hei, oslo! Tweet

orange night, originally uploaded by gorgeoux.

We found Oslo covered in serious snow, empty and silent past 1 a.m., welcoming and confusing.

Flying with Norwegian was at a Wizz Air level, including not having hot food of any description and serving sandwiches so silly I'd rather starve. Nothing remarkable unless you count more routes, cheaper seats, and the staff insisting to speak Norwegian to us.

The airport in Oslo, however, seemed much better than Heathrow, Stansted and many others (perhaps not Schiphol), with some sort of cafe and a loo by every gate. I was amused to spot Pizza Hut and Upper Crust in a country with such a high living standard, but why should that be correlated with taste, no? My favourite moment? Passport check officer only cared whether I live in Norway. Second favourite moment? Buying train tickets only requires one to swipe the card (no PIN entry) in the gate, like you would an Oyster Card. Third favourite moment? Being able to smoke on the open air train platform, which one can reach from the same elevator that takes one to both arrivals and departures. I've always been a sucker for smart design and efficiency.

Arriving in Oslo after snow so heavy that locals were baffled, we admired snow ploughs loudly cleaning the sidewalks to the tarmac (w00t, citizens don't complain like they would in London?) and jumped into a cab that was waiting, past 1 a.m., by a random train station. It proved nice and quick, and charged some GBP 15 for two-three kilometers. From that moment onwards, we stopped looking at prices comparably. Not much else to do when Norway is more or less the most expensive country in the world.

Sitting in the hotel now I refuse to check the price of the half bottle of red wine and I'm forcing myself not to be disappointed with how small the room is, and how cold, how bad the mattress is, and how soft, how tiny the chair in the room, and how alone. The only praises I can give are for free wifi and being able to heat the tiled floor in the bathroom much easier than heating the room.

Earlier, we took a walk in the streets to the nearby 7-eleven and I felt much like in Helsinki or Copenhagen. This city is dead. In fact, more so than Copenhagen. It is full, however, of interior design shops, cafes, clothes stores, florists and art galleries. God forbid you need to buy an iron! I bet you have some traveling to do. But, going back to the 7-eleven, I highly appreciated a large selection of potentially hot foods, from sandwiches to noodles, and fresh desserts, from brownies to famed Norwegian buns (not that I'd bother with so much sweet bread).

I love that people speak reasonable English, like most civilised nations around the world should do (am I not kind to decide for billions?), though Nowegians do not seem to get jokes, so I'd rather they don't get English, of the two. Trying to understand the language in writing can be entertaining with its combination of Germanic and Latin terms, but certainly doesn't get one far without some previous knowledge of more related languages than English and Romanian, like Danish.

This first account has been extensive because I'm unsure about having Internet access or, frankly, a spare moment to blog up in Kleivstua. We're here for a family wedding, one at which we're each filling the role of photographer and, possibly, jack-of-all-trades, and on top of it we have work to do and dreams of sleeping decent hours and using the sauna. So back to work now, the deadly expensive glass of red wine (just a wild guess), Sopranos, that dreadful bed and sleeping.