Oslo

Oslo built an opera house you walk on and a harbor you swim in, which tells you everything about her priorities: architecture is for using, nature is for everyone, and the boundary between city and fjord is a diving board. Behind the new glass waterfront, the marka — the collective forest — begins where the metro ends, skis in winter, berries in summer.

The sensible traveller walks the Opera's marble roof at golden hour, ferries between the fjord islands with a picnic from a harbor hall, and takes the art seriously: Munch's screams and sunrises in his tower museum, Vigeland's park of two hundred bronze and granite lives — free, strange and unforgettable. The sauna rafts by the Opera close the day: bake, plunge, repeat.

The Guide's honesty: Oslo runs expensive even by Nordic arithmetic — the grocery picnic and the tap water are elegant solutions, not defeats —; the fjord is swimmable and cold in the way that improves the story; and the metro to Holmenkollen or the marka trailheads is included in a city ticket: the forest is not a day trip, it is a stop.