Hey man,

how cool is that! You´re coming to Oslo! I´ll send you a mail tomorrow.

Kenneth
-friend and tour-guide

i was just there!
it was beautiful and the show went well and the poeple were great
but SOOO expensive!

This place is nice. You'll live on a boat in the center of the city. Cheap too. And real hippies behind the desk.

http://www.msinnvik.no/

"I'd just wander around and drink warm drinks and write prose."

There : that's my dream job.

jealousy is... one of the top places on my list of places to go.

Beautiful time to visit Oslo, but a warning: My wife and I were there the same week in 2003, and the city was empty. Many restaurants close for the Christmas holiday. To top it off our hotel, First Hotel Noble House--one of the best in the city--was also inexplicably closed.

Imagine booking months in advance, dragging all of your bags from the train station to your hotel at 11 at night, only to find a sign hung on the door reading "closed for christmas holiday." Luckily, their sister hotel a few blocks away honored our reservation. And now we look back and laugh, but at the time, the prospect of sleeping on a street in Oslo in zero-degree weather was pretty sobering.

Sameless plug: A travel-agent friend of mine helped me sort it all out: tripguy.com. He's been to Oslo, and knows the city well.

I was in Oslo, also for less than a day, back in September, and loved it. Make sure you get out to Vigeland though I don't know how lovely it'll be in December. Probably not so much.

You should listen to a Low song "Just Like Christmas" while you're there. Oslo is the setting of the song.

IMHO. best to stay near Majorstuen. Cheapish ($55?) & utilitarian is Ellingsens Pensjonat, but the bathroom's down the hall and the old folks in charge would freak if "guests" showed up. Last time I stayed at (Tulip Inn Rainbow) Frogner Hotel at 33 Frederik Stangsgate in West Oslo. Very nice, excellent but small rooms, with a lobby bar even, and set in a swanky area near the embassies, a 15 minute walk south of Majorstuen and just off Bygdøyallé, the main street/bus line heading from downtown toward the Viking ship museum and the bourgeois southwestern suburbs of Baerum. Frognerhotel was about $80 a night in 2002, with free breakfast, but for Oslo, that's the price of 7 beers. The grungey/öko/granola/hipster part of town is Grünerløkka, northeast of the Central train station, but the lodging wasn't plentiful up there. Record shops: check Platekompaniet.no, with stores in Majorstuen & downtown. Generally, pickings are slim. The only meal under $25 will be $18 for all-you-can-eat vegetarian lunch at Vegeta Vertshus downtown, kind of near AmEx. Don't hang out near the main train station. Lykke til!

PS: Those were USD prices.

PPS: From Majorstuen, take the tram up to Frognerseteren (a cold, snowy mountaintop with a lodge/restaurant). Great trams all over town. Buy an Oslo transit card!

PPPS: Amazing search engine to find anyone in Norway:
http://www.sesam.no/search/?lang=en&c=w&q=

gives you a map, address, phone number.

And to find their reported gross income for 2000, 2001 and 2002, use this:
http://skatt.sol.no/skattelister/soek/

I'm going to Oslo tomorrow for the weekend! First time, so I can't give you any tips at the moment.

Hey! I've been living in Oslo for the past 4-5 months or so, and it's charmed me for sure. As a transplanted Canadian, the cold and the dark at this time of year don't deter me none... so if you do decide to come out, and you feel like getting in touch with a complete stranger, let me know! Or if I hear of anything amazing going on here around that time, I'll let you know. Lovely.