At the hairdresser's today, nine weeks since last time! I usually go every six weeks, but now that I'm growing my hair, my lovely Swedish hairdresser (a girl!) said I could wait seven weeks until next time.
Today was sunny, and I'm going to post a couple of more NICE photos from Oslo. (Still struggling with guilt over that slush picture yesterday, I think).
A glimpse of the Opera house
A glimpse of the Oslo Fjord, the harbour and the islands
A glimpse of the hills around Oslo (and the Central Station)
Back in the Stone Age I used to work as a foreign exchange/client consultant in one of Norway's largest banks. They have recently moved into a new location, in one of the buildings that's part of Oslo's new "barcode" skyline in Bjørvika. A whole new district is being erected here, and while it'll be a construction site for years still, it already looks promising and innovative.
Two of my former colleagues - who've remained two of my best friends - invited me for lunch on the 16th and top floor of the bank building (yeah, yeah, this is not going to be the Manhattan skyline). The views were magnificent and the building an architectural gem. However my friends - and others I overheard - pointed out that the architects have not necessarily paid attention to user-friendliness - not an uncommon missing link between the creators and the users, I suppose.
Many of the employees - among them one of my friends - have "free seating" at the office - that is, she brings her laptop into work every day and then grabs the first available seat and desk. There are little padded frames on the wall where you can stick your head in if you need quiet and privacy to talk on your phone, but as my friends said - and we're all more or less the same height, approximately 163 cm - the frames have been mounted by a guy at least 190 cm tall!
These fabulous lights are from a "relax" room, which is very dark - only lit in this way - and suddenly they turn off and you're in complete darkness with a small canal of water lining the walls. So you'd better be steady on your feet (not TOO relaxed in other words), or you're in the canal before you know it!
This is the Markets Department, where all the stock brokers, foreign exchange dealers, client consultants and market makers sit. It's strange and a bit nostalgic to think that I used to be one of them, but like I said, that was back in the Stone Age when all the currency rates were up on a board and hardly anything was computerised. As you can see, some of these employees have six screens each. And while we used to scream out for the rates we needed from the spot dealers, and they would shout them in return, and we would yell back that the deal was done (millions and millions of dollar sums echoing around the room - no wonder there were mistakes made...), this new Dealing Room is oh-so-quiet. Every exchange, every deal done electronically. The foreign exchange employees get older these days. In my day we were exhausted by the age of thirty-five.
a padded frame of quiet.....interesting....should get one of those :-)
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