After Copenhagen, a city I loved, we went to Norway. We stopped at several cities: Oslo. Kristinsand and Stavanger. Another wonderful country.

One of the things we saw in Oslo was a stave church. Only a few of these remain.

The pointed roofs are absolutely characteristic but of course they have tons of snow. This stave church was on the way to an Olympic style ski jump. I would never do it; just looking down at the run up made me queasy. It was about half an hour out of Oslo – the Norwegians love their sking. As we saw in Copenhagen, there are lots of buildings hundreds of years old – like this stave church.

All the buildings here are very very old and are still in use, mostly. The inhabitants can do anything they like inside but the outside has to remain as it was. This was a medieval bakers. He went out of business several hundred years ago but the pretzel still remains.

As one would expect, Vikings are very important to Norway’s history. This is NOT a reproduction; it is a ship, one of three, pulled out of a bog. From the 800s. Yipes! Hard to believe anyone sailed in these little tiny things – and crossed the Atlantic besides and made a colony in North America.

But how did people live?

This shack housed about 15 people with their animals. There was no chimney, just a hole in the sod roof which had to be closed during bad weather. Infant mortality was 50%.

The good old days were terrible!