Cool Oslo - Part II (April 2014), Oslo, Norway

It was a grey day. It didn’t start to rain just yet but you knew that it would. We hurried up from our hotel to the quayside in front of the City Hall where we boarded our boat to Bygdøy peninsula to visit the museums. It was the museums day.

We were among the first passengers on the boat that morning and we arrived even before the Fram museum opened its doors. So we had a quick look around and then entered the museum named after the Fram; a ship made exclusively for polar expeditions. Yes, there’s a huge ship in the museum and you can come on board the ship and explore its cabins too. The Fram still holds the records for sailing farthest north and farthest south. Why was it used and when? Please read the museum’s explanation : „She was used on three important expeditions: with Fridtjof Nansen on a drift over the Arctic Ocean 1893-96, with Otto Sverdrup to the arctic archipelago west of Greenland - now the Nunavut region of Canada - 1898-1902, and with Roald Amundsen to Antarctica for his South Pole expedition 1910-12.˝ Impressive, right?

We almost had the entire museum to ourselves so we leisurely saw all the exhibits which show how life looked like onboard the Fram. There’s also a fun polar simulator and a big scary polar bear. Of course, there’s a café and a museum shop too. You reach the other polar ship Gjøa which is famous for being the first ship to navigate the whole of the Northwest Passage by going under the tunnel which connects the two museum’s buildings. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).