Min Sommer i Norge: Hallingdal & More

Before I talk about Hallingdal (the home of Rosmaling), I will mention a couple things about Friday. Firstly, I found out that I got an A on my Norwegian Literature midterm. I was very excited!! I got my haircut later early that afternoon and the my friends and I went on a tour of Akershus Fortress. It was very interesting and we got to go down into a room where canons were fired from. I would like to go back sometime and get a tour of the castle part. In the evening we went to see "Inception" at a theatre in Downtown Oslo and then I came back and packed.

On Saturday, I got up relatively early (7:00am) and ate breakfast and packed a matpakke. We left Blindern at 8:30am and we arrived a Vassfaret Bear Park a couple hours later. We saw lots of bears, moose, sheep, & goats. We also had a nice time walking up a big hill and picking lots of nice, sweet, and ripe blueberries. Apparently, the bears like them a lot!

After spending three hours there and eating our matpakke we made our way to the Hallingdal Folk Museum in Nesbyen. It was cool to see some really old houses, but the coolest thing to see was actually a house that was built in North Dakota for a Norwegian Immigrant and then it was moved it to Norway.

We left the museum and made our way up the mountain to the Hardanger Plateau where we stayed at the Fagerhøy Fjellstue. It was an amazing mountain resort where people stay during the winter to go skiing and during the summer to go hiking. It reminded me of the lodge in the movie "White Christmas." The rooms were so nice and I loved the sitting areas with the nice couches, lamps, wood walls and ceilings, and free coffee (something you don't see that often in Norway)! The lodge had some sheep and pigs next to a pond next to the lodge and there were also a lot of rabbits. They were huge!!

The next morning, I had lots of waffles -- something we don't get at Blindern. I also made a couple and packed them in my matpakke. We left at the leisurely time of 10:00am and got to the Fairytale Museum a little while later. The house was built by a lumber baron at the end of the 19th century and it was five stories high and 2000 square meters. There was a lot of art on display and some displays set up of Norwegian Fairy Tales. Overall, it was quite impressive.

After the Fairy Tale Museum, we drove for a few more minutes and went on the Krøderbanen, a steam train that took lumber from Krøderen to Vikersund where it was put on the river and floated down. I had never been on a steam train before to my knowledge and it was really cool and really slow -- only about 30 km/h or 19 mph.