Oh wow, that was...depressing

Today we went to the Munch Museum, Antiquities Museum and The National Gallery. When we left today it was cloudy and raining, so that set the mood for seeing works by Eduard Munch. For those of you who don't know a lot about Mr. Munch a lot of his work is very depressing to look at. At the Munch Museum we saw one of the copies of The Scream. I also saw a bunch of paintings about death, sickness and some landscapes. I read that 'Death of the Bohemian' is one of his more famous works after 'The Scream' and some other ones. The Bohemian one shows a man sitting on a bed slitting his wrist and his soul leaving his body. Sounds like an uplifting piece doesn't it? There is strict security there now because not too long ago there was an art heist there in broad daylight. The theives stole a copy of 'The Scream' and some other very valuable works. Also due to the heist they took down so many works. Marv said that when we arrived there we would see many paintings and wood cuts. There were no wood cuts and Marv said there wasn't even half the amount of works as there were last time he was there.

After we saw Munch we caught the subway to the Antiquties Museum. I enjoyed walking around there. We saw a few rooms on the vikings. There were lots of swords, chainmail and spearheads to look at. They also had some of the equipment the blacksmiths used and stuff they put on the horses when they rode them. In the Medival portion we saw MANY crucifixes and wooden church portals with some amazing wood work. Those people were talented! At one point I turned around to walk back out of one of the rooms and saw Jesus on the cross and the two robbers who were cricified with him by the ceiling; it was very interesting to see that. They were fairly large which was neat.

After walking around there we went to The National Gallery and saw more paintings. I wasn't too excited to go there. I'm really not a fan of Impressionist art and saw a LOT of that today. There were a few landscape pieces that were just beautiful to look at and seemed so real. One piece that stuck out to me was called "Oden's Hunt" (I think). It had Oden leading an army of Valkyrie and Thor raising his hammer in the middle of the charge. It was a very big piece and was probably my favorite.

For those of you at Luther, I saw Sarah Mauk a little while ago tonight. We walked around the train station and mall and talked. She had to catch a train back to school around 5 so I got to spend a couple of hours hanging out with her which was fun.

I cannot believe that we are almost done with the Oslo portion of our trip. We leave Oslo for Dublin Tuesday afternoon. We'll be spending about 10 days there then our trip is over.