The park is open for free all year, 24 hours a day — although if you want to see “Ganzfield” and “Skyspace,” James Turrell’s disorienting light sculptures set in an old reservoir, be sure to reserve a spot on a free tour on Sundays. And stick around for Fujiko Nakaya’s “Pathfinder #18700 Oslo,” which at very specific times fills the forest with mist.

A Masculine Alternative

You also don’t want to miss Ekebergparken’s polar opposite: The Vigeland Park. It’s a very famous, very impressive and, as Ekebergparken’s Ms. Horvei put it, “very masculine” collection of sculptures from Gustav Vigeland inside Frogner Park in the posh west side of town. Paths are wide and manicured, as at Versailles, and contain more than 200 of the Norwegian master’s bronze, granite and wrought iron renderings of the human form — including a delightfully bizarre one of a man being attacked by four babies. The culmination is a 56 foot-tall monolith of intertwined bodies. (Think the Washington Monument, but covered in naked people.) In total, it is the world’s largest sculpture park made by a single artist. It’s also free to visit and open 24 hours a day.

A Seaside Constitutional

I could have spent the entire trip walking along Oslo’s five-and-a-half-mile-long harbor promenade. And I would have, if it hadn’t rained torrentially for most of my trip.

One sunset stroll took me past a dozen fishermen sitting on bait buckets to the Akershus Fortress, a medieval castle once used as a royal residence, where you can wander among cannons for free until 9 p.m. — or come by at 1:10 p.m. to follow the changing of the royal guard. The guards march through city streets to the Royal Place, the actual home of King Harald V and Queen Sonja, where you can also wander the grounds for free and pretty late.

Another day, I was overjoyed to hang out with a friend, Sam Chamberlin, the brother of my first New York City roommate, who randomly happened to be in Oslo. Sam makes boats for a living in Maine, so we, of course, had to visit the Viking Ship Museum on the city’s Bygdoy peninsula — after he awoke early to walk along the water and through a working dairy farm with free public paths next to the king’s summer residence. (I overslept and took a bus.) The giant Viking-era ships were impressive, but we both agreed that we would have spent all day at the nearby Norsk Folkemuseum. It’s huge and open-air, featuring actual houses with grass roofs, or on stilts, that you get to walk through to see how Norwegian people lived from the 1500s until now.

Food as Art

The green asparagus I had eaten at Kontrast, chef Mikael Svensson’s Michelin-starred restaurant, were, he told me, from a farm on the other side of the Oslo Fjord. The wasabi leaves that had topped it, along with a buttery sauce of fermented mackerel, came from a friend of his who is growing weird herbs in his garage. “The whole menu you had is never going to exist again,” he said, because he only works with fresh, local ingredients. “Asparagus season is like three weeks and then it’s over. You had the very last asparagus that there is, and then we have to wait a year.”

Mr. Svensson grew up cooking with whole animals in the Swedish countryside and is part of a larger wave of young Oslo chefs who traffic in bold experimentation and hearty flavors rather than the minimalism of, as he calls it, “boring New Nordic” cuisine. The orange marigolds that topped my dessert of milk ice cream and sea buckthorn curd had come from the restaurant’s rooftop garden, where we spoke. The tender king crab I ate had spent no more than an hour out of water before getting to my table. With its topping of fresh rosehip and sauce of rhubarb juice and brandy, it had appeared on my plate like a red and white flower, floating in a tiny red pond. (The 10-course tasting menu is 1,450 kroner, about $178.)