First Impressions I

We’ve been in Norway for a couple of days now, and I’m excited to get some impressions down while they’re fresh.

Cleaner and greener

Oslo Gardermoen airport comes on strong with the eco-chic aesthetic, slapping you with a wall of moss and vascular plants as you first disembark. It’s lovely and inviting and tells a strong story, but the hidden key to making a display like this work is hot glue. I promise I wasn’t picking the wall apart (literally or critically).

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Gathering Moss” spends many words on the complex ecological requirements of moss ecosystems, and this seemed a dubious climate for delicate plants. I was able to non-invasively confirm they used the same plasticky secret sauce mentioned in Kimmerer’s discussion of a different, distant, and altogether more tragic moss display.

Moss mural aside, Oslo is wildly clean, and seems to try hard to keep things green. Imagine yourself standing outside on the curb at an airport, when you realize:

• the air smells great. like the sea, and the woods, and the wet green world. at the airport.
• there aren’t many cars, they’re all small and practical, and many are hybrid or plug-in electric. Even the Ferrari crossover SUV is a hybrid here. So weird.
• you can see the rail line to the city center, but you can’t see the train platform because it’s too close to the terminal. It’s actually more convenient to get there than it is to reach the parking lot (which is still very convenient).

The typical Oslo-mobile seems to be a sporty-looking hatchback. 4x4 is common. Diesel, hybrid, and EVs are everywhere.

European wealth and grace

Oslo’s nasjonalteatret is calm and quiet at 10:00 PM. You step out of the metro into rose-colored twilight, and stroll up wide pedestrian ways through a rich green park to the hotel. The architecture is lovely. Mostly, though, I see ferns unspooling their fiddleheads in busy garden beds. I try to keep from stumbling, all giddy on the lilac perfume in the air. People walk, and sit, and admire sculpture. They eat fast food and laugh in this park until after the darkness settles in, and it sure takes its sweet time about it. The city is unbelievably peaceful.

There are no homeless people here, despite the warm spring night. None. And I wonder where they are - where they sleep, and eat, and live their lives, because I don’t know cities without homeless people and I’m looking for the municipal hot glue that keeps things looking pretty. And how many generations of wealth disparity does it take to build the palaces and townhomes and gingerbread pensions and slate-roofed schools and towering churches and libraries and government buildings and museums that are this part of the city. And who actually lives here? Do normal people, with normal jobs live here? And how? Because it’s magical.

Coffee and sunshine

On day one in Oslo, there was no garbage anywhere. When we opened our back-alley dumpster-view window at Cochs Pensjonat, the breeze that blew in was inexplicably fresh. Everything was in its place.

H picked up a stomach bug from the neighbors the day before we left, so we took our sweet time stumbling down to the cafe on the corner. There is unreasonable pleasure to be had in eating a sweet roll and drinking a hot mug of something on a chestnut-shaded cobblestone corner in the sun. The local corovids all seem to agree. It’s a brilliant May morning, clear and warm and fresh, and for a moment I can’t imagine why I would ever go anywhere else in the world.

First friends

• First bird: magpie from the shuttle window
• First mammal: mouse in the Slottsparken shadows
• First water-buddy: 1”-long transparent shrimp-guys in the harbor east of Bygdøy
• First pastry: Kardemommebollar with rough-ground cardamom seeds on top
• First museum: Norsk Folkemuseum - so much history! so many log cabins!