travel

A Sunday in Oslo

Today was such a bright and beautiful day it would have been a shame to spend it anywhere else than outside. Although we´re heading towards the end of February, the weather is still quite crisp and we had to go back for gloves, to put it like that. 😉 We live in the Eastern part of Oslo, the multicultural “old town” and love it! It´s such a nice and friendly place, a brisk 10 minutes walk from the city center and only a stone throw away from Grønland and all its colorful (and extremely cheap) eateries. 😉 So we walked to Punjab, as I mentioned in my earlier post, but couldn´t settle for a potato nan, so we had the whole shebang- Chicken Karhai. Oh, yum! If you´re ever in Oslo, it´s a must!

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A family weekend in Vienna

We´re back from a lovely weekend in Vienna with my family and had so much fun they should have made a movie about us. A “telenovela”, to be more specific, because we´re so refreshingly crazy the whole bunch of us! 😉 At times I felt I was starring in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, it was THAT cliche! I had been looking forward to the trip for a while and at the same time I was a bit nervous- three generations under the same roof,  need I say more?! Many personalities, to put it mildly- a 2 years old toddler who screams when she doesn´t get what she wants, a brother who´s reluctant to new experiences, a father who likes to call the shots, but unfortunately, so do I.  You can only imagine. 😉

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Traveling plans

The year hasn´t really started yet and it seems that most of the places we wanted to visit have been replaced by others already. 🙂 I don´t know about you, but with us it´s always like that. And as much as I love making plans and stick to them, nothing beats having to make new plans altogether. haha! 😉

So tomorrow we´re going to Vienna to meet my family, it´s a short trip, but I´ve been looking forward to it for several months now. So I and V, mom and dad, brother and sister-in-law, as well as the star guest- our niece- will all be staying at the same hotel and enjoy ourselves for a couple of days. Looking forward to chatting and drinking beer with everybody, try the hotel massage and sauna and sip to Viennese coffee at one of their venerable old coffee houses. Oh, and I need to dig into an apfelstrudel, it´s my all-time favorite dessert!

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Røros II

We´re off to Oslo in just 2 hours and while waiting in the lounge for the time to pass with coffee and biscuits (we´ve already had a walk and it´s freezing cold out there!), I thought I´d let you know what we´ve been up to these days. We had so many plans, we´d do things right this time (meaning going dog sledging and maybe cross country skiing), but then we remembered we had Sam with us, that the temperatures were really low and that this was a holiday, after all. And what I love about holidays is that I can do what I feel like and not what´s expected of me, not even by my own self. Rest, eat when I´m hungry, sleep when I´m tired, take a walk, go shopping for local produce, have a glass of wine, cuddle with Sam, read a book.

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Røros

We´re in Røros with Sam for a Christmas getaway and it´s a winter wonderland! The weather is perfect-wind-still and lots of snow, though a bit cold for our taste (-27 C yesterday and only -16 today). 😉 Eating lots of good food and drinking local beer or mulled wine, exploring the area on foot (had to buy wool underwear today!) and shopping for small gifts. Yesterday we were lucky enough to even attend a Christmas concert in church. Today we have rain deer on the menu!;-) IMG_8939

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Monday off

I´m starting to get old- if I´m  too active in the weekends, I need an extra day off. 😉 This weekend was particularly rough: drinks and dinner with an awesome couple from Australia on Friday evening, Christmas market with Sammy and friends, dinner at friends´house later on and an unplanned party at our house and that was just Saturday. Yesterday we had pancake breakfast with our other friends who stayed the night, did some washing up afterwards and saw the Hobbit at the cinema in the afternoon. So today I was dead: When the alarm rang I thought it must be Sunday morning! Fortunately there isn´t lots to do at work this time of the year, so I was able to cut myself some slack and take Sammy to the woods. 😉 It´s been so dark lately anyway and I haven´t felt like getting out of the house, so the streak of sunshine I could spot made me feel besides myself with joy! And because we were in luck, we got a friend to meet us at Frogneseteren, the restaurant on top of the mountain. I and Sammy took the subway half the way and walked the rest. I had cream porridge and Christmas soda, my friend had a Danish and we both walked back with our lattes. 😉 I fell on the ice and almost chipped the camera, but the latte only spilled a bit. 😉 haha! Enjoy the pictures!

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Bergen

I was in Bergen on a short business trip and I thought I´d write a couple of posts about this town I love so much. An old Hanseatic harbor situated on the West coast of Norway, Bergen has got charm galore. The city center is contained by 7 mountains and preserves a small town atmosphere with wooden houses, narrow streets and lane ways, a meat market and a fish market, coffee shops and stores. It expands before your eyes as houses seem to be clinging to the mountain back. Nature is majestic and so is the architecture. And the people are so much more polite than the average Norwegian, you wouldn´t believe it!

Bergen was my adoptive home under a 3 months´trial in 2012 and I fell in love with it at once. Unfortunately, the weather is pretty bad due to the town´s geographical position- it´s raining cats and dogs and not only once in a while, either. And since I wasn´t in luck yesterday, I had to do my best with my camera and frozen feet and defeated the rain and my need to stay indoors by the fireplace.
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Christmas market

It´s official! The Christmas market season has begun and I simply adore it! The weather is crisp, no snow yet, but you can almost feel it in the air, so it must be right around the corner! The streets are lit with decorations and people come alive with anticipation. It´s the season to be jolly,  lots of gatherings every week, be it Christmas parties, dinners or seasonal beer tasting. We´re hosting a brunch next week and are otherwise jumping from one party to another in the meantime.

Yesterday I went to Bærums Verk with a couple of friends to check out the atmosphere. We had gløgg (a sort of mulled wine, except there´s no wine, just a very sweet concoction of spices and syrup, so that children can drink it, too) while walking around, the place was teeming with people,  children were sitting in a sledge pulled by a giant Bernese Mountain dog, adults were standing in waffle queues and everywhere you could smell sugar coated almonds. We had lunch at Pannekakehuset, a Dutch concept that´s very popular (since it´s the only atmospheric place there), pea soup with spare ribs and beer. They have amazing pancakes, but I had already had that for breakfast, so my stomach wasn´t ready for that much dough. 😉

The bus ride back to town takes an hour, but we talked and laughed like high school kids, so it just flew by. It was nice to soak in some nature and get into the Christmas spirit, now I´m ready for a slow Sunday until 6 o´clock, when we´re going to our neighbor´s beer tasting party. 😉

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Winter is coming to Romania

These amazing nature photographs are taken by Lucia Bujor for the Facebook group called “273 places you have to see before you leave Romania”. They picture a fairytale-like landscape in Muntele Mic, Caransebes, when trees, grass, creaks and fences are covered in rime, just before winter sets in. I don´t know about you, but as much as I love white palm trees beaches, my heart skips a beat when I see images from home. Enjoy and let next year´s trip go to Romania!

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Traveling around Romania

We´re organizing a trip to Romania with some friends of ours since I want to show them a glimpse of my mother country and at the same time discover some more of it myself. We´re planning it in May, since it´s her birthday, but also because spring is awesome everywhere, and even more so back home. A week´s time flies fast and we want to make sure we get to see as much as possible, but still enjoy it at a nice pace. We´re hoping to get to see Bucharest, Sinaia, Brasov and Cluj-Napoca. If the latter proves to be too far, we´ll choose Sibiu instead. What do you think? Any suggestions?

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