It's a ferry boat. One of many at the pier.
The ferry ride to Bygdøy was, fortunately, short and uneventful. The Norwegian Folk Museum is a large plot of land (I forgot how many acres, but it's many!) where they brought something like 150 old buildings from around Norway (or maybe just old Oslo, I can't remember, sorry!) and sort of constructed a village. There were some people in period clothes, doing demonstrations and explaining the history and such. I didn't take a ton of photos because the weather was pretty sketchy and it rained a fair amount of the time, but here's what I do have.
Corky could not resist getting on this tractor!
This was the Stave church. Pretty crazy!!
Mara's favorite thing, aside from the playground, which I
unfortunately don't have any pictures of, was the little house
where they were doing a demonstration of lefse - a traditional
Norwegian bread made from potato. Here it was pretty thick, but
when my mom and I make it for Christmastime, it's thinner, like a tortilla.
Anyway, Mara loved it and ate two whole pieces (in addition to her lunch! Lol)
Most of the buildings here were from the mid 1800s. They had both rural buildings and then a mini city. Mara got a lollipop from an old-fashioned drug store, but she fell asleep before she could finish it, so I did it for her. :) There was a dental museum full of extremely creepy old dental equipment. It made me very glad for our advancements in technology. There were some mannequins in the dental museum that Mara did NOT like. There was a farm with animals which we all enjoyed. The pigs were really cute, although they smelled horrible. Mara liked the chickens, much to my dad's dismay (he grew up on a chicken farm with 5,000 chickens and doesn't much care for them anymore unless they're on his plate) and we all enjoyed the fjord horses.
As we returned to the dock to await the ferry back to Oslo, Mara fell asleep.
Just a little funny side story: Mara sleeps deeply and sometimes when she is awakened before she's ready, she can get a little combative. We had to wake her up to take her out of the stroller in order to get on the ferry and she was livid. She screeched and kicked and flailed for several seconds until she became fully awake. Poor kid (and poor mom, who got the brunt of the half-awake aggression).
When we arrived back on the pier in Oslo, the rain started in earnest. Up to this point it had just been sprinkling a little bit. We quickly ducked into a French bistro for dinner.
I had a little bit of a hard time choosing something to eat here.
The food was unfamiliar and nothing really sounded good, so Mara
and I ended up splitting a hamburger, which worked out fine.
I believe it was the following day that we went on several excursions. First, in the morning, the sun was shining so we headed down to the pier where there was a playground. It was supposed to rain later in the day so we decided to take advantage of the sun while we could, and Mara had been bugging us to take her to this park for a day or two.
After this, we went for a walk into the city to see the palace again and the parliament building. My mom and I had seen them on the day that we walked to the laundromat but Corky hadn't seen them at all. Since I'd already taken photos of both places, I didn't take any this day, but I did take a picture of Mara being entranced by a handpan player on the streets of Oslo!
The guy was really good, and very friendly.
We gave him several kroner both this day and
the next day when we saw him again. Mara liked him.
Since this post has already gotten pretty long and it's already 7:30am, I am going to cut it short and make a Volume 3 post. I have to go wake up my sleeping kid for preschool and my sleeping husband for work. (It seems that the dogs and I are the only ones who can get up on time. Lol!) Stay tuned for Volume 3 of the Norway adventures.
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