Photo of the day: Rosendal, Norway

by Elizabeth Seward on


Norway is a place I’d like to go. To be fair, I’m a travel writer. I’d like to go most places. Scratch that. I want to go everywhere. But Norway seems particularly enchanting to me.

When photographer, Ben Britz, first began traveling, he traveled in the most frugal ways possible. While in Norway back in 2005, he traveled only with a backpack. With a small tent for sleeping and a thumb in good shape for hitching rides, he explored Norway. As a note for those looking to camp in Norway, here’s a tip: in Norway it’s legal to camp anywhere you want (except for farmland or cities), even private property, as long as property owners cannot see you.

Thankfully, he managed to find room to pack his camera and took this shot.

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Fuglen, Oslo: The world’s most stylish cafe-furniture shop

by Alex Robertson Textor on

After a few days wandering around Oslo in the middle of winter, I felt as if I’d hit upon the city’s essence. In a frenzy of reductive resolution, I decided that the Norwegian capital is best described as a city of winter sports-crazed jocks.

My evidence: the many locals who made it abundantly clear that they couldn’t wait to drive to their cabins in the mountains for a skiing weekend. That and the absence of the sort of local design scene that characterizes the other continental Nordic capitals. Jocks and design are sort of opposites, right?

Other Nordic countries are leagues ahead of Norway as recognized sources of contemporary design. Norway doesn’t have the design heritage of Sweden, Denmark or Finland by a long shot. Even Julie Ann Seglem, the charming proprietor of a shop called Mitt lille hjem, bemoaned the absence of a stronger domestic design scene in conversation with me. She sources many of her shop’s items from Denmark.

On my February visit to Oslo, I studiously walked the streets of Grünerløkka, Grønland, and central Oslo looking for evidence of contemporary design. I found some cool stuff, certainly. The most interesting blocks of Oslo, retail-wise, are along Markveien in the commercial heart of Grünerløkka, where second-hand stores and cute personality-driven boutiques make for a distinctly local atmosphere.

Standouts here include Brudd, a collective-run shop that sells handicrafts, some very beautiful, by Oslo-based artists. Especially captivating, I thought, were the delicate cups by Sara Skotte. Markveien is also home to Chillout TravelCentre, a small chain that started in Bergen. Chillout covers lots of ground. It is a travel gear shop, a bookstore, a café, and a branch of Kilroy Travel. It’s an exciting store concept, one I’d love to see replicated elsewhere. And there’s also the aforementioned Mitt lille hjem, which pursues an attractive vintage cottage chic approach to home decor.

But there was no sign of a shop with an aesthetic powerful enough to seduce visitors with its very vision. This was no big deal. I was already convinced that Oslo, a city of snowmobiling jocks, was operating with something of a design deficit.

And then I chanced completely randomly upon Fuglen and I realized that I hadn’t quite gotten things right.

Fuglen is a café and furniture store in central Oslo. Every last detail has been worked out, from the modernist logo on up. The café so successfully replicates an early 1960s den that it was recently hauled into service as a backdrop for a Mad Men-esque photo essay featuring Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian Prime Minister.

Fuglen was originally opened as a café in 1963, though its current hybrid cafe-shop incarnation only dates back to 2008. It has three proprietors: Einar Kleppe Holthe, vintage furnishings expert Peppe Trulsen, and barista/bartender Halvor Digernes.

Fuglen serves fine pastries and very fine coffee drinks, and the lounge areas of the café spill out across several rooms. The space transforms into a cocktail lounge on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings.

The furniture and the objects on the walls, mostly very beautiful vintage pieces, are for sale. Most interestingly, a huge number of the outstanding items on display were created by domestic designers. Norwegians Birger Dahl, Fredrik Kayer, Cathrineholm, Arne Halvorsen, Erik Pløen, Torbjørn Afdal, and others receive their due here. The Norwegian design legacy, it turns out, is quite a bit more impressive than the attention it receives.

And yes, there are hipster ladies at Fuglen chatting softly, wearing big glasses and looking not unlike their compatriots in Portland or Hackney. And hipster gentlemen looking aloof and pulling off their trick of managing to look neither straight nor gay at the same time.

So where does this leave the city of weekend jocks? Might Oslo be the sort of city whose jocks also enjoy snapping up vintage enamel ashtrays to crown their Alf Aarseth dining tables? Whatever the answer to these questions, there is no debate around the recognition of Fuglen as a design beacon in Norway. In fact, just today, Fuglen received special recognition in the form of an award from the Norwegian Design Council.

[Images: Eirik Sand Johnsen for Fuglen]

Schengen and the disappearance of European passport stamps

by Alex Robertson Textor on


Creative new use for border crossing posts at German/Austrian border.

In the late 1980s, an American spending a summer traveling across Europe with a Eurailpass would see his or her passport stamped possibly dozens of times. With a few exceptions, every time a border was crossed, an immigration agent would pop his or her head into a train compartment, look at everyone’s passports, in most cases stamp them, and move on. Every Eastern Bloc country required visas, some of which could be obtained at the border and others of which had to be applied for in advance.

Today, an American can enter the Schengen zone in Helsinki, fly to Oslo and then on to Amsterdam, proceed by train through Belgium, France, Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland, then by bus to Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and then by ferry back to Helsinki before catching a flight to Athens and landing in Greece without once needing to submit a passport to a border guard’s scrutiny.

The development of the Schengen agreement across Europe has altered the geopolitical map of the continent in many ways. For tourists, the development of the Schengen zone has simplified travel by drastically reducing the number of times a passport can be checked and stamped as national borders are crossed.

The Schengen Agreement is named after the town of Schengen in Luxembourg. It was here in 1985 that five countries-Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, West Germany, and France-signed an agreement to essentially create borderless travel between them. A model for this agreement had been created years before by the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg), which eliminated border controls back in 1948. The Nordic countries also did away with internal border posts, in 1958.

In 1995, the five original Schengen countries plus Portugal and Spain inaugurated the zone. In 1997, Austria and Italy joined. Greece followed in 2000 and the five Nordic countries joined in 2001. In late 2007, nine more countries joined the Schengen zone; most recently, Switzerland signed up in 2008.


Abandoned border crossing between Slovakia and Hungary.

Today, 22 European countries are part of Schengen. Every European Union country (save the UK, Ireland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Cyprus) belongs. Other members include EU holdouts Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland. The European microstates present a few complications. Monaco’s borders are administered by France, which makes the tiny principality a part of Schengen, while Liechtenstein’s accession, approved by the European Parliament in February, is pending. San Marino and the Vatican are de facto versus official members, while mountainous, landlocked Andorra remains outside of the zone altogether.

There are five EU countries not currently part of the Schengen zone. The UK and Ireland (as well as the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands) operate a Schengen-like agreement called the Common Travel Area. Neither country is obligated to join the zone.

Romania, Bulgaria, and Cyprus, however, are all bound by treaty to eventually join. Romania has fulfilled all the criteria for joining Schengen and Bulgaria is close to fulfillment as well. These two countries will accede together, likely later this year. Cyprus presents a more complicated situation given the division of the island between the Republic of Cyprus in the south and the largely unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north.

With the coming accession of the Western Balkans to the European Union, the Schengen zone will almost definitely continue to grow. Might it one day cover the entire landmass of Europe? Check back in two decades.

[Images: top image Flickr | Mike Knell; middle image Flickr | jczart]

Launchpad London: Oslo budget strategies

by Alex Robertson Textor on

In hindsight, Oslo was probably the worst possible inaugural destination for a budget travel series. And in fact my first few hours in Oslo, though a great deal of fun, were a budget traveler’s nightmare. An hour in and $90 down, I had to wonder if I would be able to come up with any useable Oslo budget strategies at all.

A one-way journey on the airport express train, which sets off from a vast concrete bunker-like station at the airport, costs 170 NOK ($29). Ouch. While cheaper than a taxi, $29 is a bruising amount to shell out for an airport train.

Never mind. There is lunch to eat. My first stop is Grünerløkka, a hip neighborhood and the home of Delicatessen, a tapas restaurant on my advance research list. Delicatessen is a very appealing place. Lighted candles–a standard feature in Oslo restaurants, it turns out, at least during the darker months–grace every table. Heavy wooden tables give the place an almost rustic feel. The waiters are friendly. I took my time with the menu, ordering a chorizo sandwich, a small salad, and finally a crema catalana. For a moment, I forgot about the objective of my journey. The chorizo, from La Rioja, was delicious. The bill was not. With tip, my meal plus coffee cost 350 NOK ($60).

Clearly I needed to rethink this whole restaurant thing. I had to get to a supermarket. At the discount chain Rimi, I bought a peppery salami, two rolls, some yogurt, bananas, and mineral water for 125 NOK ($22). Again, not cheap, but the haul was big enough for my dinner and breakfast the following day. For lunch on my second day, I ate a vegetarian smørrebrød at Café Tekehtopa on St. Olav Plass in central Oslo, relatively cheap at 79 NOK ($14). And then, in a stroke of unplanned luck, I was treated to dinner by Oslo resident Sam Daams of Travellerspoint, whose acquaintance I’d made via Twitter.

But if I thought I was going to close the evening without another moment of sticker shock, I was mistaken. We met several of Sam’s friends, all foreign men involved with Norwegian women, at the newish Schouskjelleren Mikrobryggeri, a lively cellar microbrewery and bar in Grünerløkka, and I bought a round of beers for the crew. Four pints came to 292 NOK ($52). I gazed off in a miniature stupor, trying to figure out precisely how much I’d just spent, while Sam and his friends laughed in recognition. This was, after all, an experience they’d all had previously.So where are Oslo’s budget-friendly bargains?

Several museums are free, including the Oslo Museum‘s three museums (Oslo City Museum, Intercultural Museum, and Theatre Museum); the National Museum – Architecture, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, the National Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (all of which fall under the authority of the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design); the National Library; and DOGA (the Norwegian Design and Architecture Centre).

On the retail front, things are grim for bargain hunters, although the Marita Stiftelsen charity shop on Markveien had some funky second-hand goods for 5 NOK ($1).

How might my costs have been lowered? I could have utilized the services of a regional train instead of the airport express train for the airport-center link. The regional train runs 110 NOK ($20) for a one-way journey, a roundtrip savings of $18 against the airport express. And while I slept in one of Oslo’s very least expensive beds, booked through airbnb, a more serious budget traveler would find cheaper accommodations in a private room booked through the tourist office for as little as 300 NOK ($53) per night. A campground site (during the summer months only) would be cheaper yet, and free accommodation options like Couchsurfing are of course the cheapest of all.

Sticking exclusively to supermarkets for food and drink is the safest bet, as even the fast food kebab spots that provide budget meal relief in other parts of Europe are pricey in Oslo.

Check out the introductory post in the Launchpad London series.

Launchpad London maiden journey: Midweek jaunt to Oslo

by Alex Robertson Textor on

London is one dizzyingly well-connected city, uniquely positioned as a hub for air travel around Europe and beyond. The city has five airports–Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, and London City–six if you count tiny Southend. In 2010, over 127 million passengers were carried through these airports. By way of contrast, Paris, the next biggest city in Europe in terms of passenger numbers, saw 83 million people pass through its two airports in 2010.

With this post, Gadling launches a new series designed to call attention to London as a launchpad for travel around Europe and beyond–from daytrip locations just outside the borders of Greater London to destinations as far afield as Dubai. We’ll provide an overview of transportation options and also provide a budget-minded navigation of each destination.

First up: OsloSeveral airlines fly from two London airports to Oslo. From London Heathrow, British Airways and SAS fly to Oslo-Gardermoen, the city’s main airport. From London Gatwick, Norwegian Air Shuttle flies to Oslo-Gardermoen and Ryanair flies to Oslo-Rygge, a secondary airport south of the city. When I searched for fares on Kayak, Ryanair’s flights to Oslo-Rygge were cheapest, though I decided against this option in order to avoid having to deal with the lengthy transit time between the center of Oslo and Oslo-Rygge.

The cheapest flight I found to Oslo-Gardemoen was flown by Norwegian Air Shuttle, a Norwegian low-cost airline with good reach across Europe and an especially strong network throughout Scandinavia. My flight ran £95.60 ($153). I booked it just six days prior to departure.

My accommodation, organized through airbnb, cost me $152 for two nights. The $76 nightly charge breaks down as follows: $68 for the room plus a $16 airbnb service fee. Budget watchers will observe that I’ve spent $305 before arriving in Oslo.

My accommodation via airbnb amounts to one of the cheapest beds in Oslo, though single rooms at Ellingsens Pensjonat, the least expensive Oslo guesthouse I came across during research, are cheaper at 400 NOK ($70) per night.

Bargain-hunters can find relatively low rates in private accommodation. Rooms in private homes can be booked at the train station tourist office on the day of requested accommodation. These rooms begin at around 300 NOK ($53) per night, and there are dozens of private Oslo rooms on offer depending on season.

Want more options? Bed & Breakfast Norway lists the following accommodations with single rooms available for under 400 NOK per night: the centrally-located Den Blå Dør for 400 NOK ($70) and Enerhaugen for 370 NOK ($65); and Ambiose Bed & Breakfast for 370 NOK ($65) and Bed & Breakfast Poppe for 250 NOK ($44), both of which are located on the outskirts of Oslo. During the summer, camping is another budget-friendly accommodation option. From June 1 through September 1, sites for one or two people can be booked at Ekeberg Camping‘s Oslo City Camp starting at 180 NOK ($32) per night.

I set off with a backpack containing two changes of clothes, my passport, a small present for my hostess, a notebook, a print-out of my ticket, my researched list of museums, neighborhoods, and restaurants, and my iPad. And my heavy winter coat, which I had to drag out of storage.

My objectives are straight-forward: to explore Grünerløkka, Grønland, and the city center; to hunt for good things to eat (especially hearty, rustic Norwegian fare and, if I’m lucky, some good Pakistani grub); to explore the local design scene; to avoid frostbite; to run into Stella Mwangi; and lastly, to remain financially solvent.

For another look at how a new home base opens up travel destinations, check out Gadling contributor Meg Nesterov’s Weekending series. In this series, the author details her travels from her home base in Istanbul to Bosnia, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Greece, Lebanon, and around Turkey.

[Image: Flickr | Hyougushi]