oktoberfest

With the beautiful nature, hiking is a good way to spend your time here in Norway. You can walk for hours without seeing anyone else. In order to facilitate these trips, there are many cabins in the middle of nowhere that you can rent for a night. You can book them online, hike there, sleep and go on the next morning. They have pretty much everything you need and you only have to bring some food and blankets (the beds with pillows etc are there). We also did this last week. We went on a 4 hour hiking trip towards a cabin north of Oslo with about 40 international students. It was not as challenging as the hiking trips near Stavanger, but still it was nice to see more of Oslo’s surroundings.

In the mean while temperatures are falling and the first outdoor ice tracks are already being prepared. A nice discovery we made last week was that the Norwegians have copied the Oktoberfest. All over the month October student associations and bars have organized multiple editions and last week we went to the biggest one. This took place in a big tent at the student bar Chateau neuf. It had pretty much everything an Oktoberfest needed like the right music, lots of beer, lederhosen and dirndls but still it was far from the real thing in Munich.

Prices in Norway are really high and so are Norwegian wages. Therefore quite a lot of Swedes come to work here for some time and then go back to Sweden. A popular bar amongst those here in Oslo is sports bar O’learys. The same bar we randomly picked to watch the football match Netherlands – Sweden. Watching the Dutch team beat the Swedish team with 4-1 in a bar with 300+ Swedes is great but you won’t cheer that loud.

This week we are going on a trip to Stockholm and take a ‘student cruise’ from there to Talinn so more stories and photos are still to come.