Oslo- part 2

We finished off another rainy day at the Folkenmuseum- one of about a hundred 'open air' village/museums in the country. Seriously, every town seemed to have one. This one claimed to be the largest collection of historic homes and buildings, so we gave it a go. It had buildings from the 1700s to 1950s. We were worn out from the rain at the end and didn't spend much time at the more modern stuff. (don't ask why part 2 of Oslo is posting before part 1. It just sort of happened that way).

The highlight of the park is the Stave Church. They have these scattered about Norway. Once common across Scandinavia, only one survives outside Norway today. They mostly were built in the 1200s and used a vertical beam and plank construction type that allowed them to build so tall. We do still wonder why the Norwegians didn't get into stone buildings more as there was plenty of rock around, but I suppose no shortage of trees either. It does go to show though, if you want a lasting legacy- build in stone. There are tons of Roman and British buildings from antiquity, but not much in Norway besides these churches.

Just fantastic, detailed craftsmanship.

At one stop a lady engaged us in a game of Black Peter. Just like old maid, but the odd one out is a little boy who appears to have been playing in the coal bucket. You can also see not everyone is blond- just the kids in this scientific sample. We saw plenty of fair people, but plenty that weren't as well.

This is a barn from the 1940s. Still common across the countryside today we saw lots of barns like this with the upper level connecting to a hill (not hard to do in this topography) so you could drive a tractor right up. We saw our owners drive their tractor up, so the idea must work.

An assortment of buildings from late 1700s to mid 1800s. Quite similar to what we saw in Finland- often built up off the ground.

This building was amazing. They said it was common to have interior walls well decorated, but this was definitely an expensive home from mid 1800s. Fantastic artwork.

Ended at the general store and the Telemark collection of homes where this lady was making lefse. Rolling it out on a huge butcher table and then cooking on a very cool round stove, with a clean round top- just like lefse griddles today!

She was a great source of lefse knowledge and is where we learned the difference between flatbread/potato lefse, and sweet/thick lefse- which is what she was making. She said the flat, potato kind was a mainstay for how they ate all their food. Anyone who's made it knows there is a great degree of skill to come up with a successful product. 'Lefse ladies' would travel from farm to farm and stay for a few days making huge amounts of lefse which would then be stored and used over the next six months. Generally they'd have a lefse lady come two times a year.

She also said, while butter and sugar may taste good, they wouldn't have used sugar as it was too expensive. Thus the sweet lefse. It puffs up to maybe a quarter inch thick and is just sweet enough you can eat it with plain butter (they flogged pieces for $5, which we gave in and bought even though everything in our minds was telling us a demo food should be free).

After the museum we did go shopping downtown, but had no luck finding anything 'Norwegian'. It was a bunch of chain stores and fairly uninteresting stuff. After our authentic meal at Subway we took the curvy road along the lake back to our cabin. A nice city and cool museums, but we liked the countryside better in general.