Having seen many of the must-see attractions on our last visit, this time we stopped by the WW Norwegian Resistance Museum. It is located adjacent to the ship, and it can be easily seen in half an hour. We then walked to the center of the city, just a few blocks away, where several of the streets have been converted to pedestrian malls. The streets were filled with people.
In Oslo, the streets were spotless and the crowds sparse. Norwegian people, are a very handsome bunch. It's fun to walk around and look at them all.
I tracked down an Internet café located in the basement of a record store. I was online for almost an hour downloading more than seventy email messages and emailing friends and family our picture postcards for the day.
Afterwards, we walked to an area called Aker Brygge located just across the harbor from the Millennium. It is reminiscent of Pier 39 in San Francisco. We had a nice lunch in a harborside outdoor café, and then bought some souvenirs and gifts to take home.
The Millennium sailed at 3 PM for Stockholm. As we headed south down the fjord, the ship's pool area was packed with people enjoying the warm sun. Way down below us Cigarette-type power boats were pacing along as we moved down the channel. Onyx, the outstanding reggae band on board was belting out the perquisite Barbados tune, "Hot, Hot, Hot".
Except for the green hills, it sort of looked a little bit like sailing away from Miami, it sounded a lot like Montego Bay, and we had to remind ourselves we were in Norway, just a short distance from the Arctic Circle.
Stockholm:
Even though we were in Scandinavia two years ago, these are all great cities that can capture attention for a longer period of time than the single day that cruising permits. Stockholm is a very attractive "water" city, more than twice the size of Amsterdam and four times the size of Oslo. Everything is very clean, the streets, the cars, the buildings. Oslo seemed to us to be somewhat sleepy, but Stockholm seems to be racing along.
Oslo is a three hour sail up a long fjord. By contrast, Stockholm is at the top of a glacial archipelago of 24,000 islands in a delta fed by a large lake, and here too it takes three hours to transit to and from the Baltic Sea. Even more than Oslo, the approach to Stockholm reminds one of the San Juan Islands, between Anacortes, WA and Victoria, BC. Most of the islands appear to be uninhabited, but occasionally you get to see some rather sumptuous looking summer homes.
The Swedes and in fact all the Scandinavians have a tough winter. Not so much because of the cold but rather because of the limited number of hours of daylight in December and January. The sun rises at about 11 AM, and by 2:30 it's pitch dark again, or so we were told. This is why the summer days have so much value and Swedes seem to do all they can to maximize what they get out of these days.
In the morning, we spent 3 hours on the ship's shore excursion of a sightseeing tour by boat, It was very worthwhile and we saw a lot of the city and the surrounding area and took a few pictures. We returned to the ship for lunch (can't miss that!) and in the afternoon we went to the center of town using the free shuttle provided by Celebrity.
There was convenience to using the sightseeing boat excursion arranged by Celebrity, because the boat docked at the very stern of the Millennium. Taking a similar excursion privately would have required a trip into town and seeking out an sightseeing boat operator on your own. I have no feel for how much money would have been saved by going it alone.
My wife checked out some Orrefors crystal goblets in NK, a large department store, but they were only marginally less expensive than the same thing in the Costco store back home. Certainly not enough savings to justify shipping nor even carrying.
It doesn't seem that difficult to locate an Internet café in any of these cities. You just ask a young person, they all know where they are.
Scandinavian young people...all are very good looking and speak English almost without an accent. The internet cafés are all populated by young people, many of whom can't afford a computer of their own.
We got online in Stockholm for a half-hour for 20 crowns. That's about $1.80. Money very well spent. The online connection was a high-speed ISDN line or something similar...much faster than a 56K modem. Windows commands are all in the local language and the keyboard is a little different than you are accustomed to, but it is possible to deal with it.
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