Day 1 in Oslo

We purchased 2-day Oslo Passes that included the bus to and from Oslo, museums and all transportation in the city. A great deal! Downtown Oslo is small and a contrast of historic and extreme modernism with many, many museums and sights mostly all within walking distance. Metro and buses are well-planned and easy to use. And did we mention absolutely everyone speaks English in Norway and Sweden?
We hopped on the bus at the bottom of our street and within 40 minutes arrived. On our list: tour of parliament, Royal Palace, Nobel Peace Center, WWII Resistance Museum, and the ancient Akershus Castle and fortress . Amazing.

Tour of Parliament

The Storting is an unusual legislature and the parliamentary system incorporates a 'separation of powers' between the government and the legislature.  Members of the government (i.e. cabinet ministers) cannot hold a seat in the legislature and must resign one if they are appointed from the Storting.  Yet the government must maintain the confidence of the legislature.  Only two motions of non-confidence have passed in the past century or so, in part because there is a requirement for a 'positive' negative vote - in other words, a majority of MPs must vote against the government.  Abstentions count for the government.  So the dictum that parliamentary systems must be characterized by a 'fusion of executive and legislative branches' has to be qualified in the Norwegian case.  Adding to the chamber's interest (to Munroe at least!) was the semi-circular arrangement of seats around the speaker's podium, and the fact that seating was in pairs and by county and not by party.  The idea apparently is that MPs from different parties have to share a common space in the seating arrangements over the 4 years of the session, thereby encouraging them to find common ground.  Our guide pointed out that there was at least one marriage resulting from this in recent memory, and this marriage crossed party lines!  They surely seem to want to weaken the grip of party in the legislature and Munroe has a new research project for when he gets home!  The list system PR that is in use also allows voters to over-ride the party's rank ordering by voting for particular candidates on a party's list.  So he is curious to see what effect all this has on party discipline in voting patterns in the Storting - he expects to find a literature on this in the library at UB.

Royal Palace
We

Nobel Peace Center

Resistance Museum, WW II

We barely had 1/2 hr to see everything in this fascinating and sobering museum.  Highlights were many: microdots on match heads with codes, tiny films hidden in screws, teachers refusing to indoctrinate their students.

Castle and Fortress

Dating from 1299, this medieval castle and royal residence developed into a fortress in 1592 and was rebuilt into a renaissance castle between 1637 and 1648.

Akershus Castle today contains banquet halls, the Royal Mausoleum and the government's reception rooms, and its small, historic church is the home of the royal sarcophagi.