover chocolates.
When I tried googling, I got lots of chocolates, not listed as kosher. I could just check
for kosher food, and kosher for Passover. That brought up lots of offers of matzah/matzoh.
Matzah
Also chocolate covered matzah. I had tried that previously and did not like it. I preferred matzoh on its own, as a savoury. The chocolate did not seem the best milk chocolate, more like cheaper cooking chocolate, based on non milk fat, or chocolate flavour, or different proportions.
It was an interesting novelty. But, although one person was polite and said it was okay, nobody was keen on it.
Another website, Exquisite chocolates, said they were closed until a date in April after the event. Buying food for a kosher even on the way there is risky. You might find the kosher restaurant or shop is already closed.
I once found that a branch of Tesco had curtained off the kosher section during the sabbath, before the Friday evening meal I was attending. Sabbath, starting like Xmas eve the night before, comes in around sunset, earlier in winter. In summer the sabbath, shabbat in Hebrew, goes out, finishes, later on Saturday in summer.
I saw offers of hampers, beyond my budget, containing large numbers of small items, all of which were just cheap items, unexciting. Fine for a school. Nut nothing impressive and luxurious for a well to do hostess who had spent a week cleaning the entire house and removing all previous food.
A Discovery programme had proved, at least to me, that the origin of the festival was one event, or several, in which a rainy season had made stores of cereal, for bread, to go mouldy, leading to food poisoning. The contaminated food, would kill off the first born child, given double portions of bread.
If I remember rightly, the programme said that the favoured firstborn would get a double portion.
Why did this not affect others? Bread was only part of the diet of adults. In a shortage, women would not receive it, only the firstborn adult male. Bread was not given to children breastfeeding to the age of four.
The consumption of contaminated cereal would lead to what was known in the USA in previous centuries as St Vitus's dance.
Hence the using up of old flour and food in pancakes for lent. If you go to a kosher shop, before they close for Passover, you can ask them for chocolates or sweets which are kosher for Passover.
The simplest solution is to go to a kosher shop, before they close for Pesach, and ask for kosher for Passover chocolates or sweets.
I like halva. You can get variations, such as chocolate covered halva.
You can find kosher food in a shop in a synagogue or kosher school complex. They sell what looks like an Easter egg, a kosher surprise, like a kinder surprise, a chocolate egg with a small toy inside, such as tiny spinning top. My grand0daughter was given one at school where a (Jewish) child who had a birthday, and his mother had bought a chocolate egg for every child in his class of thirty children, instead of a cake. (Some schools have a cake every week from one child or another. Others ban cakes, because of peanut and egg allergies, crumbs attracting insects, time taken from lessons for cake cutting, parents who ban sugary cakes and snacks on health grounds.)
Useful Websites
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