Oslo, Norway. Part of our trip to Scandinavia in 2016 was going to Oslo. Here we met with Orkla, Statoil, and a publicly traded fertiliser company called Yara. We took the train from Stockholm. It took about five hours. Oslo is a nice mixture of the old and the new. The headquarters of Statoil, now called Equinor because they are embarassed to admit they are in the oil business, is architecturally cutting edge. Orkla’s headquarters were nice but a bit more pedestrian. Yara was just in an office building.
Our Airbnb put us in a lady’s garage apartment (we didn’t stay in a single hotel on the trip). There was a large hill behind the house where lived a number of rather large gophers. They seemed unafraid of humans. This bothered Adarsh, perhaps to the extent that it sort of affected his game while in Oslo.
One day I humped up the hill behind the house. The road went straight up. At the top of the hill there was an intersection and I turned left. Soon I saw to my left a large cemetery, which I entered at the gate. I went in and began looking at the graves, which were very old. All of a sudden, I came upon a very impressive monument. It was the grave of Henrik Ibsen, the playwright. I kept moving and soon found another grave, that of Edvard Munch, the painter of “The Scream”. I had happened on the oldest and most famous cemetery in Norway.
Norway is wealthy. Over the years they have accumulated what amounts to a severance tax on oil taken out of the North Sea. It has gone into a fund for the benefit of Norwegians which now amounts to well over a trillion dollars. For a country about the size and population of Kentucky.
The people seemed to be moving ahead, concerned with fitness and getting from point A to B. They were less affable, more driven.
An exception to this was the boyfriend of the woman that owned the house we were staying in. He was a big guy who worked on offshore platforms and liked to drink beer. We couldn’t keep up with him.
We went on from there to Bergen. And then we flew back to Stockholm. But prior to that we had gone to Helsinki. I’ll cover that next time.