travel

Judith reporting from the Nordics, today .. Norway

This report is written by Judith de Graaff from Joelix and all images are by Judith.

 After a week of Swedish countryside and Norwegian fjords, we reached Oslo where we stayed in theComfort Xpress Hotel. A so called "Social Media Hotel"... which meant so much as: cool lobby & brekkie hangout, with super fast internet. And nice staff too!

Oslo is a big city with quite a compact city center. Some of my favorite stores were Elm Design(Icelandic fashion design, in the same street as Acne and Filippa K) and Clas Ohlsen. The latter is a part of chain store where you can buy everything from a lightbulb to a fridge. They mainly sell electrical stuff, hardware, everything for your home, leisure and multimedia. Not a very special store, but it's so complete that I liked it. 

The area we explored outside the city center is called Grünerløkka. Here you'll find small shops and lots of great vintage stores as well.

I simply LOVE the Granit stores. We already visited a big Granit shop in Stockholm, but again the Granit Grünerløkka store didn't let me down. Granit sells basic storage solutions and other functional products for home, office and garden. There is nearly any branding on the products (which reminds a bit of Muji) which makes it super easy to personalize the products in your own way.

Christine reporting from Oslo

One of my favourite things about Oslo is that it is neither too big, nor too small.  It is the third largest city in Scandinavia, with a little over 500 000 inhabitants, and the capital of Norway, but it is still a manageable size and easy to get around.  It has shopping, entertainment and leisure activities for everyone, but today I’m going to show you my favourite spots.

My daily errands usually take me to the city centre, the area around the city’s main street Karl Johans gate.  The Royal Castle lies in one end of the street, and the central station in the other.  A lot of the big chains, like H&M, Zara, etc have stores along Karl Johan, and there are also several large department stores, and of course a lot of cafes and restaurants.