I’ve been in Stavanger since Thursday afternoon. The city seems strangely deserted for the summer season and Tou Scene, where I am staying, closed the day I arrived. I’ve taken the solitude as an opportunity to work on my map of Doggerland, with which I have made significant progress.
I did make it out of my residency this afternoon, in order to visit the city’s petroleum museum. Stavanger is Norway’s oil capital and the operation of extracting North Sea oil is controlled largely from here.
I began thinking about the offshore platforms above the many oil and gas fields. The museum held quite a number of scale models of these. It also had quite an emphasis on helicopter flight. Helicopters journey everyday between the city’s Soma airport and these temporary structures on the sea.
While I am here, I will consider Stavanger the gateway to the North Sea’s oil platforms.
