Oslo; first impressions. Green, calm and clean. It's so nice to have arrived at the Oslo airport which smelled of popcorn and looked like a stylish entrance to a sauna, all glass and wood and light. This was a contrast after the awful mayhem of a quick flight changeover in London's Heathrow which required 'fast track' access clearance from uniformed women with big behinds and a sprint down a kilometer or so of terminal corridors. In UK style, the travellators were out of order too.
The calming views from the mountain we're staying on seem to wash away the fact that I don't have my luggage yet(nor does Chris). Hopefully, I'll go downstairs in a minute and it will have magically arrived sometime overnight. If not, I'm not sure the conference delegates want to meet and greet me in tracksuit pants that I have been wearing for the last 3 days. Ewww.
Oslo city lies beneath the Hollmenkollen Hotel, all compact around the harbour on the Fjord. It's misty and soft and I'm enjoying the cool breezes (my hotel window actually opened and I could breathe real air last night - what a treat from the usual air-con prison hell). With summer here, the little grasses have put forward their best yellow dandelion flowers, the trees are all budding and the sea of green pine forest called the Marka that surrounds Oslo just stretches on forever. All these Nordic pines are standing to attention, neat and orderly; painted in by a landscape artist intent on presenting Norway as a ecological paradise in pristine condition. I feel like I'm in a Norsca commercial. It makes our familiar Australian gum forests look like some artisan absent mindledly just scribbled them in.
