Oct 19 2008
Holmenkollen ski jump
I went to the Holmenkollen ski jump on the 16th of October. The subway-turned-street car took me up (200m) one of the hills surrounding Oslo. I stopped at the Holmenkollen stop to go see up close the ski jump that you can see from everywhere in the city. It was decided that the ski jump is to be demolished and a new one put up. I’m not sure if the new one will be located at the same place or elsewhere. At 16:30 they were to be removing the crown portion. As you can see from all of the construction work in the photos, it was fairly busy. As tempted as I was, I could not approach any closer for the fences they had erected. (The photo I’m showing here was taken when I was in Oslo during Christmas 2007. I wanted to show the prominence of the ski jump over Oslo. The white building to the bottom left is Oslo’s new opera house and just above that, in the line of trees, is the royal palace. NB: it’s a large photo.)
Though there’s a photo in the gallery of a sign that says Lillehammer ’94, the winter Olympics ski jump event of 1994 was not actually held at this location, it was in Lysgårdsbakken.
I apologize for the photo quality, it leaves a lot to be desired I know. I didn’t have a great camera and the weather was perhaps the worst possible for photo taking.
Other news
In other news, I got my residence permit, valid until 31 August 2009, so now I don’t need to worry about getting deported. The next day I hustled over to the folk registry office (every folk has to be registered you know) to get my personal number. To my surprise, every woman behind the desk, that I could hear, spoke Polish. Not only that, all of the men waiting for their turn to apply for a personal number also spoke Polish. It was unnerving actually, I felt like I was in Poland. My number should get to me in a few weeks then I can do the other things regular Norwegians do such as: open a bank account and use a cheap monthly cell phone plan (not a contract though).
Tomorrow I’m going to visit those three stave churches. Photos will be up shortly afterwards.
[...] few weeks ago I applied for my folk number (read about it here), that’s the social insurance number equivalent here in Norway. I neglected to tell you the [...]