A woman I met on the clean, quiet, punctual train into town tipped me off that Los Tacos was the place for cheap(er) beers before 9pm. As a nation of lushes, Norway promises financial ruin – if you get change from a tenner you’re doing well. So a cool £3.92 for this pilsner was a serious win. What about food? I asked the latter of the two lads in the bar where to get a reasonably priced meal. “McDonald’s or you go hungry,” he said.
I asked him why Oslo was so expensive. “Well, you pay what things actually cost to do properly,” as if it was blindingly obvious. But what does that mean?
Everyone knows about Norway’s oil-made pension pot: at £1.3 trillion – about the same as Australia’s GDP – it’s the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. The corollary is high wages and pricey services. Combine that with strong unions, high taxes – particularly on the fun stuff – and an allergy to cheap foreign labour, and a £10 Heineken begins to make sense.
The new-ish Edvard Munch museum – all wonky glass and 13 storeys high; you can’t miss it – is about 50 metres away and open till 9pm, so I swung by for a post-pint mooch. Three of the five existing versions of The Scream are on show, one at a time. The version you get – they differ a lot – depends on when you arrive.