8 min read
Monday
- As days go, Monday the 9th of January wasn’t a particularly remarkable in my life, but it was my dad’s birthday!
- Monday was mostly comprised of my last Gym visit before flying to Norway and doing last bits of cleaning.
Tuesday
- Managed some last-minute packing of what would otherwise have been forgotten items and charged up all of our devices for the plane journey ahead of us
Wednesday
- Got the plane to Norway in the morning after sleeping over at Amy’s parents house
- Had a Spoons breakfast and headed to the plane
- Was well prepared with entertainment for the plane
- Flight was shorter than originally expected so a little win was had there
- Then we made it to Amsterdam, got to see more of the airport that time than when we went to Japan, the layover was longer so we got to do some more exploring
- Sat down at one of the restaurants in the Airport and had tea and hot chocolate
- Got on the flight to Norway, everyone was really nice, the pilot tried his best at some Norwegian for the flight despite being Dutch and we all gave him a round of applause (no really) when he pulled it off!
- Flew into Norway and saw snow and trees out the window - what a sight to arrive into!
- Got our first train in Norway from the airport to Oslo Central Station and made it safely to our hotel
- There were vending machines on the trains! I’ve never seen that before! You’d expect to see it in Japan where they literally have a vending machine on every street corner, but going to Norway was the first time I’d seen anything like that!
- Amy had her first hoop lesson in Norway and I had an explore around Oslo! Got to know the local area straight away which is always a plus for me, makes me feel safer for some inexplicable reason
- Flopped into bed after doing an impressive 15,000 steps
Thursday
- Had another little explore around Oslo with Amy and went up a mountain (as has become tradition for us when we go on holiday together!)
- Managed not to die on the very slippy Norwegian ice
- Descended the mountain and took the best BeReal ever taken in the history of my BeReals 👀
- Ended up in Kaffebrenneriet for some Hot Chocolate and Tea, the cups were really funky! They were more like bowls than cups that you then brought up to your mouth like you do when you’re draining the milk from a cereal bowl and you think nobody’s looking
- Grabbed some snacks for the hotel room from the Supermarket, they had a system at the self checkouts where you have to scan a barcode to get out of the gate, that’s one of the cleverest things I’ve seen in a supermarket so far!
- After chilling in the hotel room for a little bit and resting our poor legs that had already done 20k steps at this point, we headed back out to meet up with Amy’s friend Mathilde, who was joined by Tiril who joined us in our excursions to Outland and Neo Tokyo before ending the night with a lovely dinner at MAX and ended up staying there for the next 4 hours! We got so caught up in talking and all getting to know eachother that we stayed a lot longer than originally planned!
Friday
- After a late night the night before, we had a well-deserved Lie-In on the Friday morning ahead of the festivities to come.
- There was still some tourist-ing to do though! So we filled ourselves up on the breakfast buffet provided by the hotel and got out on our way.
- We took a trademark Google Maps scenic route through the city, seeing some of the landmarks we’d seen the night before in the daytime which made for quite a magnificent change! (Although I still like the Freia chocolate sign best when it’s lit up!)
- We made a stop at the Kongelige Slott (The Royal Palace) of Norway and walked up the familiar path we’d seen a lot of videos of during the 17th of May celebrations that were held there last year. There was a fountain that was completely frozen over that people could use as a free ice-skating rink as long as they had their own ice-skates.
- We saw some of the strangest statues (When we weren't trying to stay alive on the slippy Norwegian ice 🥶) that I've ever seen. Including but not limited to a man fending off a feral pack of babies trying to take him down and a tower of bodies of naked men, women and children - overall a lovely walk!
- After a lovely dinner at an Italian restaurant, it was time for the main event of the day! A meet-up held by the lovely @ducklingstix. We all met at Oslo Train Station and ended up taking up a whole carriage on our way to Sandvika.
- Went to a pub quiz in Sandvika all themed around TIX (whom some of you may recognise as Norway’s entry to Eurovision in 2021) at the lovely and cosy LoKal Lounge in Sandvika. What followed was such a legendary pub quiz and party that we ended up in the local paper! We made a lot of friends that day and it’s an experience I’ll never forget 😌
- Sidenote - When we got back to our hotel, there was a fire truck outside! Turns out someone had been smoking in their room and set off a fire alarm! Luckily we were not in the hotel at the time so weren’t woken up at a time when we would usually be fast asleep.
Saturday
- Still riding the high of Friday’s festivities, the day we had all been waiting for had dawned. The concert we had come to see and had been delayed for a year previously was at last upon us.
- We headed to the venue and met up with some of our friends we had met the previous night. (Shout out to Rune for returning my lost jumper that I had left behind in a whirlwind of alcohol and ADHD) then went to line up to get in!
We had bought tickets to both the Family Show (Familiekonsert) and the Evening Show so we went to the Family Show first. This was where we learned of the plan Marie and Mathilde of @ducklingstix had been cooking up since before the postponement of the concert the year before. They had cut out no less than 12,000 hearts in blue paper and printed this message upon them:
Hold denne foran lommelykten under Fallen Angel / Ut Av Mørket. La oss farge Spektrum blå
Translated as:
Hold this in front of a torch during Fallen Angel / Ut Av Mørket. Let us colour the Spektrum blue
Which was a lovely gesture, as TIX had previously mentioned in an interview, that he lived with Synaesthesia, and when asked what colour his song for Eurovision was, he said it was a “Blue Song”
- As we took our seats and settled in, the lights begun to dim, leaving only an ominously positioned coffin smack bang in the middle of the stage. While not entirely unexpected, as the promotional material for the show heavily featured a gravestone with the time & date of the concert engraved upon its surface, the presence of the thing was slightly unsettling.
- Organ music then began to play as a priest, followed closely by a precession of acolytes shuffled their way mournfully towards the top of the stage. The priest bid us all rise and thus it started. The man whose concert we had come to see was slowly lowered onto the stage from a point in the ceiling, his body splayed like he had been webbed on the chest by Spider-Man. He then rose and welcomed us all to his funeral, kicking off the concert with Fallen Angel, the song he had sung at Eurovision and catapulted him into the awareness of the public on an international level.
- After a rendition of Fallen Angel, he was placed into the coffin and lowered on the stage out of sight. But not for long.
- In a burst of flame, he reappeared, like a reverse Gandalf-esque resurrection, going from bright and pure TIX the Good (TIX den Snille) to the impishly delightful Mean TIX (Slemme TIX). And so began, for one night only, the biggest party in all of Norway.
- We went again to the evening show and it was even better than the show before it. It was also mine and my wife’s first ever proper concert. (I had been to a music festival when I was young, but I’m not counting that!)
Sunday
- For all of us, the Sunday was a come down from the high that the two previous days had provided so thoroughly. It was, however, a welcome lull in what was a very busy week.
- We did a little bit more exploring of Oslo, going the opposite way to where we had gotten used to walking when we exited our hotel and had one of the best hot chocolates I’ve ever had at Cocoa Café which I would recommend to anybody going to Oslo.
- After warming both our appetites and our hands with the aforementioned hot chocolates, we went to the train station to meet up with Marie and Ruscan for the last time this trip.
- After having a lovely chat and promising to see eachother again (and discussing the concept of Russetid with great fervour) we went for lunch and settled back into our hotel room for the last time.