Two months ago, I took the train to Oslo. We were a whole crew, going to visit Hanna, my former classmate who just moved there to start a PhD. Half of my master’s class, renting a beautiful apartment in central Oslo for the weekend.
My first stop was Botanisk Hage, the Oslo university botanical garden, and I made most others in the group come with me. I don’t know if any of the others shared my love for greenhouses and flower beds, but it was a beautifully crisp, sunny afternoon with temperatures just below freezing, and the garden had no entrance fee. A perfect place and time for a stroll.
Mid-January in Oslo doesn’t offer much in the way of greenery, but the frost that covered the grass and branches made everything glimmer in the setting sun. The garden takes up an entire inner-city block, and has a hill in its center. The garden is mainly open grass and old groves of deciduous trees, flowerbeds and small ponds on the hillsides. I can imagine it being lush and full of flowers in late May. Now, the browns and gray-greens that ranged from moss and mint felt very tranquil. Like a breath of fresh air in the middle of the busy city center.
As for the greenhouses, they were more stimulating. Not large, no, quite small actually, and old. Two beautiful metal, wood and glass structures, one tropical with three separate wings, and the other a temperate palm house. When we first entered the wing with the water lily pond in the tropical green house, I could not take any photographs for at least 15 minutes. The humidity and heat made the lens get foggy, the difference from the outdoor freezing temperature and the artificial tropics inside being so extreme. It was a beautiful pond, though, so green, and the orchids in one of the other wings so weird, so inspiring. Breathing that air, carrying so many smells that you can basically taste it. I miss the tropics. That heat and the humidity, it feels like it makes breathing so much easier.
The Oslo botanical garden was small, but very well kept. I liked it a lot.
As for the rest of the weekend, I really liked Oslo. So much cool street art (it seems to be a Norwegian thing, it was the same in Bodø and on Lofoten. Tons of really impressive, original street art). Easy to walk through, nice mixture of architecture, cool bars. Expensive, yes, but so is Stockholm. However, what really made my Oslo weekend so memorable and magical, was the company I shared it with. The people in my former master’s programme are truly amazing, and we became such a great group during those two years, and this weekend reunion with half of them, and the Skyping we did with half of the absentees (calling in from Uppsala, England, Argentina and New Zeeland), made this a weekend so full of warmth and laughs and love, that it has carried me for months since.
Katja Malmborg 