Springtime in Norway

I've just returned from my first tour of our three offices in Scandinavia. I spent a day in Copenhagen, two in Stockholm and a day in Oslo. It seems that my visit coincided with an unseasonal cold snap. All three cities had plenty of snow on the ground and falls occured most days I was travelling. Oslo had almost a metre of snow on the ground.

The cold snap has thrown Copenhagen airport into choas. When I arrived late on Tuesday I found myself in a baggage hall stacked high with piles of unclaimed luggage. It seems that cancelled and delayed flights had resulted in passengers departing without their bags in tow. The choas seemed to have grown worse when I passed through the following day enroute to Stockholm.

I managed to join the fray as my bags missed the flight from Heathrow. The SAS representative in the baggage hall was wonderful, promising profusely that my luggage would make it to Stockholm the following day. She even disappeared for several minutes, returning with an emergency toiletry kit that included a smart T-shirt along side the more regular soap, shampoo and toothpaste. Quite a contrast to our experience in Egypt last December.

This hitch seemed to set the tone for the rest of my journey, where flights were delayed for hours at a time. However, this did play to my advance on the last day when I found myself trapped in traffic as hoardes of Oslo folks headed to the mountains for a bumper ski weekend. I arrived at the airport 15 minutes before my flight was scheduled to depart, only to find that it had been delayed 40 minutes. Even better, I was home by 8:00pm, just in time for dinner. These short-haul flights are such a novelty after five years of red-eyes in Asia.

On a lighter note, our office in Copenhagen is situation above a popular micro-brewery. It's also located on the top floor of a old building, effectively built into the loft area. You enter via a large communal kitchen that has a sloping roofline, sunlight pouring through the windows and simple wooden floors. I felt as if Anne Frank was about to wander into the room. It's as if time has stood still. You have a wonderful sense of history coming alive and enveloping you, most unlike anything I've ever experienced in Australia.