Sunshine to Snowstorms and Everything In Between: Living History

Our last day in Oslo we visited an amazing museum called the Norwegian Folk Museum. They had historic buildings from all over Norway reconstructed here. And they were not replicas, they were the actual buildings taken apart and put back together here on site. These buildings were actually used and lived in through lots of different time periods in Norway. And they had people dressed in traditional costumes to make it a real living history experience.

Learning about life in southern Norway in the early 1600s...and yes, this house and all its furnishings are from the early 1600s! A windowless house (though there was a skylight covered with a goat's bladder) filled with smoke and 8+ people in two beds. In winter they would sleep about 16 hours a day.

Turf houses galore! I love them! The turf roof was not only insulation, but also kept the roof waterproof.

Stone carvings from Buskerud, where a lot of my Norwegian ancestors were from.

One of my favorite buildings was the stave church. It was made all of wood, and just looked incredible! The most surprising thing was that the inside was all wood as well; even the paintings were done on the wood. We actually saw a few churches like this as we drove through Norway but never stopped at them.

Levi J liked the traditional Sami hut and teepee. The Sami are the indigenous people of Norway.

Aside from the stave church, my personal fave was the traditional homemade bread. A kindly stranger lent us some krone (Norwegian money) to buy some; can you believe we did not use anything but credit cards our entire time in Norway AND Iceland?? The bread was flat but still with a little thickness and so soft. It had a little sweetness to it, and it tasted ah--may--ZING! In the olden days, to make it rise they would use antler salt, which was actually ground up antlers, because it had a little ammonia in it.

They baked the bread right in front of us, of course!

But the kids' favorite was the farm and the animals. We caught the end of the animal feedings; we saw the cow fed, gave grass to the bunnies (again!), and watched the pigs pig out. The farm looked so similar to the farm we stayed in when we went to Oppdal, Norway. They said many of those barns and farm buildings are being torn down now to make room for more technically advanced farming.