Vienna – Day 1

welcome back, readers of my sporadic travelogue! After 2 weeks solid travelling, have ended up in Vienna, with a view of getting a good mugshot of famous composers today. All dead, mind you. Mozart, Strauss and Beethoven are all buried here, according to the friendly Vienna map I have been frantically attempting to read. If [...]

Oslo – Day 2

ext morning, waking up in the lovely Cochs Pensiojat, in a heated room that had evidently seen better days, I mulled over how much I was willing to let my 40 pounds burn. (Literally, given the heating was purring like a champion steed.) My vague memories of the night before – stumbling from one menacing-looking [...]

Oslo – Day 2 – IV. Holmenkollen

We leave off our narrative as I alighted the precocious Tram No. 18; one heck of a long-distance runner. On its way to Majorstuen, one of those places of ubiquity that shoots to fame on the spurious grounds of being an accidental public transport nexus, it passes Gronland (easily the only run-down part of Oslo, [...]

Oslo – Day 2 – III. On Snow-Capped Hills

Knowing Oslo, I was intent on a ski lift to call my own; and by Jove did I get more than I bargained for. Wielding my transport pass, I hopped off Bus 30 at the Nationaltheatret, in the process convincing myself that I did NOT need another Lebara SIM; my rock-solid constitution, naturally, crumbled, when, [...]

Oslo – Day 2 – II. Aker Brygge to Line 18

We leave the narrative in a shady 7-Eleven, manned by a girl with roughly equivalent eptitude (if that is what remains when you remove the “in” from “ineptitude”. But if English was that simple, how does one account for the proliferation of summer schools in Kent and Surrey?) as some of the glitzier Formica tabletops [...]

Oslo – Day 1

In a rather interesting shift in focus, I will post, daily, a record of my travels to many foreign lands, all populated exclusively by the big-boned white man, or woman, and staffed almost exclusively by the Chinese takeaway and Indian corner shop, before, I belatedly realise, it all slips my mind in the blink of [...]