Author: ghetran

Santorini

I couldn´t wait to share my travel adventures with you! I would have already done it from Santorini (although it might have come across as a bit pathetic!), but the internet connection was rather slow. 😉 First and foremost: Santorini is every bit as wonderful as the travel guides will have you believe! Its picture-perfect appearance greeted me every morning and I really couldn´t believe my luck of waking up to such a sight!

Our first day was very stressful since Vinsanto Villas, where we´d paid for our stay in advance, had double-booked and tried to pass a shitty hotel in the middle of nowhere as an upgrade. That made me so furious I was literally ready to jump on the guy´s face when he calmly told us there´d been a mix-up and besides the hotel was renovated, just not our room! haha! How funny is that?! In the end they moved us to Nomikos Villas in Firostefani (we were supposed to stay in Imerovigli) and covered the difference. The villas themselves had nothing wow over them, but our room was spacious and clean, we had a pool, a bar and air condition. And, best of all, we had our own private balcony with stunning views of the caldera!

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Trondheim part 2

Today was another fun day in the quaint city of Trondheim! Ok, maybe city is a big word, but what a pretty town it is! I totally fell in love with it! I´ll tell you this, I´ll take the first chance I get to go back! Although it was raining this morning, it didn´t last, so I grasped the chance to explore it after hours.

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Trondheim

Once in a while I get to travel in my work and this time the trip went to Trondheim. Although I´d been here before, last time was a brief weekend visit two years ago and before that I was a student mainly concerned with shopping and partying, so I can´t say I´d seen the city properly before. This time Vuong came along to keep me company and check out shops to place his products in, so I was in luck! Otherwise I would have most probably eaten i my hotel room and spent most of my afternoon napping. 😉 Remember I´m a napper?

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Weekend

This week has been busy and exhausting in terms of work, so I couldn´t wait for the weekend to come. The joy of having a couple of days off was only spoiled by my juice detox diet. I don´t think I´d ever realized how much I enjoy the idea of food, its social connotations, the physicality of it all. How else can I explain why I´d feel so robbed of the pleasure of eating, although I´m not really hungry?

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An expat´s confessions

I always think in terms of an expat, I wonder how come I didn´t write about this topic earlier. I was inspired by a friend of mine, Lavinia, whose blog I get to read every once in a while. She lives in England and mentioned a couple of things she had to change since she´d moved there. So I thought I should explore the topic myself, since Romania and Norway are two very different countries, indeed.

First thing that stroke me here was the weather. I´m sure that´s no news to the ones of you who have been reading my blog for a while now. 😉 You see, I´m from Southern Romania where we get temperatures close to 40 degrees C in summer. It seldom rains (or I chose not to remember rainy days) and I´ve always felt like staying inside when it does. In Norway, rain is just an everyday phenomenon and even though Oslo is much drier than the West Coast, it´s still too much rain for this cutie! After 13 years here, I went and bought myself a pair of rubber boots and a rain coat last year, to be able to walk my Sammy without swearing and fussing about. Yesterday it poured though and I ordered a cab. I just couldn´t bring myself to get an umbrella and risk getting wet.

Another thing I didn´t managed to change entirely is my way of dressing. I don´t wear as much makeup any more and my clothes are definitely simpler (I adore Scandinavian wear!), but I´m still overdressed for most occasions. Haha!;-) I stopped caring long time ago though, instead I just enjoy every opportunity to shine. 😉 haha!

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August

Even though the calendar says otherwise, I feel we´re coming towards the end of  summer. Although the air is still warm, most festivals are over (not that I ever attend) and the rain seems to settle in. I started work for real last week and each day is busier than the last one. I don´t mind it, though. A sort of holiday atmosphere is still lingering in the air and people are in a better mood than they were in June, before they left for Italy, Spain, France or Greece. Or stayed at home  and couldn´t believe their luck when summer came to Norway, too.

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Bedroom inspiration

We´re so dissatisfied with our bedroom, we need to do something about it and that soon! The thing is we need a bigger wardrobe (and prettier!), but we also want to redo the floors and that needs to be done first. Hence, until we have enough money (and the time) to change the floors in the whole apartment, I´ll stick to pinterest and the blogging world. The room needs repainting in a warmer color and that too has to be done after the flooring. So here is some inspiration! What do all these rooms have in common? They´re quite big and very charming! I love antiques, old mirrors, frames, lamps and mid-century design. Which one is your favorite? Mine is the first and the third!

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Weekend trip to Tønsberg

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I´ve been really jealous of all the people with boats, summer houses or cabins this summer. Not because we haven´t had a holiday or been out drinking wine most evenings, but because the weather has been so perfect and no matter how close we live to the harbor, it´s not the same as being somewhere else entirely, a place you get to take a break from daily routine and chores.

So I remembered I had a lot of hotel points from that time I worked in Bergen for three months in a row and ordered a weekend in Tønsberg for the two of us. Tønsberg is a cute little summer town 1,5 hours away from Oslo, not much to do there, but very picture perfect for a short trip.  Thus we took the train, even upgraded to first class (called “Komfort” so it sounds less class-oriented- haha!) so we´d avoid sitting with chatty teen-agers and there we were by mid-day Saturday, ready for check-in and lunch. We ate at Kolonihagen, a nice spruced up place with emphasis on local and organic food.  They were terribly busy that day, so the service wasn´t great, but the meals were as lovely as always. We had Jerusalem artichoke soup and pie with salad and for desert we shared a pannacotta.

After a round in the “city center”, a couple of pictures of quaint wooden houses and wondering if we should or we shouldn´t have some ice-cream, we headed for the hotel for a nap (we´re known as the nappers in our circle of friends!). Besides, the 4th season of the Killing was just posted on Netflix, so we were dying to see what was happening. After a couple of episodes we freshened up for dinner at Champagneria, a classy place they have in Oslo, too. We ordered lots of tapas, skipped the bread and the “patatas bravas” for once and gorged ourselves on “jamon iberico”, baked chèvre, chorizo and so on. 😉 Unfortunately Peppes Pizza, their neighbor, were having an open-air private party of some sort and they were so loud, we couldn´t even hear our waiter speaking, let alone converse. After a heavy dinner with lots of bubbles, a walk was in order, so we strolled around white washed houses and said hello to many cute cats on our way up to Slottsfjellet, the Castle Rock, to put it in a Games of Thrones way. The view from there was sublime! The sunset, the wilderness of it all, who would have figured they´ve just had a festival a couple of weeks ago? Everything seems so untouched and for an asphalt girl, as I called myself many years ago, to experience that in the middle of the city is just surreal!

On Sunday everything was closed, even some eateries, so walking about with no purpose proved little fun. And it wasn´t warm enough to swim, so we mainly hanged in our hotel room and watched the Killing, except for eating mussel soup for lunch and burgers for dinner. The burger place is worth a trip, it´s called Kverneriet and it´s a hipp place with pretty good burgers and nice atmosphere. Vuong´s conclusion was that Munchies in Oslo is still the real deal! That was our weekend! How was yours?

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Hiking with Sammy

You´re probably fed up with my baby boy by now. Well, that´s too bad! `Cause I love him so much I don´t care to write of nothing else today. 😉 We went on a small hiking trip, you see, so I need to brag a bit about it, since I´m such a lazy wanna-be diva on a regular basis. 😉 haha! I had a coffee date with a good friend of mine I don´t get to see as often as I´d like to, so I suggested we should go for a walk in the forrest and get our coffee on the top of the hill, at Frognerseteren, an imposing café where you would meet you grandma for lunch a while ago, but that´s managed the transition between tradition and innovation well. So we talked and Sam ran and bathed and chewed on sticks and ran some more, we lost our way and we found it again and in the end we were on top of the hill savoring a cup of coffee with cream porridge (because I´m halfway back on my low-carb diet and I don´t want to turn into a heath freak!).

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Rings I Fancy

 

Whenever I have a little bit of time on my hands, I enter the dream land of Etsy and let myself get carried away. I handpicked these rings for you and I love each and every one of them! The thing is I´m not so good at wearing jewelry, but I like to stock it and know it´s mine. Talk about Gollum syndrome! My precious! Grrr!

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