Scandinavia, Part 6: Lillehammer

This first batch starts out with the pix of others, namely our tour leader Marichka. Then, just a couple from our bus ride from Gudvangen to Lillehammer. The last, a painting in our Lillehammer hotel…

Lillehammer is famous for hosting the Winter Olympics in 1994. Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to the Olympic village there, nor the Art Museum, but we did go to Maihaugen.

Basically, a house museum, but much more and one of most amazing exhibits I’ve seen, Maihaugen is the brain child of Anders Sandvig who collected farm houses. He eventually relocated all of them to this site, which has continued to expand the purchase of various houses representing difference eras (including every decade of the 20th century. You can walk into many of them and they are full of artifacts from that time. Not only that, but in some of them people are dressed in period costumes and will explain things about the place and time.

This first batch starts with a couple places on the way to Maihaugen: the statue of a guy who saved the king, the Lillehammer Art Museum, and the church. In fact, at Maihaugen we started with a church which included an explanation of religion, before and after the Protestant Reformation, by our guide.

Our guide then turned into a school teacher, taking us to the one room schoolhouse. We continued on to a number of farm houses, barns, stables, and related buildings – all having been disassembled and moved to this location. Note the dates the kids had carved into their desks…

In addition to people (note the woman handing me some homemade Norwegian cheese), the place has many animals – horses, goats, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, etc. Many pix are of the rooms with authentic furniture and artifacts. Note the inscription on one that was built in 1786 then rebuilt in 1858…

Moving from the rural (and older) section, we went through the various houses of the 20th century, and an entire village from the 19th century…

In this batch, not the actors walking on stilts, and one who demonstrated the work of early pharmacists. The facility also included a Postal Museum with every related artifact you can imagine…

Finally, Maihaugen also includes an Olympic museum, not just featuring the Winter Olympics in 1994, but the Olympic games in general. Afterwards, we strolled around the town, and went to a special restaurant featuring wild meats in the evening…