Celebrating Norway

Yesterday's 17th of May made me recall one of the times Tim and I 'celebrated' it in Oslo. (Possibly the same year as I took the picture below. It's from 'our street' in Oslo, where almost everyone flagged from their balconies. It was really pretty, and every year they got lots of attention for it.)

Tim and I had walked down to the Palace (a five min. walk from where we lived), to look at the parade. When the parade was over, we walked up and waved to the royal family, as the good fake-Norwegians we were. And the amazingly poor pictures we took was a great addition to our collection of 'bad pictures of European royal families', which we had started the year before with a really bad photo of the Swedish king (well, at least we got his hand).

After having had the obligatory hot dog in potato bread (!), we got in contact with some of Tim's old friends. They invited us over to a flat in central town, where one of them was serving cocktails. Wohoo! we thought. That sounded absolutely great! We were a little surprised, because 1) few Norwegians will serve you any other alcohol than beer because it is so expensive, and 2) the girl who we were going to had about a year earlier converted to Buddhism, and did not drink (but then, even sweeter of her to make it nice and festive for the rest of us). Well, we should have known. It was all a misunderstanding/ mis-translation. It was not cocktails (surprise, surprise) but fruit cocktail - diced fruit in syrup! Which was nice enough, but not what we had in mind... And when the others a bit later went out for dinner, we had to go home, since we were rather poor at the time. But happy birthday, Norway!