This weekend I took a 3-day trip to see [“my girlfriend”:http://grigoratou.com], who studies in Bergen. Took some pictures here and there (less than I planned) and decided to write a little about it here.

This was my first time in Bergen. Katie went there about a month ago to persue her BA in psychology, but quite recently she decided to change her major to CS. Which is kinda cool. :-) I left for Bergen thursday evening around 11 pm, taking the bus which takes about 8 hours, because I could sleep on my way there, and it’s really cheap compared to flying there. Of course, you get what you pay for, so basically I was stuck in a freezing cold bus for about 8 hours, getting roughly 1 hour of sleep. People told me to bring a pillow, but I kind of underestimated that advice. Next time, a pillow will certainly be a priority. So anyway, I get to Bergen and Katie picks me up and we go back to her place. She lives in a mediocre studio-room on the outskirts of the city, but for the price she’s paying, it was actually quite decent. An IKEA-poster-room, but heck, so is my apartment. I’m not creative when it comes to interior decoration. And I’m poor. So swedish furniture it was. We went out that day, surprisingly for my first evening there, despite hearsay, it was actually not raining[1]. After walking around town for a while, seeing the big attractions (not many), getting a general view of the city, going shopping for some long-needed clothes, we went to a so called traditionla irish pub'' down town and sat down for a bit. I of course had to have a good ol' pint of Newcastle Brown Ale. Which was good. We went home, basically chilled out the rest of the evening, watching a bit of mythbusters, etc. Next day, we went out again. We decided to go around town for a bit, and while doing that, I came across this little charming recordstore. Went in there, and *surprisingly* they actually had both a slot in their recordstack calledtrance & prog-house”, and a turntable for previewing them. You don’t see that around Oslo every day. I spent about an hour in there previewing records, and walked away with 3 to add to my collection. Picked up a few classics, and another record by a guy I haven’t heard of before, but the tune was very nice. One of those I can't walk out of here without this''-moments. We had tickets to the movieWedding Crashers”[2], so we went to see that afterwards. Not really impressed with the movie, but it had a certain entertainment value, and from a movie starring Owen Wilson & Vince Vaughn, I guess that’s what you can expect. It was fun anyway. We went to revisit the good ol’ irish pub, and went on to the Big Horn steakhouse. For anybody who has been there, they know how it goes. A meal, and you go on. Nothing big. Better than Burger King though. Sunday, we mostly stayed in, and I helped Katie out with her studies. As I mentioned, she recently shifted majors to CS, and kind of got in the middle of the semester, so she’s a little behind with some of the things. She owns an iBook (yay!), so of course, I taught her how to use XCode. Went through some basic introductory assignments in java, and tried to help her out a bit with some math also. Keyword here being “tried”. :-) Had a beer, walked to the trainstation, sat and talked for a bit, and took the bus home. This time, it started out a lot better than the initial bus-trip. But then the bus broke all of a sudden, and we had to wait for 2 hours for a new bus. Had to move every single piece of baggage to the new bus, got a crappy seat, and the bus was - again - freezing cold. Didn’t get any sleep from there to Oslo. Arrived, went home, showered, changed clothes, came to work, started inhaling coffee, and now I’m here. All in all, it was an excellent visit. Bergen is a lovely city, has a charm to it. It doesn’t have the “big city”-feel to it, which I didn’t really expect it to have, even though it is kind of big. The trip back and forth sucked, but being there, seeing a new city, spending time with the lady, was awesome. Oh, and the pictures: !/img/bergenpics/DSC00224thumb.jpg!:http://printf.dk/img/bergenpics/DSC00224.jpg !/img/bergenpics/DSC00234thumb.jpg!:http://printf.dk/img/bergenpics/DSC00234.jpg !/img/bergenpics/DSC00236thumb.jpg!:http://printf.dk/img/bergenpics/DSC00236.jpg !/img/bergenpics/DSCF1222thumb.jpg!:http://printf.dk/img/bergenpics/DSCF1222.jpg !/img/bergenpics/DSCF1227thumb.jpg!:http://printf.dk/img/bergenpics/DSCF1227.jpg !/img/bergenpics/DSCF1233thumb.jpg!:http://printf.dk/img/bergenpics/DSCF1233.jpg !/img/bergenpics/DSCF1234_thumb.jpg!:http://printf.dk/img/bergenpics/DSCF1234.jpg fn1. It rains about 200 days a year in Bergen. It’s infamous for rain. fn2. “link to IMDB”:http://imdb.com/title/tt0396269/