THE SMOOTH WAY

Today's first picture is the Australian rip and curl on Dee Why Beach. When our daughter Julie first went Down Under in 2006, Sophie, my husband and I went to visit her in Sydney, and we stayed one week at Dee Why and one week in Manly. These small towns are both situated on what is known as the Peninsula, and the quickest way to get into Sydney city centre is to take the ferry from Manly.

Dee Why Beach

On a ferry (again!)

Julie was in Oz on a "Work and Travel"-visa, which is a visa you can get only once in your lifetime. It gives you an opportunity to get to know Australia, in fact it is exactly that - you work and you travel. Some Australian employers know how to take advantage of these young adventurers and offer them pretty awful and low-paid jobs, but Julie was lucky and landed a job at a smoothie and juice bar, which she ended up managing. (She'd tried her skills at potato-picking up country but was so bad at it that she got fired. I suspect she got herself fired on purpose....)

Our terrace in Manly, overlooking the beach

Actually I was not going to write about Australia today - I was going pick up the thread from yesterday and talk about the company we started after we'd sold our fruit basket business. Instead of just taking the money and running, we HAD to be entrepreneurs again. We never learn! So visiting Oz, hearing about Julie's work, lying on Manly Beach every day with a - yes, you've guessed it - SMOOTHIE-bar across the road, we thought: "Hmmm..... this could be something for Norwegians..." Less than two years later we opened The Smoothie Factory in an Oslo suburb.

And we're still running it. These have been five incredibly hard years - introducing smoothies and freshly made juices to the Norwegian public has been tough going, but FINALLY! About two years ago things started to change for the better and gradually we increased our sales. By then we'd poured amazing sums of money into it and very nearly given up many times. We felt terrible about having persuaded our shareholders and co-owners to join our project - basically they'd lost all their investments by then too.

Our daughters have all been managers at The Smoothie Factory - one after the other - now it's our youngest daughter Sophie who runs the business. But we're very much hands on all the time, not getting paid yet of course. But we hope and believe that one day we'll be able to expand, to be able to see increasing profits, and eventually to return our shareholders' investments to them.

Twice we've been elected "Best in Test," once by a TV-channel, once by a newspaper. We receive a lot of feed-back from our customers that our smoothies are superior to others, and yes - they are made with first-class ingredients. Frozen yogurt, frozen or fresh fruit or berries, juice or milk.

This venture has been far from smooth. But when I see the bar crowded with smoothie-hungry faces - as well as one or two celebrities - my entrepreneurial heart proudly races. Though I definitely think this is the last time I launch one of my ideas into expensive reality!

Mira's many smoothie-faces:

FRUITFUL LIAISONS

I thought I'd start today's blog post with some photos of the blossoming peach trees in France, which I wrote about earlier. These pictures make a lovely contrast to my bored and fed up self-portraits of yesterday, and initiate today's theme... although I'm just as bored today - with the clearing out of my office:

The only thing I'm a little bit pleased with is that so far I've thrown away more than I've kept. But there's still a loooong way to go! Does anyone happen to be in need of a Chesterfield desk and matching leather chair by the way?:

We try to throw away things quickly (well, we have no choice), but every now and again nostalgic things turn up. Old contracts, client lists, letters, and reminders of the company we started together in 1995 and sold in 2007. I wrote about our gourmet shop yesterday. While running the shop we gradually discovered that a good sales product for us was doing gift baskets. For school lotteries, for birthdays, and especially for Christmas. And then suddenly! Our entrepreneurial idea was born! We decided to try gift baskets, or rather fruit baskets, on a larger scale. We'd heard that this was becoming a popular office perk in Sweden, so we asked the bank for a loan to get started. But no. We mortgaged our house.

We worked incredibly hard at building up our clientele - for the first 2-3 years simultaneously with running our shop. This was just before the Internet explosion, so we flooded the market with colourful, exquisite brochures in the post. We printed out company lists and telephoned thousands of companies. Then we started to grow quickly and realised that if we wanted to expand further we would have to get hold of larger premises and employ people - we couldn't do everything ourselves. The little freedom we'd gained by starting our own business was by now non-existing. We hadn't had a holiday together for years. So we expanded, again with our mortgage - and with a couple of investors and friends who believed in us.

Still - I can't remember a Christmas during those years that I was prepared for our "home" Christmas celebration. I was the best employee at wrapping fruit baskets in cellophane, so this is what I did - up until the last moment before the Christmas bells chimed. I recall decorating the tree and wrapping presents and laying the table and cooking - through the night. The Night Before Christmas.

But it was worth it. "Fruitful Liaisons" was one of our slogans. And yes - we achieved them, the liaisons. We found the best contacts ever through the Indonesian Embassy and went to Jakarta to design and order our own baskets. Our clients increased in number every day. We were copied unashamedly by other entrepreneurs, who nicked our clients. But they usually returned to us. Our idea became successful the day nobody said: "Why should I order a fruit basket for my employees? We can send our secretary out to buy it." Instead THEY rang us and said: "I'd like to order fifty fruit baskets per week, please." 

YES. We'd made it. 

We sold our Baby in 2007. 

FRUIT & VEG

Bored Big Mama

Oh, what a boring day! I woke up this morning to bright sunshine and melting snow - very rested after more than eight hours sleep (I was a wreck after my mini-cruise escapades) - but knowing that I have days ahead of me of clearing out our office. We're supposed to be out by the end of the first week of March, and my husband is going on a golf trip on the 1st, so I guess that means he's leaving most of it to me!

Fed up Big Mama

Yes, my husband and I have worked together for as long as I can remember, and we had an office together with desks facing each other - well, since 1992 anyway. After Sophie was born, we decided not to go back to our old jobs - he a sales manager, me a foreign exchange analyst. They were both hectic jobs, with long hours and a lot of representation, and I for one didn't know how to face it with three kids of 7, 4 and 1. So we decided to start our own business to give ourselves some more freedom. Did I say freedom? For the next fifteen years we built up and ran our business concept, first a fruit/vegetable/gourmet-shop, then after a few years of doing that we started another company simultaneously. And in 2008 we started yet another one, which we are still heavily involved in.

Exasperated Big Mama

When you run your own business you're actually never really free - you take your work everywhere, in the car, home, on holiday. In addition we were a married couple working together, but I made a point of NOT talking shop at home, much to my husband's frustration sometimes. I needed the time-out though! The premises that we got hold of were in walking distance from our house, so we did actually feel a bit more liberated than before, being able as we were to work alternate shifts and one of us walking home to feed the kids and help with homework.

Running a gourmet shop in Oslo in the early nineties meant educating your customers. There hadn't yet been a "food" revolution, and you couldn't even buy olive oil in ordinary supermarkets! Let alone things that we take for granted today, like Basmati rice, tapenades, marinated olives, eggs from free range hens, more than one type of tomato, balsamico vinegar. I used to hand out recipes to our customers, and many are the people in our neighbourhood who still pickle gherkins my way!

French sea salt from the Camargue, extra virgin olive oil and duck paté

During the years that we ran our gourmet shop I felt great satisfaction in "teaching" people about good and healthy food, but we were educated too! Our customers were eager to swap recipes with us, to tell us about novelties they'd snapped up abroad and to generally share good food experiences. We had a lot of celebrity customers as well, among them Norway's most famous actress and diva Wenche Foss. But if I was behind the counter when she came in she just looked past me and chanted: "Where is that lovely man who's usually here? I want HIM to help me!" So I called to my husband in the office behind me: "Your girlfriend is here!"

Handpicked goodies from a Bulgarian garden

Serge Gainsbourg has joined the veg - "l'homme à la tête de chou"

ROCKIN' GOOD TIME!

No blogging for the past two days because I've been out sailing on the Seven Seas! Well, to be honest it was only one sea, namely the Skagerak - yes, and a little bit of the Baltic too. My daughter Johanne had invited me and her sister Sophie and the little girls on a two-day mini-cruise from Oslo to Kiel, Germany. The main purpose of this kind of trip is to eat, drink and be merry. And perhaps get some tax-free shopping done as well. It was the end of the girls' half-term holiday, so it was fun for them to get a break "abroad."

The departure from Oslo began with the check-in having huge computer problems, and when everything is digitalised, and you have no manual back-up - well, then you're lost. It was absurd - everyone was just hanging around! The check-in staff staring blankly into the crowd, twiddling their thumbs!

When we eventually received our boarding cards/key cards, my name was spelt wrong. But there was no way I was going to queue up again to have it changed. It did strike me though, in the unlikely event of shipwrecking, that they'd be searching for the wrong person.

What they didn't tell us however, was that we had to hang on to these cards for dear life - it turned out they were your passports in and out of the ship when it was docking in Kiel, and when you disembarked back in Oslo - as well as your cabin keys.

The Color Magic 

Color Line

When getting off the ship in Kiel you had to swipe the cards through a scanner at the terminal, and my daughter thought it would be enough to bring her own card, and not the children's. But no. Going back to the cabin to look for the other cards in all their mess was not an option, so Sophie decided to run the 500 metres back to the ship's reception to have them print out new ones. They in turn managed to print two cards with the same name (Mira's), which subsequently showed that one Mira had already passed the turnstile, while the real Mira was still waiting on the ship side of the barrier. She was not allowed through until yet another card had been printed, which took another fifteen minutes! We did wonder if we were the only people on board to have problems with this system.

Kids' drinks with lots of unhealthy additives, but having a good time anyway!

I did my Big Mama duties and babysat my granddaughters both nights and fell asleep with them in the cabin they shared with their Mum and aunt. After being woken up and escorted back to my own cabin in the early hours of the morning by Sophie, I discovered that the wretched key card didn't work. There I was in my bare feet, make-up all over my face, contact lenses that were still in and practically grown into my eyeballs, my hair all over the place - in an empty ship corridor. After about twenty minutes two security guards came to my rescue and pointed out to me that my card had a small fold in it. How can you not get a fold in a card that's made of paper? 

Cod on a bed of potato and cauliflower purée - the Oceanic Restaurant

Norwegian farm cheeses

Disco night!

All the ship's corridor and cabin floors are carpeted - is that hygienic? Well, it's not up to me to decide, but all I can say is that if you walk along the corridors and look down on this pattern the stripes begin to move - seriously! It's an optical illusion of course, but when the boat rocks from side to side it's a bit nauseating - even for someone like me who has never been acquainted with seasickness!

Our two-day cruise was wrapped up with breakfast at my house this morning. I for one had to take a nap this afternoon - and I KNOW the other girls did too. But we had a rockin' good time!

THREE SISTERS

Johanne, 29 - Julie, 26 - Sophie, 22

When our youngest daughter Sophie was born I immediately said to my husband - "Oh, a third girl! Are you disappointed?" Oh my - the two of them, the midwife and the husband, scolded me in unison. "A beautiful girl! She's perfect! How can you say something like that?" Well, all I can defend myself with is that women who've just given birth are a bit confused and exhausted. It probably crossed my mind there and then that my husband would have liked a son. But he for one wouldn't have it any other way.

And he's in good company, with several stars: Bruce Willis has three daughters, so does my favourite actor Jeff Bridges. Bob Geldof has three (glad we didn't have the same taste in names though). Come to think of it - doesn't Matt Damon have three daughters too? Anton Chekhov wrote a play about Three Sisters, William Shakespeare's King Lear has three sisters in it. And Shakespeare writes about three witches in Macbeth. He says nothing about them being sisters of course, but I've always imagined they are! Woody Allen's "Hannah and her Sisters" is one of my all time favourite films. Three sisters again! And how many daughters in the Downton Abbey family?

Posing all beautifully dressed up in national dresses on Christmas Eve

But then they can't resist doing gangsta poses! With Jelena!

If I should pick out one thing in my life that warms my heart endlessly, that gives me enormous pleasure and happiness, it's the fact that these three sisters actually LIKE each other. Of course they had sisterly arguments when they were younger, and still do - but they really ENJOY spending time with one another! Laughter, jokes and snappy one-liners echo through the rooms when they are all together. Music comes on, gossip, clothes, jewellery and make-up exchange hands quicker than I can yell "who's staying for dinner!" 

They are also very supportive of each other. Not at any cost - they certainly know how to be frank if they feel one of them is making bad choices - but there's never been any doubt of their loyalty to one another - against us if necessary! And that's how it should be.

I found these road signs in my garden one morning - their idea of a practical joke.... Crazy little party girls!

The Three Sisters, Blue Mountains, Australia

Johanne's 29th on December 7th 2012

Big Mama!