Oslo, Norway: My First European City and Everything I Did Not Expect to Love About It
I did not technically land in Europe for the first time in Oslo. I landed in Copenhagen.
We had a layover at the airport, and when we got to customs, the agent looked at us, stamped our passports, and said, "Welcome, I hope you enjoy your trip." That was the moment it became real. Not the flight, not the booking, not the months of planning. A passport stamp in Copenhagen and a kind woman at a desk who seemed genuinely happy we were there.
She was also the one who told us, completely unprompted, that all the Americans loved Tromsø. She was right. But we had Oslo first.
I went to Norway for our fifth anniversary, traveling with my husband, my mom, and my brother, who was turning 25 while we were in Tromsø. We also had an immediate introduction to the chaos of international travel when my brother's bag got stuck in Copenhagen and had to be sent on the next flight. We waited about an hour, which honestly could have been so much worse, and then we were off. Norway was not going to hold its breath for us.
Oslo surprised me. My husband had been to Europe before and said it looked like any other European city. I did not have that reference point, and I am glad I did not, because what I saw was a city where history and nature exist so naturally alongside each other that it stops feeling like a novelty and becomes how things are. The harbor area was small and walkable and exactly the kind of waterfront you want to stumble around without a plan.
We ate at Den Glade Gris the first night, a restaurant that uses every part of the pig, which I respected deeply. We took a scenic fjord cruise the next morning with an audio guide that I actually paid attention to because the history of the Oslo fjord is genuinely fascinating. We went to the Natural History Museum, where I got to practice my Norwegian, which I had been learning on Duolingo with more dedication than I will admit here. I cannot tell you that I was good at it. I can tell you that I tried and that the signage was patient with me.
We also went to the Historical Museum, which had artifacts going back to the 1200s. I am a history nerd, and I could have stayed for hours. There is something that does not translate until you are standing in front of it, the weight of looking at something that old, something that real, that has existed through centuries of everything that has happened since. It hit differently than I expected.
One of my favorite moments was eating in one of the city's oldest buildings. I wish I could tell you I remember the exact year it was built, but what I remember is how it felt to sit there, surrounded by all that age and history, eating a meal in a place that had been feeding people for longer than my country has existed. That is the kind of thing that quickly reframes things.
Everyone we encountered was kind and perfectly happy to speak English, which I appreciated while also feeling slightly guilty about. I did get to use Spanish a surprising amount, from servers at restaurants to the staff at the welcome center in Tromsø. Norway is more multilingual than I expected, and it made the whole trip feel more comfortable than I was anticipating for the first time in Europe.
I wish I had had more time to explore outside of Oslo. There is so much more to the country than what we saw, and I already know I am going back. But for a first European city, Oslo was exactly the right place to land. Small enough to feel human, historic enough to feel significant, beautiful enough to make you understand immediately why people talk about Norway the way they do.
The passport stamp in Copenhagen started it. Oslo made me a believer.
