CategoryOsloBG

Happy blogaversary to Terella.no! As many of you may remember from previous years, my adventure with blogging started out as an experiment. I was lecturing a class in “Technology Business and the Society” at the Norwegian School of Management and among the topics was a new phenomenon; Blogging. Considering myself a network evangelist, the concept fascinated me and I decided to try starting my own blog. After a short time I was addicted as it seems blogging filled several needs in my personal interests. It filled my need to be social and meet new people, it fulfilled my interest in networking, my passion for technology, and last but not least it enhanced my enthusiasm for photography providing a place to share my interests with people from all around the world.

Blogging connecting people:
Over the years I have experienced many new and interesting things because of my blog. I have met new people who over the years have become good friends to me. I now have friends all over the world, and have both visited other bloggers and had many visitors in my homeland because of our connection through blogging.
Oslo Blog Gathering in 2010 is a good example of how blogging has brought myself and others together. Not only did I get the opportunity to meet many of my readers face to face, but many of those who started reading my blog have become friends with each other have built new friendships and new networks out from people they met in Oslo.

Living the good life through blogging:
In recent years living a good life – or as the Italians say “La Dolce Vita” has become more and more important to me! When I came down with Parkinson’s disease a few years ago I had to learn to slow down and give more focus to enjoying life. I quickly experienced that blogging also enhanced my personal enjoyment and quality time with my wife DianeCA. Diane shares my interest in photography and social media, and together our quality time together grows when we share it with others.

We both enjoy photo hunting and trying to capture the magic of the day, the season or the moment. We often enjoy what we are doing that much more while we are imprinting a memory that we will later share with others. We have also traveled around Europe over the last few years and met up with some of our blogging friends. Almost anywhere we wish to travel we already know someone we can contact in that land.

Expanding to other social media – a bonus not a replacement:
In the past couple of years some of the time I used to spend blogging has gone over to new forms for Social Media such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. I don’t see these things so much as a competition to my blog as an enhancement. I use them to keep in daily contact with friends from the blogsphere – and while I may blog less often than I did in the beginning, I like to keep my theme – Norway and the Nordic countries; our culture, traditions and habits while keeping the quality of my posts at a high level. I feel it is more important that the reader learn something interesting from my posts then that they follow my daily movements.

Blogging Connecting People to meet up in France

Habits, OsloBG, Summer, Travel Abroad

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Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and of course “Blogging Connecting People”, is one of my sayings. I mean it opens up new ways to learn about other cultures, traditions and habits and then breaks down barriers the same way. Even more; it creates opportunities to make friends around the world and as a network evangelist, of course I love that. After almost 7 years of blogging, I have plenty of examples: Hosting the Oslo Blog Gathering in 2010 with about 30 participants from all over the world was of course an experience of a life time (photo on top is from the grand opening at the town hall) and after that traveling to Lisbon to visit Helena at Lelé Batita and Luis , the Portugal’s representatives.
For me Connecting People and Meet Up adventures actually started even before that; in France when Claudie and Pierre invited not only my wife and I, but another blog couple from Norway and a couple from Sweden as well. We had a jolly good time and photos tell more than a thousand words; so here is a collage from that week:

The hosts gave us a taste of France cuisine every day – we was at a jazz concert in their local town and we visited the beach at Bandol, in Marseilles and Toulouse.
Her are my posts from this wonderful week in France 2009:

1: Building friendships at Blog Gathering in South France
2: Blog Gathering at Ollioules in Provence France
3: Blog Gathering in Provence France visits Le Castelle
4: Norwegians visiting Montreux by Lake Geneva in Switzerland

You might have guessed why I put up this post right now? Yea; Blogging is still Connecting and gives the opportunities to meet up: We are meeting up with Claudie and Pierre again this week and are so much looking forward to seeing them again. So stay tuned, I will of course post about it when I get home and in the mean time you can follow us daily on Facebook!

The Viking city Old Oslo Town in Norway

Culture, Habits, History, Nature, OsloBG, Travel Norway

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The old town of Oslo, the capital of Norway, where the Viking city was located contains the ruins of Oslo’s first cathedral: St. Hallvard’s as well as Clemen’s Church and St. Olav’s Monastery. In 1624, this medieval city was buried when the inhabitants had to move over to the new town Christiania, close to the Akershus Fortress. The medieval city was thus preserved for posterity and is therefore called the “Pompeii of the North“. My wife and I had a guided walk there a few weeks ago to get better acquainted with the city’s ruins and medieval heroes. It went from the church’s power region to the King’s domain: the Medieval Park (locally known as Ruins’ Park) and if you fancy a trip a thousand year back, you’re welcome to join us:

The St. Olav Monastery:
It was founded in 1239, when King Håkon gave the Dominicans a site just north of St. Halvard’s Church. It was already St. Olav’s Church, which had been built a few decades earlier. This would become the Abbey in the new facility, and it was rebuilt to fit the Dominicans specifications. The buildings were probably first constructed in wood and were eventually replaced by brick buildings.

The Dominican Order had strict requirements for the design: ground floor and the interior were always the same in all the order’s monasteries as well as the abbey which was represented at the north wing of the facility. The problem was that there was room on the south side of St. Olav’s Church just a few feet over to St. Halvard’s Church, the city’s cathedral. The monastery had to be built north of the church and the Abby had to be in the south wing so in this way, the normal Dominicans concept was reversed here in Oslo.

St. Hallvard’s Cathedral:
Also know as Oslo Cathedral Church was the city’s earliest cathedral. It was built during the 1100s at the height of the Old Town market square and was used as a church until about 1655. Besides being the bishop’s seat and religious center of eastern Norway for about 500 years, the cathedral was the coronation church, royal wedding church, chapel royal, and one of Scandinavia’s most visited places for pilgrims.

Hallvard cemetery is located mainly south of the cathedral. It was the honorary cemetery in Oslo and eastern Norway from around 1130 to 1639. Here the bishops, chiefs and other prominent men and women were buried. The most prominent were interred in the church along with the kings.

The Clemens Church:
This was one of the parish churches of old Oslo and lay south of the Bishop’s Palace and Halvard’s Church. It was a stone church with a tower and it was one of the very few churches we know with the double-nave floor plan. Along the middle axis of the choir there were three powerful roof supporting pillars.

The church went out of use after the Reformation and was probably in ruins shortly after. It was uncovered in the excavation by Gerhard Fischer in 1921 and remained that way for years. In 1970-71 the archaeologist Ole Egil Eide was given the opportunity to dig further into the ground under the church, and found traces of burials older than the stone church, 81 in all. His interpretation is that there have been at least two churches, presumably stave churches, on the spot where the stone church was built around 1100. The oldest of the tombs are radiological dated to 980-1030, and are some of the oldest Christian burials found in Norway.

The Kings Residence:
The main ruins were the Kings Residence from about the year 1000 to the 1300s and then the Canon’s residence up until the reformation in the 1500s. The oldest finds on this site are part of a simple, circular fort consisting of a moat and one or more wooden buildings. There was a treasure found consisting of German and English coins which place the construction of this fort to somewhere between 1040 and 1060, during the rule of Harald Hardråde (Harald the hard ruler). Construction of the stone fort whose ruins you see in the photo at the bottom of this post, began in the 1200s during the rule of Haakon Haakonsson (Haakon the IV). The main entrance was in the north-west corner and featured a gate tower.

The great hall in the south-east corner was almost as large as The Haakon’s Hall in Bergen. The Kings residence was a citadel, dwelling and meeting place for the king and his men when they were in Oslo. Akershus fortress took over this function already in the 1300s and gradually became the administrative center for this part of Norway. Large parts of the ruins from the Kings residence were removed in 1890 when the locomotive workshop was built on the site.

The Oslo Blog Gathering:
You may wonder what this has to do with our Blog Gathering (OsloBG) in 2010, but as the matter of fact, the grand finale was held in these Medieval surroundings. So for you who participated and all who followed us during these three days of exploring Oslo and Norway: our culture, traditions and habits – here is the photo of Kings Residence more than a thousand years back:

Edvard Munch Modern Eye in Paris Frankfurt and London

Culture, Habits, OsloBG

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The travelling Edvard Munch exhibition “The Modern Eye” started in Paris Centre Pompidou and focuses on The Norwegian painter’s later works and his relationship to his contemporary era. His personal experiences and the introverted workings of his mind have always attracted attention, but here the spotlight is on his inquisitive participation in his social affairs and a modern visual culture.
The exhibition is stringently organized in distinct sections. In the first section some of his major works from the 1890’s are presented. In the next one will find later versions of the same motifs in Munch’s radical artistic idiom.

Claudie and Renny at Munch’s masterpiece “The Scream”.

The Oslo Blog Gathering to Munch Museum:
OsloBG 2010 was a chance to Visit Oslo, the capital of Norway, to explore the city and Norway’s history, culture and traditions! Among a lot of options, I was pleased to take our special blog friend Claudie from France to the Munch Museum. The artists masterpiece and most known work was of course a must see : -)

Her Majesty Queen Sonja travels to France:
Her Majesty Queen Sonja was honourable guest at the premiere of the Munch exhibition L’oeil moderne” at the Pompidou Center in Paris. “The Modern Eye” presents a variety of formats through which Munch expressed himself.

Munch arrived in Paris in 1885 and developed his graphic expression here as a student of the French painter Leon Bonnat. In this exhibit, drawings, graphics, sculptures and film contribute to a very special presentation of Munch’s art and his modern look.

Munch’s ‘The Scream’ is the defining image of modernity, and one of the most important works of art in private hands. One of four versions of “The Scream” was sold by Sotheby’s auction house in New York this spring for about $80 million.

The exhibition was displayed in Pompidou Centre from September 2011 to January 2012. Now it’s at Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and will also be at Tate Modern in London from 28 June to 14 October 2012. If you have the chance to see this exhibit while it is on tour I would say, Carpe Diem : -). Don’t let the chance pass you by!

Terella 6th Anniversary gives best posts about Norway

Habits, OsloBG, Travel Norway, Travels

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RennyBA’s Terella is about Norway and the Nordic countries; the significant four seasons, our culture, traditions and habits. Six years ago today I started out on a project, not having any idea how large and great this project would be. This Anniversary post will be a look back at some of the highlights + a bit facts & figures:
This post is N° 548 and there are totally 15 150 comments approved. Yearly page view rate is now about 55 000 and almost 70% comes from Google with search words like Oslo fish market or Rakfisk (a traditional Yule dish), Gaustatoppen (mountain with the longest and widest view), Liv Ullman and Aleksander Rybak. The 10 most visitor countries are US, Norway, UK, Canada, Sweden, Germany, India, Australia, Netherlands and Philippines.Enough hard facts, let’s take a look at the most popular post each year; RennyBA’s Terella Hall of Fame (click photos to read the post):

2006: Norwegian Christmas Day Smorgasbord
Lots of my posts, especially at Christmas time are about food, but then again it is an important part of Norwegian Yuletide. This post is about some of our old home made food traditions, with recipes passed down for many generations and I consider myself lucky having a mom who still holds on to them. My mom and grandmother did most of it in the kitchen with fresh meat coming directly from the butcher. Then of course we have the cookies – 7 varieties – and the marzipan and other types of confect. It all shows up at our First Christmas Day smorgasbord at the traditional family gathering.

2007: 17th of May – Norway’s National Day
Our constitution was signed at this day in 1814 and declared Norway an independent nation. All over Norway, children march through the local neighbourhoods with an abundance of flags and traditional costumes. Each elementary school arranges its own parade, led by the school’s own marching band. The parade takes the children through the community, often making stops at homes for senior citizens, war memorials, etc.

2008: Christmas tree and food traditions in Norway
Norwegians have either a spruce or a pine tree in their living room – decorated with white lights, tinsel, Norwegian flags and other ornaments for Christmas. As a child and with my children of course, we made paper baskets of shiny, collared paper. The baskets can be filled with candy or nuts. Chains made of collared paper are also very popular.
Our celebration starts Christmas Eve at 6PM with a feast and before presents are opened, we “circle the Christmas tree”; all the family holds hands to form a ring around the tree, and walk around the tree singing carols.

2009: From frozen Paradise to hot summer beaches
After all, my blog is about our significant four seasons and this post literary illustrating my point. It’s a story about our favourite beach and how it change from the hot summer days where you need to cool down in a dip and then to wintertime where we go skiing and skating at the very same spot. So within 6 month, you switch from snowsuits to tiny bikinis – and everything between (sometimes less *LoL*).
Around summer solstice, the sun is up from around 3:45AM to 10:45PM -19 hours in southern Norway. If you then have in mind that the sun is up only for 5 hours in mid winter and the temperature is around -10C, I guess you understand why Norwegians are crazy about taking advantage of this sunny, warm weather.

2010: The Oslo Blog Gathering
A dream came true – No doubt OsloBG2010 is my ultimate Social Media experience. It fulfilled my saying “Blogging Connecting People” when about 30 friends from all over the world met – in real flesh – in August in Oslo! It was a once in a life time experience and also proved another of my saying about networking like blogging: “It’s a Givers Gain”:
After sharing about Norway in general and Oslo in particular, it was a blast of a gathering when I finally could meet at least some of my regular readers and show them around at places they had read about and wanted to see by themselves! The top of the cream was when The Major of Oslo invited as all to the Town Hall and even a guided tour around in the building.
I’ve done my best to collect some of the blog posts by the participants about their stay and what they liked about Norway and Oslo. Take a look at OsloBG’s official program site and there you find the link to the participants and their reports from the gathering!

As I always say “Blogging Connecting People”: When I started this blog and first came up with that motto I had no idea how true it would be. Now I have so many good friends from all around the world, and blogging here on my Terella has brought me in touch with all of them. Thank you all for following along on my adventures and here’s to another year of blogging and connecting people!