Farmor has a great little strawberry patch in the front yard and this year I’ve assigned myself to make sure we get as many strawberries as possible.  The season hasn’t been very good to us – cold and cloudy – so the berries would likely be few and small but I thought I’d give it [...]

The days are so sunny and bright, green and vibrant, awake.  It is hard to imagine that this landscape was once covered by a meter of snow.  Winter is a distant memory, almost forgotten.  It is only when I browse through my photos that I remember that life will change again very soon and all [...]

“På ferie” (on holiday) is one of the first phrases you learn at Norwegian language school here in Norway and there is a very good reason!  Norwegians love going on holiday – it is Norway’s biggest past time.  Come Summer and practically the whole country shuts down to cater for all the Norwegians taking their [...]

Norway is really big on recycling.  We have green bags and red bags, yellow bags and inside-out bags.  The easiest to remember is the milk carton recycling.  We open them, wash them out and then fold six into another empty carton.  If you write your name and telephone number on the outside carton you go [...]

There are three ways you can buy chickens – as eggs in which you’d have to incubate them yourself, as chicks in which you have to raise them and be without eggs for six months, or as grown chickens from six months on but cannot be 100% sure how old the chickens are – when [...]

It was Farmor’s 70th birthday and Tante made one of her famous cakes for the occasion.  The flower decorations were all hand-made with marzipan.

Tante’s marzipan cream cake was the first to be devoured.  But luckily Norwegian birthday parties never have just one cake.  We also had a bløtkake (cream cake) with pineapple made by Farmor [...]

The Norwegian post symbol is a golden ‘bugle’ horn and the background, which also serves at the postal colour, is red.  From 1647 the horse-and-cart postal carriages used to blow their horns to clear the way as the ‘post is coming’.  This golden horn on a red is a symbol to note when traveling in [...]

Tromsø has treated us very well over the last few years.  We have many fond memories and will miss our favourite places.  Feeling a little indebted and sentimental, we thought to give something to Tromsø to remember us by.

With having young children, one thing that I have missed is having the books to read them [...]

We get a lot of people emailing us about engineering jobs.  Well, you are in luck!  Below are some excerpts from an advertisement found on finn.no today.  If you are an engineer and want to live in Norway (well, Hammerfest) then this might be perfect for you (note: Job closes 01.09.2010):
Adima is an employment service [...]

Nothing to the right and nothing to the left.  This is a usual scene of the main shopping street in downtown Alta.

It may seem that Alta is the role model for ’sleepy town’, but it is all-so very tricky.  Shopping in Alta is done inside.  There are actually two shopping centres in the above pictures [...]