Saturday, May 17, 2014

One night at Sundvollen - Mørkganga

Today's May 17th, Happy Constitution day to Norway.  Wooo.. So I haven't blogged in a while.  But maybe I'll start blogging again.  And since today is one of those days where I feel like blogging, I will.  Maybe it's a promise I can keep or maybe I can't.  Anyway, 2 days ago on the 15th work organised an event called Techzone, which is pretty much a company wide outing to somewhere, with technical talks held throughout the day, but in the end the reason is pretty much to get drunk.  But before that, there's plenty of activities to do.  The last time this event happened was in 2011 when I was still an uninitiated newbie to Norway.  Ever since then there have been plenty of "micro techzone" events held in the comfort and confines of our work canteen, and we were waiting for "nano techzone" events where we would pit toy figures against each other and watch technical talks on youtube, so this was a big surprise.  But anyway, the day kicked off something like this.

15th May

8:30am - The buses arrived, I was one of the first to show up at work.  Usually I'm a late riser.  Today,  I had to get up early.  And believe me that was a hard thing to do.  We caught the bus which departed at 8:55am and then arrived at the hotel, Sundvolden hotel at 9:30 where we were greeted by a marching band and ice cream.  Impressive, as Darth Vader would say.  There were about 360+ of us, but only 200+ of us were going to stay overnight.  The rest had wives, husbands, babies, mistresses, were either mummy's boys or daughters, and had other affairs to look after, and so could not stay overnight.  The day started out in one word, sunny.  Unfortunately it didn't turn out to be that way the rest of the afternoon.

Between 9:30am to 5pm there were technical talks in all the rooms, and plenty of food and drinks in-between.  Here's a photo to summarise the hotel.


Sundvolden hotel

Yeah there's an indoor heated pool and I spent close to two hours in it later that night.  Read on for the best bits.