After a three year hiatus my work trips to Oslo have happily resumed. Our company recently moved into some office space at Fornebu just outside Oslo which is coincidentally quite near the Lysaker offices of my former employer. The office itself is inside a refurbished terminal building of the old Oslo airport. The new airport being inconveniently located about a zillion miles in the other direction.

office_scale

The terminal is now a “hip” and “trendy” space for start-up offices with lots of “edgy” features like exposed pipes and half-finished stairwells. Definitely nicer than our grim London office.

Nearby is the massive headquarters of Norwegian state-owned oil company Statoil. It’s built like a huge Jenga tower: each of those blocks is three storeys high! Even stranger, underneath the blocks is a mix of brightly coloured panels and TV screens showing psychedelic videos. Nice to see some modern architecture that isn’t all glass and steel.

statoil_scale

I managed to have a totally cashless trip using a combination of credit cards and this amazing pay-by-phone app called RuterBillet. You just pay for a bus ticket via the app then show the driver the “picture of the day” before the timer expires. I was very excited.

bus_scale

We stayed right in the centre of Oslo and I was up on the 27th floor with this totally awesome view over the train station and fjord. As usual everything in Olso was horrifically expensive: glad I’m not paying!

hotel_scale

Here are some more photos I took during evening sightseeing: