2004: Oslo, Norway. Bodylosjen was founded, rules were written, blood oaths were made.

2005: Hamn, Senja, Norway.

2006: Berlin, Germany. First trip abroad, with Pearl Jam-concert as the highlight.

2007: Tallinn, Estonia.

2008: London, England.

The rules of Bodylosjen prevent me from sharing information about what we do on our trips, but mostly we just try to have fun and experience new things, while catching up on what our old friends have been up to the last year.

London is a great city, and I’m definitely going back there with Marianne for shopping and romantic dinners, I’ll just have to save up a lot of money first, since London is one of the most expensive cities in the world.

I made one very important realization during my stay in London: Norwegians are arrogant and rude. At least compared to the polite people we met everywhere in London.

If you bump into someone on the busy streets of London, you can be sure that they’ll turn around and say “sorry” with a smile, rather than just walk away or give you the evil eye like many Norwegians would.

This is just one example, I could give several more, but the point is that I’ve decided to do my best to not become a grumpy Norwegian myself, and rather try to be more polite myself and hopefully turn a few grumpy souls around.

Friday: arrived at Sciphol airport around 16.00, jumped into a taxi that took us to the hotel, and was installed in our room before 17.00. Our room at the Okura was really big, and of good standard. The bed could have been softer, but I don’t think I’ve ever stayed at a hotel where the standard rooms have really comfortable beds.

20.30: we’re sitting in our chairs in restaurant Ciel Bleu, toasting in a smooth dry champagne, waiting for the first of four (well, turned out to be six, after two “compliment of the chef”) courses. Here they are, in order:

Langoustine, langoustine and langoustine :
Langoustine Tartar style with pickled cucumber and Perle caviar.
Crostini with flattened langoustine, passion fruit and vanilla sea salt.
Avocado cream with langoustine and tepid custard of langoustine.

Turbot and black truffle:
Slowly cooked turbot with parmesan and black truffle, beetroot mousseline and dressing of “Villa Manodori” aceto balsamico.

Beef fillet and veal cheek
Fillet of Black Angus beef with veal cheek lacquered in lemongrass, potato cooked in chorizo oil and gravy of Jamaica pepper.

Dolce de Leche and banana
Ice mousse of dolce de leche and bronze tuile of banana, warm fritters of black chocolate and banana caramelized with brown rum.

Each course was accompanied by a wine chosen by the restaurant, all of them perfect matches.

We were really happy, extremely full, and quite tipsy when we made our way back to the hotel room to get some sleep before getting up early saturday morning.

Saturday: we had agreed to meet Jesper and Katie around 14.00 at their place, so we started the day walking around in the area surrounding our hotel. We stumbled upon the Albert Cuyp market, which was an experience in itself. Later on, after a tour of Jesper and Katie’s place, they gave me a perfect birthday-present: a Bodum coffee-maker and a bag of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee. Me and Marianne are making ourselves a cup of this delicious and exclusive coffee tonight!

We got a guided tour of the Vondelpark, the museum quarter with the Van Gogh museum, Rijksmuseum, the Diamond musem, to mention some. We then proceeded downtown, and I can’t mention everything we did, so here are some short points:
• Walked through lots of streets with both known and unknown shops, lots of fun stuff to see.
• Saw the canals, with the great architecture of the buildings and houses near the canals.
• Had a couple of beers and bitterballen at Bar Arc.
• Saw some more of downtown Amsterdam, and of course the Red Light district.
• Walked past some coffee-shops, but never entered them.
• Had a great meal of venison steak at 18twintig.
• Rounded off a fantastic day with a glass of champagne at Jesper and Katie’s, before walking back to the hotel to get some sleep. We hope we can repay the favor by showing Jesper and Katie around Tromsø and the rest of the north some day, thanks guys!

Sunday: got up “early-isch” to get out to the airport early, so we had plenty of time to do souvenir- and taxfree-shopping. Used the airport express train, after spending 20 minutes figuring out how to pay for the tickets, since the machines only accepted local pin-cards, and there was a 30 meter line to the information-desk.

To sum it up, we really really enjoyed our stay, lots of it thanks to our great guides, but also because Amsterdam is a nice city to visit, and because the hotel and restaurants we visited were just magnificent.

Getting back to work after being away for over three weeks was also quite interesting, it’s funny how tons and tons of email with more or less interesting questions, resulting in time-consuming tasks, can kill motivation to work on the larger projects. At least I was able to find the time to do something I’ve had on my todo-list for a long time now: dynamic PDF-generation with custom fonts. This is something I need for an application for a customer, and it seemed easy enough to do from reading the FPDF-documentation, but turned out to be a cumbersome task. I’m writing a post describing the process, mainly as a reminder for myself incase I need to do the same thing again later on a different computer, but also for others who may have (had) the same problems as me.

We’re going to spend the first week up north, going to our family cabin in Senja, visiting family in Bardu, and then going to Marianne’s mum who will be dogsitting while we’re going to Mallorca for two weeks. Whohoo!

¹Â seen a few of movies, only two worth mentioning:
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: brilliant movie, great adaptation of the book, lots of magic and well-made special effects. I think Chris Columbus did the best job in capturing the magical atmosphere from the books, so I find the first two movies to be the best, but this one still gets a 9/10.

- I also went to see Transformers, which was a mediocre movie IMHO. Special effects 10/10, but the story, dialog, acting etc: 2/10.

Oh, almost forgot (how could I), I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in just a couple of days, I couldn’t put the book down. Quite sad that this seven year journey has now ended, but at least we have two more movies to look forward to. The book left a bit too many loose ends, so it was great to read JK Rowling’s online interview where she gave a bit more information about the lives of the main characters after then end of the last book. Fantastic book that will stand as the culmination of a unique and magical coming-of-age story that will undoubtedly live on for years and years.

I know that the summer is coming to an end here in the northern parts of the northern hemisphere, but since this is the beginning of my summer vacation I would like to wish everyone a happy summer!

Yesterday we went bowling, and I’m proud to announce that my new personal best is 163. To be honest I have absolutely no idea how I got 163, but I’m guessing that luck was the biggest factor in the equation.

In other news (the short version):
- The movie “300″ was crap.
- The movie “Pan’s Labyrinth” was definitely not crap, though not as good as I hoped it would be.
- Went to Levi, Finland, on a ski-trip with work. Skiing is fun!
- Summer holiday is booked, Mallorca here we come! Been there once before, really looking forward to going back to see more of the island.
- I’m really happy with life, apart from being fed up with work.. More on that in a different post, about dealing with stuff you can’t do anything about.

As the title suggests, the destination for this year’s trip was Berlin, Germany, something we were told by the guys when we met them at Gardermoen. What they didn’t tell us, was that there was a well-planned reason for going to that specific city. More on that later on.

I won’t go into details about the trip, mainly because it’s all highly classified information. The keywords of for this information would be: beer, food, sightseeing, beer, food, sambuca, tequila, party, beer, food, sambuca, sambuca, sambuca.

The goal for this trip, as with all our trips, is just to have plenty of fun, chat with old friends about old times, and experience new things to chat about during next year’s trip. With those goals in mind, the trip was a huge success. We had a fantastic time, and when we thought it couldn’t get any better, the following happened:

We’re eating a nice dinner at TV-turm in Berlin, all of us dressed up in suits, looking as good as we possibly could, when a waitress walked up to us with seven envelopes in her hand. The grin on Erling’s face soon revealed that this was staged by him. After two nice speeches by Erling and Anders, we were allowed to open the envelopes. Inside were tickets to a Pearl Jam concert the next day! We have all been listening to Pearl Jam for as long as we can remember, so this was just the perfect concert for us to go to. After dinner we went straight out to celebrate that we were going to the concert, and we didn’t get back to the apartment until about 6 in the morning. I later heard rumors about a shortage of Sambuca in bars all over Berlin, and I’m pretty sure we had something to do with that. There were also rumors of some crazy Norwegians who had been dancing like crazy all night at a club called Stern Radio, but this has not been confirmed…

Describing the concert is easy: it was AWESOME! I had chills down my back pretty much the whole time, the crowd was awesome – something that seemed to have an inspiring effect on Eddie Vedder because he was really giving us a great show! A great experience that I will not soon forget. I learned today that it’s possible to purchase a bootleg from the concert from http://bootleg.pearljam.com/. Can’t wait to listen to the concert again!

Well, that’s about all the information I can give without risking death by accident on our next trip, so to sum things up – we had a fantastic time, and I can’t wait to start planning next year’s trip!

Maybe it was our fault?