Oslo Diaries: Ghost town

Having the city to ourselves during Easter in Norway

Oslo seems like a lovely place to spend the long Easter weekend, unless you actually live there. We’ve only been here a few hours and already it’s easy to see that the population of Oslo has taken their leave. The streets are quiet and empty, the restaurants mostly closed.

But we shouldn’t take it personally. Most of the people who live in Oslo use any free time they have to leave, a tour guide explains to us the next morning. The winters are so long and harsh that any time they can the whole lot of them decamp to Spain. In fact, he explains, he’s the only tour guide in his company still left in the city this weekend. He tries a wry smile but still doesn’t quite manage to look happy about being the one left holding the bag, the bag in this case being thirty or so tourists who aren’t in Spain but are here in Norway, in the drizzle, with him.

That’s another thing we didn’t take into account when booking a holiday to Norway in April. In London, April means that spring has sprung, just about. The daffodils are on their way up and the antihistamines are flying off the shelves. In Oslo, April is basically still winter. So, the Norwegians are in Spain, but the Brits are in Norway.

At least everything being closed means it’s harder to spend money. Norway is famously, or rather, infamously, expensive. Go to Norway and be prepared to sell a kidney on the black market when you get back home, or so most people seem to think. Ask a northerner (and this isn’t slander as I am one myself) about their trip to Norway and they are likely to go pale and start murmuring about the amount of krona they spent on two coffees and a pastry. They look like combat veterans remembering a particularly dicey encounter with some shrapnel.

There is some truth in this. Food is a little bit more expensive in Oslo, a little bit more expensive than food in London, anyway, another place the average northerner is liable to accuse of stealing all of their money for very little return. But the alcohol is where it gets truly pricey. Norwegians, being a rational, sensible lot, have noticed that booze isn’t that good for you, physically or mentally. To stop people drinking then they have made it incredibly expensive to do so. I’ve caught flights cheaper than a round of drinks in Oslo. Then again, so have many of the Norwegians, straight to Spain where they can get a sangria without needing to re-mortgage their hideously expensive houses.

And their houses aren’t just hideously expensive. They’re hideous. Not all of them of course. The nicer parts of the city are still nice, and there are still some older buildings worth a second look. But the vast majority of Oslo is built from the glass-and-steel-box school of architecture. And if it’s not made out of glass or steel, then the building is often made of that most beautiful of materials, concrete. Oslo is city-wide proof that a country discovering bucket-loads of oil in its territory is great for the wealth of the place, if not for its beauty.

I’m not making Oslo sound that great, I admit. We need some plus points. The public transport here is second-to-none. You can’t move for trams in this city, which come regularly and are, at least compared to everything else here, reasonably priced. Almost as ubiquitous as the trams are the pastries. The Norwegians all being gone just means more pastries for those of us who are here. And it feels safe, even at its quietest. Commit a crime in Norway and you could be over the border in Sweden before anyone has even realised, never mind alerted the authorities. The country must be doing something right if everyone manages to be so happy (Norway is always near the top of the World Happiness Index) despite it being cold, dark, wintry and expensive for more than half the year.

These are all quite practical things, though, so I should point out something more tangible for those just wanting to see the place, to be a tourist. On our first night we venture up to the Akershus Fortress. It sits in the city centre and has amazing views over the water and the Oslofjord, a group of islands where the city’s residents have their summer homes.

The sky is burning bright yellow and orange as the sun dips below the horizon. We have the place, and the view, almost to ourselves. The weather is clear and even slightly warm. I’ll never be a person who will get up to see the sunrise regularly, but I’m glad as I stand here that I’m the sort of person who will hang around for the sunset. And glad that despite it being an expensive, quiet, Easter April weekend in Oslo, there’s still this. They can still do sunsets in Norway, at least.

And they haven’t yet figured out a way to charge you to see it.

---

Thank you so much for reading! A quick request - if you liked this please don’t forget to press like. It helps other readers find Tom Fish Is Away.