The last 2013 post from Norway

I'm flying off in 9 hours, so this is going to be super short.  Today's the last night that I'm posting from Norway, at least for the year 2013.  Been 3 years since I moved here, my my... how time flies.  This year I haven't posted much.  Maybe next year will be better.  Gotta put on the blogging hat on again.

Sometime next year I'll be leaving Norway, on to better things.  You might ask yourself "Why?  Isn't this the supposed best place to live?"  In one word, "No", in two words, "Hell No" (But if you're a welfare loving, socialist, nincompoop you might disagree with me).

It's a BIG world out there!!

But that's another story, that's to be continued… in the next post!

Javazone 2013

So I attend Javazone from Sept 11 till Sept 12.  Javazone is a tech conference highly catered towards the Norwegian and Scandinavian region, but there were plenty of English sessions as well.  I'm not a fan of Java, but I'm fan of technical stuff, so that's why I go.

Day 1


View Larger Map

The venue, Oslo Spektrum, that's that big irregular shape in the middle.  Where it has been since I moved here, and probably before that as well.

The morning kicked off at 8:30am with a Norwegian band playing music.  I was more concerned with keeping awake at this point.  Early mornings ain't my cup of tea.

Yes the guy in the middle really is half naked and wearing a mask.

The first session of the day was at 9am, and I started off with Douglas Crockford's session on "Managing Asynchronicity in JavaScript with RQ".  It was pretty cool, I like the syntax of RQ.  He is a really good speaker, probably the best session I attended over the two days.  I spoke with him in 2008 when I was still living in Australia in another conference.

Douglas Crockford.

Javazone works like this, every session is 60 minutes, with 20 minute breaks in-between.  So after the break I spent 20 minutes running around taking photos, and well, eating food.  I tried the cheese platter and bbq pork wrap, both were frankly awful by any kind of edible standard, thankfully the sushi was good which was a change.  Usually it's the sushi that's awful.  But anyway there's 6 different sessions going on at any one time, so you have to pick just one to attend.  If possible usually I avoid pretty much all the Norwegian speakers, the American speakers or non Norwegians are much better speakers from my experience having attended all the sessions previously.

Sponsors area.

10:20am was the next session.  "Livin on the edge: Netflix edge architecture".  Did you know Netflix uses software that I create? And now here I was attending a session by them.

Adrian Cole.

11:40am's session was about avoiding creating gigantic blobs of mud posing as systems in the real world which people use.  "Breaking the monolith: Towards a system-of-systems architecture".

His name is Stefan Tilkov.  Harden the f*** up Stefan!! (only Australians will get this joke. ;))

The session at 1pm wasn't very interesting for me.  Well I thought it was going to be but turned out, not really.  It was called "Visualize your architecture and information".  No pictures here.

2:20pm's session on programming was like a history of programming languages and how today's functional programming languages solve some programming problems like state and mutations. "Programming, Only Better".  At the end there was a Norwegian guy who asked questions in Norwegian while Bodil translated.  Was this guy just too ashamed to speak English?  I don't know. :)

Bodil Stokke.

3:40pm's session by Finn.no, the only site that Norwegians know of in addition to vg.no, provided interesting insight into how mobile is taking over the desktop.  Only a few years ago in 2010 1% of mobile users were using their site, today it's 41% and by years' end that's expected to be 50%.  Anyway they create native mobile apps that interface a backend, it's extra work but it works in this case. "Why and how we do mobile native apps at Finn.no".  Also talked about how the uptake of people updating their apps, well not everyone updates them, some people will never update them.  After the session ended I had some coconut ice cream.

Alf Thomas Nilsen.

5pm's session was on "Data, Visibility and Abstraction".  At this point my brain was about to shut down.  I had some chicken drumsticks after the session was over.

Stuart Sierra.

The last session of the day was at 6:20pm.  I attended "Borrowing from Github's Culture for Fun and Profit".  I actually liked this talk about Github's promoting working from anywhere, no leave day policy and other not mainstream accepted ideas.  Mainstream is usually poor and at most, average.

Matthew McCullough.

So after that I was pretty much done for the day.  I had to go to trafikanten to exchange my faulty ruter cards and get a refund for my old paper tickets, finally got around to it after several months.  Didn't get home till after 8pm, long day.  I think I may have more sushi than the average person, but at least the sushi was well appreciated.

Day 2

Well this is going to be short, as it was pretty much the same as the day before.

Sessions attended

1. First, Kill All the Product Owners
2. Information-Leading Architectures
3. Design is a Process, not a Document
4. Configuring large scale distributed systems
5. Dart and Web components - Scalable, Structured Web Apps
6. You probably don't know how the internet actually works
7. 6 Years Later: One Line of Code That Changed the Web Forever

I'm not elaborating on the sessions as it's pretty much the same day as yesterday.  Will I be back next year?  Well that's another story!

Saint Petersburg, Russia, Day 3 - Museum of Eroticism (МузЭрос), Conchita Bonita, Matiss Art Gallery

Warning, this post has nudity, if you're affected by nudity and private bits and things modelled after private bits, stay away, and do not read this post.  Below the age of 18?  Runaway now!

11am Woke up had breakfast which was fried potatoes.

3pm Left for Museum of Eroticism.  It's located close to the Ploshchad Vosstaniya station.  It's new!  And 24 hours, so you can visit anytime.  Well I've never been to an erotic museum before, so why not?

For double the pleasure, use your brain and imagine. :)

Looks like a toilet bowl but hidden in the hole is well, a male reproductive organ.

Another variant of the above, with pedal for easy access.

Oh... feathers!

More photos coming after this jump break

Saint Petersburg, Russia, Day 2 - State Museum of Bread, Loft Project ETAGI

11am Woke up and had breakfast.  Buckwheat and omelette was the order of the day.  Had a shower as well.

At about 3pm we took the metro to Mayakovskaya and then walked to the State Museum of bread.  We arrived just before 4pm.  The museum closes at 5pm, so we arrived somewhat in time.  A lot if not all of the descriptions are in Russian so for me it was mostly a shoot and try to understand what's happening.

Chicken bread.

Piggy bread.

Sacred bread.

Bread for astronauts.

How bread is born.

Oven with eager cats on the top.

Flour milling tools.

Saint Petersburg, Russia, Day 1 - Pioneerskaya

4am Woke up and caught the early train to Gardemoen.  My rapid shower and breakfast was 30 minutes then it was another 30 minutes walk to the train station.  It was quiet, it was dark, and it was dead.

5:40am Arrived into Gardemoen, dropped off my luggage, then went through customs, it was quite quick, not many people were in the airport.  The flight to Copenhagen was timely as well.  I arrived on time, walked around a bit, went through customs since I'm leaving the Schengen area, and waited for maybe half an hour before resuming the second league (yes I'm a pro football player, hahaha).

9:35am Off to Russia!!

2:35pm Arrived into St Petersburg.  Customs was a bitch as usual, but nothing major and I went through after 10 minutes of looking at the customs officer.  A. picked me up at the airport and we went back and dropped off my luggage.  We caught the bus then the metro, all in all it took us about an hour to get home.  Then had lunch/dinner at her place which was pelmeni made by her mum.

Russian Pelmeni

They're really good, made from pork and I'm no pork fan honestly.  There's a reason why I'm known as  the "Little Muslim" in the family, years ago.

Didn't do much afterwards, well, we walked to the nearby shopping centre and I bought batteries for my luggage scale.  Then about 6pm we had some dinner at the Burger King, I just had to check out Russian burger king, what can I say.  Well there was nothing really special about it.  Anyway, after that we walked home.  Watched a Russian movie, that was cool, I also had borsch soup.  Yes I was still hungry.

Borsch soup

It's made from beetroots, and all sorts of Russian goodness.  Kudos to the chef. :)

Lights out, oh I can't even remember the time!  But it was late.  And I was really tired!

Happy Easter and I'm outta here!

Believe it or not, this is actually a Finnish easter :D

Is it me, or does Easter seem to come earlier and earlier each year?  Last year in 2012 it was April 8th, this year it's 31st April and the year before last, 2011, it was the 24th of April!  Staying with the "I am never in Norway during a lengthy public holiday" tradition, I'll be heading off to St Petersburg again.  No epic 30 day trips throughout Europe this year.  What will I do this time?  No idea, but we'll see.  I have mini stopovers in Copenhagen going there and Stockholm on the way back.

The work report today!  Of course this year most of the floor was empty.  It was dead like the walking dead without the zombies.  There were maybe 6 of us at most  in the office!  The rest were either on holidays or working from home.  Whatever that means.  For some from the office, it's working from Spain, but that's work of course, don't say that it's not work, cos it's work. ;)

If you're Norwegian this Easter period usually means somewhere in a cabin skiing or not skiing, but in a cabin nevertheless, with family that you may like or dislike.  For the rest of us that aren't crazy enough to fork over several million kroner for a wooden shack in the isolated woods, it's getting out of Norway time.

Anyway I realised I'm extremely behind with the blog entries for February for Morocco.  I'll put them up when I get back and backdate them.  Going to be some very, very long posts.

Time to sleep, I have to get up at 4am.  Be back on Monday!

God Påske!

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Marrakech, Morocco, Day 2 - Here and there and everywhere

5am - Had to wake up really early this morning to catch my flight to Amsterdam en route to Morocco.  After a quick breakfast, I had a quick shower but missed the bus by a few minutes.  Well no problem I caught the next bus.  My flight was at 7am so I was supposed to be at the airport at 5. :)  Eventually I arrived at 6:15am and just made it in time.  A. was already there, so no worries.

9:30am - The flight was delayed by a bit so didn't arrive until 9:30am or so in Amsterdam.  We were supposed to arrive at 8:40am.  But anyway we made it in one piece, and arrived into Schiphol airport.  The flight to Marrakech was at 3:35pm, so we decided to go to the city to check it out.  I was there last year during summer for a very short period of time, but it's nice to see it during winter.

Ticket machines at Schiphol plaza.

Oh we bought the tickets just after getting out of customs, it cost about 17 euros or something along those lines for 2 adults.  So we went straight downstairs to catch the train.

Waiting waiting waiting....

We caught the train after waiting only a few minutes since they run quite often.

Helsinki, Finland, Day 1 - Chinese New Year Eve 除夕, Jumbo, Flamingo

Greetings!  I'm in Helsinki right now en route to Africa via Amsterdam, back to Helsinki on the 21st and then to Oslo on the 24th.  Should be an interesting next 15 days!  This time last year I celebrated Chinese New Years eve' with my family, this year I'm opting for something different.  So no reunion dinner for me this year, but maybe next year.

6:30am Woke up to catch the 8:14am bus to the train station.  I arrived at the airport at 9:04am and spent close to 45 minutes queuing up to pick up a luggage tag for my bag.  There were only two women working the lines, so it went at the pace of a snail.  Good thing I checked in online, because if you don't now you'll have to pay for a "checkin fee" of 10 euros, go airBaltic!

10:40am Boarded the plane and arrived into Riga for the connecting flight to Helsinki. We were supposed to land at 1:30pm, instead we landed at 1:45pm and my connecting flight was at 1:55pm!  So they had to wait.  We didn't depart till 2:10pm or so and arrived into Helsinki at 3:15pm, so a bit late but not that much.  However, then we had to wait 45 minutes for the luggage belt to start working for some reason.

4:30pm Caught the shuttle (free!) to my hotel, holiday inn vantaa.  I took a short rest and left at 5pm for   "Jumbo" which is this large shopping centre close to where the hotel is, about 10 minutes walk.   I was quite hungry.  I had two eggs, and three biscuits for the entire day!  But I decided to go shopping first, and it was a good thing I did because everything shut at 6pm.  I bought some batteries for my luggage scale, and some food for tomorrow mornings' flight.  They have a huge supermarket called k-city market located on the lowest floor that sells everything, food, clothes, skis, etc.  Oh I saw a man who I may have accidentally mislead, he wanted to catch the lift from the carpark to another floor and I was in the lift but I thought the lift went only to parking so I told him that, well I'm not sure if he listened anyway but he smiled and waved and I smiled back.  It's easy to remember when you're the only non European in the entire shopping centre.

6pm I left "Jumbo" and took a short walk to "Flamingo" which is just next door.  It's an entertainment centre, the biggest one in the Nordic countries and contains several shops and restaurants as well as a spa and a nightclub.  Also, it's named after "Flamingos Las Vegas".  Eventually I settled for a restaurant called "Food Court".  Haha.  Funny.

New Years Eve Dinner!  Giant crab pot with green and black olives, tomato sauce and rice.  It's Mediterranean really.  Cost was about 18 euros.

7pm or so, took a walk to the upper floors of the shopping centre and took some photos.  I checked the movie times but there was nothing that I really wanted to watch.

2nd floor, on the left at the rear is where you buy cinema tickets, and the upper floor houses the cinemas.

View from the other end, indoor mini-golf or something

Spotted this flamingo in the corner.

I left shortly after and walked back to the hotel.  Now I'm just relaxing and preparing for tomorrow, have to get up really early again because my flight is at 7am.  I've been trying to load maps onto my ipad but high res maps don't work on the ipad, they cause it to crash which is terrible design.

Anyway in 2 hours and just over a bit, it will be Chinese New Year, so 新年快乐 to everyone!

Tromsø, Norway, Days 1 to 3

17th January

5:15am Woke up to catch the 6:14am bus to the train and then caught the train to Gardemoen where I arrived at 7:05am with plenty of time to spare.  My flight was at 8:15am.  I mostly sat around waiting, and hanging around the ark bookstore.  Didn't have anything to check in as I was only going away for a few days so I packed pretty light.

10:15am Arrived in Tromsø airport.  I thought I'd just missed the airport shuttle but thankfully there was one.  I arrived at the hotel about 10:50am, and my friend and his wife were waiting in the lobby for me.  Well I tried to check in but there were no clean rooms yet, so I dropped off my stuff in their room. My friend asked if I wanted to "have a rest" but there's no way I'm resting, so we headed off straight out.

Welcome to Tromsø!

Tromsø was pretty much the same way I remembered it two years ago.  Population around 70,000 and the average age is 30.  Mountains.  Still the same streets.  We took a walk to the information centre and I selected x-country skiing for 1pm till 4pm and a northern lights chase for 6:30pm.  I pretty much dictated the day's events. :)  Which is fine with them.

Information Centre.

Well at this point it was close to 12:30pm, so we decided to buy some quick takeaway (I took some curried chicken with bread and a bottle of water) at a bread shop then took a walk to the ski shop where we were going to pick up skis and go ski with the help of an instructor, whose name was Sebastian and Swedish.  Oh I've noticed that the Norwegians in Tromsø speak with a different accent from those in Oslo. It's definitely not as tonal, and more flat, if that makes sense.  Also I tried to speak Norwegian to Sebastian but since no one else will be able to understand it was better to switch to English.  Anyway, so we went to the ski shop, picked up the skis, sticks, and then we picked up some British guy.  It seems like he wants to work as a guide in Svalbard or something along those lines and he was asking Sebastian how he would approach that.  We took a minibus up to the mountain, where we ski'd around the area close to Prestvannet lake.  My friends had never ski'd before in any way shape or form so this was quite the experience for them. :)

Cross country tracks.

We took a break near the lake, and by that I mean we sat on some tree branches and used that as a sitting bench.  My friend then asked if people actually lived here, he was surprised, because we were close to several houses.  I consider that normal now of course!  And Sebastian taught us some general ethics on staying away from the tracks if you're not using them. :)  We had hot chocolate and some cinnamon rolls which were really good.

Prestvannet, now frozen over. 

Satellites.

So shortly after our break, we ski'd a bit more then Sebastian taught us how to do a 180 degree change while walking on skis.  And he made a mini obstacle course that we went through.  We ski'd a bit more then it was photo taking time and then back to the ski office where we dropped our skis off and took more photos.

Me on skis.

Skiing is fun, really. 2 people agree. And spot our instructor.

After we dropped off our things we went back to the hotel, picked up our tripods and other misc, then went back to the lobby where we met up to have dinner.  I had a 5 minute look at tripadvisor and decided on sushi, so we took a walk to Rå Sushi bar.  Apparently this place is ranked #3 out of restaurants in Tromsø.

5ishpm Ordered our sushi and just waited.  Our food didn't arrive till 6pm, and we were supposed to be waiting at the hotel lobby, Rica Ishavshotel by 6:30pm!  Eventually it was a mad rush to the hotel, and we arrived just in the nick of time before the bus left.  There were 31? or 32 of us on the bus altogether.

6:30pm From this point on it was mostly driving and waiting to get off the bus.  The weather was simply awful, clouds everywhere.  We went to one place, I'm not sure of what the name is, but that didn't turn out so well.

Car lights to the left, northern clouds up in the sky, but alas, no northern lights!

We then went to Brennfjell which was supposed to have some higher chance of seeing them but there was nothing there either.  Which is a real shame because the solar activity that day was the highest in 5 years!  But the weather was equally as bad so we didn't see anything.  The guide said we could try again the next time and it will be cheaper (800 nok vs 950 nok, pretty crazy prices to begin with), and even a third time which will then cost 700 nok.  We had our hot chocolate and cookies then the bus drove back to the city.

2am Arrived back in Rica Ishavshotel and took a walk back to our hotel.  I didn't sleep till half past even though it's been a really long day. We decided to meet at 9am at Egon restaurant for breakfast the following day.

18th January

8:50am Woke up and went to Egon to have breakfast.  Breakfast was quite good, a variety of breads, meats, coffee, tea, my only gripe was the preserved juices, why can't they have fresh juice?  My friends overslept so I didn't meet them. :)  They didn't get up till close to 10.  At 10:30 I went back to my room and had a shower, and organised to meet them me when ready.  Eventually we met at the lobby around 11am or so, and since they hadn't had anything to eat we took a short walk to a cafe along Storgata and they had their meals there, at a place called kafeglobus.

1pmish We took a walk to the information centre to see what we could do.  Well no skiing since it was really awful (again) and looks like there wasn't going to be any northern lights either.  The woman recommended that was catch a bus to the Tromsø museum so we tried to do that.  First we bought a Tromsø 24 hour card, then we caught the 37 which was supposed to take us there but then we overshot the stop and my friend and I were getting hungry at this point, so we stopped along Karlsøyvegen and went to the shopping centre there but there were no food shops.  Eventually we settled for Pizza Express Lagnes, where I ordered a 30cm chicken taco pizza and gobbled it down with much enthusiasm.

4:30pm We caught the bus 34 back to the city.  Now it was close to 5pm so we took a walk back to Rica Ishavshotel to enquire about the weather.  And it turns out the weather was awful, and it was, it was raining all day, and the girl pretty much told me there was 0% chance of seeing them, and I didn't want to flush 800nok down the toilet bowl so we didn't take up the chance.  Which is okay which me because I'd seen them several times when I was in Iceland/Norway in 2010.  So what we did instead was to go for a movie, since it was the international film festival this week in Tromsø.  We picked "The woodsman and the rain", since that started at 6pm and it was the closest movie that would be starting at that time.  Of course we had to take a walk to the cinema, which isn't that far.  Tickets were 200nok per adult.

Aurora kino Focus

Aurora kino Focus, we sat on the upper floor, circle seats!

Anyway the movie is good and I recommended to go see it.

Now at this time it was close to 8pm.  So we went to have dinner at the grand nordic hotel bar & restaurant along strandskillet.  I ordered salmon and vegetables.  Before we paid I talked to some couple  sitting next to us.  The guy asked if I was from Japan (as usual) but then we told them we were from Singapore.  I spoke to the lady in Norwegian and then she started to tell me her life story about her moving to Tromsø from Finnmark when she was 4.  Seems like she doesn't really like it here. :)  But every July and August she'll go back to Finnmark.  Anyway, we had to go back after that.

10pm We thought we'll take our chances, catch the 34 and see if we can catch the lights at Folkeparken.  Unfortunately that proved to be no avail.  We got back closer to 1am after catching the bus and thought we'll give it a shot again the next day at 6:30am so we decided to meet at the lobby at that time then to have breakfast.

19th January

6:30am Woke up, and got ready to have breakfast.  Just when I was about to leave my friend rang and told me breakfast doesn't start till 8am so we should catch the bus again to Folkeparken and see if we get to see anything.  Well we tried that but there was nothing.  To summarise.

8amish Got back to the hotel, dropped off our stuff then went to have breakfast.  At 10am or so I talked to the guy at the counter who then provided me with instructions on getting to the airport, I was leaving today so yeah.  Had to pack and then check out after having a shower.

11:30am Checked out, and took a short walk around the corner to a cafe where I had goulash.  The person who served me, and asked if I was Japanese and when I replied in Norwegian he said I spoke good Norwegian, in Norwegian.  I'm only a newb so that was flattering. :)  But he told me this story about how he went to Singapore in 1985 and was smoking in a shopping centre when he was approached by a policeman telling him not to smoke and he was surprised as he had been to other Asian countries back then and he was allowed to smoke.

Well after having goulash I took the bus 42 to the airport where I arrived at 12:40pm.

Fishy thingy outside the airport.

The flight was delayed by an hour, I fell asleep in the plane when we boarded and after an hour we were still there!  The plane had to be defrosted, so we just waited.  I didn't get back to Oslo till 6pm, so ends this trip to Tromsø.  Stay tuned for more adventures in February.

On the runway.

Scenes from above.

Scenes from above.

Prelude to Tromsø

Tomorrow morning I'll be catching an early morning flight to Tromsø, in northern Norway.  The last time I was there was in March 2010.  I'll be meeting up with an old friend and his wife who flew in from Singapore just a few hours ago.  They've never experienced cold weather like this before, and the weather forecast predicted is quite warm actually. -3 C on Thursday and up to 4 C on Friday.  They've never seen the northern lights before and they've never skied, so we're going to go hunt for the northern lights, and probably ski as well.  I've seen the lights when I was in Tromsø the last time, as well as when I was in Iceland.  I'll be bringing my camera and tripod, so hopefully I'll get some really good photos!  Not bringing my laptop though, I'm travelling light for this trip.  Be back Saturday evening.

Tromsø here I come again!

Tallinn, Estonia, Day 13 and 14 - New Year's Day, Reval Cafe, Old Town

1st January. Another day another new year.

9:45am Breakfast was surprisingly crowded.  After breakfast, I rang my mum to wish her happy new year, and did some blogging as well.  It was a lazy start to the New Year.

3pm Went for lunch at Reval Cafe.

Reval duck borsch

Duck with potatoes.  Mulled wine on the right.

Seafood risotto

Took a walk to Solaris after that, we thought of watching a movie but there was nothing of real interest, so we walked back to the hotel.  Thought of getting a massage but that was out as well.  So instead we had an early dinner, I didn't take any photos but we ate at the hotel's cafe, which was called "Cafe Mademoiselle".  Today's dinner was duck salad, fish salad, and chilli chocolate ice cream with cranberries as dessert.  We also bought some really cheap bread that was on sale, since everything was half priced.

Slept at around 12 midnight or so.

2nd January.  Last day of the 2 week adventure.

8:45am  Early wake up because we had to check out today.  Breakfast was so packed you could not even find a seat.  But eventually some people left.  After breakfast the next several hours were spent packing.  Checked out at 12pm eventually and then caught a cab to Tallinna Autobussijaam (Tallinn Central Bus Station), I saw A off then caught the Tram 4 to Freedom Square and then walked to Solaris where I had Hesburger on the top floor where the cinema is situated.  Well after that took a last walk around the supermarket, then walked to Old Town, took some photos, and then it was back to the hotel.

Tallinn Old Town.

Tallinn Old Town.

4pm Caught the 90K bus to the airport, checked in and spent the next hour or so wandering about the airport.  By that I mean using the internet.  Wifi is almost everywhere in Estonia.  I boarded the plane at 6:10pm, no delays this time, and arrived back in Oslo at 6:40pm and arrived safely back home at 9pm catching the bus.

Stay tuned for more adventures in January.