Karl Johans Gate
We crossed the square by the central railway station and the Ferris wheel. After walking up the pedestrianised Karl Johans Gate we called at McDonald’s for a cold drink.
As we walked up we passed the Hard Rock Cafe I want past the queue waiting to be served in the shop. Once inside I checked out the prices of the T-shirts as I had missed out on city T’s last year in Argentina. But at NKr 319 for a city T I did blink, especially as the T-shirts were thin and had uneven seams. In other words they were a complete rip-off from this particular franchised Hard Rock.
Further up Karl Johans Gate we walked through the shade towards the palace. As we passed all the fountains were very popular and in one we watched another couple of ducks. This fountain created lovely shapes in the water.
The crowds thinned out around the palace and I walked up to get closer to the sentries at the front. Then it was time to head off towards the end of the Oslo fjord and visit the silver diver statue.
The silver statue of a scuba diver
On one of the piers there was this multi-coloured zebra.
I had to wait until a guy had finished his lunch and stop sunbathing before I could capture the statue by itself. I was disappointed though that he didn’t sit or stand with the same pose as the statue though!
We crossed the plaza and went down Rosenkrantz Gate.
Further down the street was this mural.
At the end of the street we watched a walking tour of passengers off another ship amusing themselves while they queued for lunch.
Ice cream time
By now the temperature had climbed to an indicated 28C are we calling the first time screen power that weekend too. That was when we found out that our carefully saved Norwegian bank notes were longer legal tender!
Frustrated we looked for a bank but with no signal on my iPhone this was proving hard until I managed to connect to the free city Wi-Fi. We stopped at a local travel agents for advice and they suggested going to the nearby post office.
The very kind man in their changed our notes. He explained that only people with bank accounts would have been able to exchange the notes. As we had nearly £50 in 200 and 100 Norwegian Kroner notes we would’ve had a real issue with not being able to exchange them.
Then it was back for ice cream and we set off back to the ship.