First Day in Norway

Day 1

We arrived in Oslo at 10:43 am on Thursday, July 10th after an overnight flight with two layovers in Chicago and Stockholm. My new boss kindly met us at the airport and drove us around to the apartment and various administrative offices to take care of our work and residency permits before a quick check-in at the office to meet a few folks. Then we had the afternoon and evening to ourselves to catch up on sleep and explore the city by foot.

When Matt was out here in April, he found a comprable apartment to our old one in San Francisco, with approximately the same square footage. Like our old one, we get to climb four flights of stairs each day, but this one also has a heated balcony, a dishwasher, a washer, and two, tiny bedrooms instead of one big one. Oh, and we can say goodbye to the sweet rent control we enjoyed in the states. Thank god we're earning the local currency.

I had sticker shock just looking at the prices in stores, so I'm glad that we brought most of the things we need. For example, a meal at Burger King is about $8. Shoes and electronics are about double price and clothing on sale at low-end stores costs the same as full price items at Macy's in San Francisco. I'm sure that we'll figure out how to find good deals in no time.

It’s amazing to see how close everything is. Work is only 25 minutes away by foot and there's a food store directly across the street from our apartment building with a friendly cashier who seems happy to practice his English with us. He finds it amusing when we try to use Norwegian phrases. The royal palace and public parks are only a few blocks to the south and there are cool cafes, bookstores, and sights in every direction. On a quick evening stroll we passed the palace, royal theater, history museum, parliment building, castle, docks with old wooden boats, shopping areas, fountains, opera house, train station, subway station, city hall, and much more. Oslo is an extremely walkable city and large pedestrian promenades run through the center of town.

You can see cyclists and skateboarders everywhere. There are tons of people out and about, enjoying the scenery, well into the night. It never really gets dark here in the summer. Twilight hit at about 11 pm last night and the sun pops up again by 4 am. But even in the dead of the night you can see around just fine.

Besides that, the people in Oslo are more diverse than I imagined; they dress like Californians and everyone speaks some English. Even the bookstores have plenty of English publications. In the last 5-10 years, the city has been flooded by immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, so it's not uncommon to see people of every color, shape, and size, even muslim women with full birkas, despite the warm weather.

See more photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/roaring.tree/FirstDayInNorway02