I rush out of the park onto Bygdøy Avenue, lined with ancient chestnuts and built up with prestigious, aristocratic villas with elegant pediments and quiet courtyards. Here Gothic spires argue with puffed-up Baroque barrel mansions, while Renaissance turrets come into conflict with modernist loggias (terraces). Walking along Bygdøy Avenue means inevitably dropping into the Kastanjen restaurant, where solid gentlemen in jet-black tuxedos and intellectual spectacles inevitably charm dark-skinned girls in velvet dresses with décolletage with ornate eloquence.
After the evening meal, they descend to the Aker Brygge harbor, where it smells of the sea, where seafood merchants feed the seagulls marbled shrimp and purple octopuses, and the birds pounce on the prey, drown one another, and shriek piercingly. And then they jump out of the water, perch on the old familiar lighthouse, or rush to the Kvadraturen district and land on the top of the bronze King Christian IV on Christiania Square...
Guided tour
A portly and jaunty girl, formerly a law-abiding blonde and now an extreme woman dyed in saffron, leads Japanese tourists through the narrow alleys of Oslo. The Japanese tourists, armed with tiny digital cameras, try to capture every moment: on the central street – the malachite spire of the Cathedral; in the sex shop – Viking hats with realistic penises instead of horns; at the Pakistani stall – colorful beads and gilded medallions. And also shaggy trolls with hooked noses, arranged on the counters of souvenir shops and luring idle dreamers inside. Taking a strategic position at the old whimsical fountain on Christiania Square, Helga leads the Japanese into the "Anatomichka" – the oldest building in the city with a timber frame. "Here," she recounts, having paused, "in the 18th century an apparatus for distilling juniper vodka was humming..."
The idle tourists begin clicking camera shutters twice as fast. "The main moonshiner of the city was considered to be Mr. Schmidt. He had many customers, and business was going fine until Schmidt started raising pigs in his backyard to feed them production waste. Getting drunk on wine sediment, the pigs happily flopped onto the grass and enjoyed life, which could not be said about Schmidt's neighbors. The smell in the city was crushing – especially with a west wind.
The animals roamed all over the district and pestered the citizens with their unexpected visits. General Pumo suffered the most: a whole battalion of very drunk pigs knocked down his fence. In the end, due to endless complaints, the city authorities had to close the moonshiner's shop." The house is called "Anatomichka" in memory of those times (1815-52), when the medical faculty was located here, and the first students of the University of Oslo studied the structure of the human body; listened to entertaining lectures and carried out laboratory work.
Two blocks away stands the grandiose building of the General Post Office: you cannot walk past it. One of the last examples of national Baroque, the ponderous work of Rudolf Jacobsen went counter to the fashionable trends of that time: "frivolous" life, Cubism, jazz.
A cannonball from the time of the Swedish king Charles XII is embedded in the wall of the building on the corner of Dronningsgate and Tollbugata. It was fired from the cannons of the city fortress Akershus and was intended for the Swedish troops besieging Oslo in 1716, but accidentally hit a mansion that stood on the site of the General Post Office. The cannonball was discovered by builders dismantling the house in 1914, and they immured the antique projectile into the post office building – in memory of the great battle.
Immediately behind the Post Office on the right side of the street is a yellow-brown noble mansion built in 1624 with five columns and two symmetrical two-story wings. Inside, there is an elegant marble staircase with magnificent steel railings in the Rococo style, velvet and silk carpets, and stucco ceilings. For many years, since 1803, the Norwegian Military Academy was located here, and soldiers in neat uniforms frequently walked around the building.
After visiting the Norwegian Military Academy, Helga leads the Japanese tourists to the other end of the city – to the Deichman Library, where the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun are sucked into the vortex of free Internet. Meanwhile, Helga tells that in the oldest library in the country, there was not a single book in the Norwegian language at first – only publications in Latin, Danish, and German. In addition, the library had to compete with the bookshop of Andreas Dürendahl, opened in 1781.
Dürendahl charged a small fee for books, but his collection had far more entertaining works: light vaudevilles, farces, and comedies ("Knight Robert and His Toothless Bride"), as well as the first "enlightenment" treatises on sex in the city: "Aesculapius, or a Doctor in the Temple of Venus: First Aid and a Study Guide for Prostitutes and Their Clients", "A Medicinal and Dietary Gift for Newlyweds and Young Men and Women Entering into Marriage". The Deichman Library, however, offered mainly religious books, which brought boredom to the townspeople.
To be continued.