Blog Seven: They did have grass on the roof...

... in Norway, and it was covered in daisies, and very nice too. And they had a museum made entirely of little wooden houses that they had brought by lorry from all over Norway and put up again in the special museum field in Oslo. All the houses looked as if they would have little old ladies living in them who would eat you at the drop of a hat, and they had little built-in wooden beds by the stove, and wooden verandahs, and carved rooves with dragon heads, and they were very beautiful. But the best thing we saw was a very small dog. It was so small it couldn't climb the kerb. Its owner had to pick it up. Isabel thought that perhaps it was a guinea pig in disguise.

Other Norwegian things:
1 Norwegian Italian restaurants. We had a kebab on a skewer and they hung the skewer from a hook so our dinner was upright. This was a little confusing.
2 Water busses: If you live on the other side of the bay from the main bit of Oslo you can go to work on a boat. You get on and off at boat stops, which are like bus stops only for boats, and with water where the road might be. This reminded us of when Rafi arrived in Venice. There's a famous story about a journalist arriving in Venice and not knowing what to expect sent a telegram back to his boss saying 'Streets full of water. please advise'.
3 Really nice ribbons. One day a year they all wear national dress, which is very woolly and warm, and involves knee breeches and blouses and pinafores with full skirts and ribbons sewn on. The ribbons can be very fancy and very beautiful. We bought some to make into bracelets. So far Isabel has made four and I have made one. We cut some ribbon to the length of a wrist, plus a bit; sew some felt on to the back, then sew a popper on the end. Then it is a bracelet.
4 A statue of a lion outside the publishers' office. We sat on it to have our photo taken. We thought it would be quite funny if all the photographers had the same idea and we would appear in all the Norwegian papers and magazines sitting on the same lion. Photographers are peculiar. They always want you to do something new and often it involves lying on the floor.