Ringve

I (Nic) got up before everyone to return the car by 8am, so I would only be charged with 3 days for the car. Everyone was pretty tired from the long drive so I was the only one awake when I left. Today was a holiday and it turned out that there was no one at the car rental place - just a note that I should leave the keys at the front desk of the Radisson that the car rental office was housed at. So I did this, helped myself to a cup of coffee at the breakfast buffet and walked home.

We had arranged to spend the day with Siri, going to the Ringve (a music museum).



Siri picked us up and we arrived around 1pm. We had tickets for a 2pm tour, and Ethan wanted to explore outside, so this is what he and I did while Deb and Gwyneth went to check out some of the exhibits. He was climbing on some rocks when he fell on his bum and kind of rolled back and hit his head too. Of course the back of his head started bleeding, and I carried him back up into the bathroom at the museum. I cleaned him up a bit, the bleeding stopped pretty quickly and he seemed fine. After a more careful check by everyone, he was declared ok and the visit of the museum continued.

There were a lot of old and interesting instruments in the museum, plus some hands-on things that the kids could play with.



The tour was really cool. A tour guide took us through a house with many old pianos, violins, organs, etc. Each one was built and played a bit differently, and the guide treated us to a short song on many of them. Pianos came in many different variations, with different sounds, different pedals, even different sets of keys. There was also a mini-piano which was mute, but was taken by a player to "keep his fingers in shape". Similarly there were many violins, particularly interesting was the Norwegian violin where the bridge is flatter, so the player can bow 3 strings at a time instead of the usual 2. There were also lots of instruments, like organs, which required an air pumping device and had various ways to pump the air into it. One organ required a person to essentially work a stair-climber type device to add pump air for the player (some job!).

After the Ringve, Siri took us to a spot on the "beach" with a cafe shop. Here we are at the cafe, eating waffles and drinking coffee.



It was warm and very nice there. The beach was a rocky shore on the fjord. The kids enjoyed tromping, poking around for snails, etc, and throwing rocks in the fjord. We were not even considering wading into the water.



Ethan fell asleep on the way home, and may well sleep all the way until tomorrow, he's got some catching up on sleep to do. For dinner I made something I found at the store called marinated "flintstek". It was ok, but I think we decided it was pork, despite the fact that the name "stek" might lead one to believe it was beef. Oh well, I guess we have some learning to do regarding the food. We have purchased a disposable grill that everyone here seems to use, so hopefully we will be able to identify meat well enough to figure out something to make on it...