17th of May was the Norwegian Constitution Day. I'm a little slow posting this seeing as that's almost half a month ago but I guess better late than never. I also had to wait for some of the photos to be sent to me from my friends and girlfriend.
This day was simply awesome. Social happenings aren't really a thing these days so it was nice to get out and see some people. I met with some old friends and made a couple of brand new ones as well.
In Norway it's quite normal to have champagne breakfasts for Constitution Day. These usually start as early as 7 in the morning. We set the table with all sorts of awesome food, get dressed in our finest attire and drink champagne for breakfast. It's a little bit silly but it's sort of become tradition at this point.
This year was different though. Due to the pandemic any household couldn't hold more than five guests inside. It was however allowed to have up to 20 guests if the arrangement took place outside and you didn't have to walk through the apartment to get to the site. Meaning those lucky enough to have a decently sized garden could host a good group of people.
We were a group of seven people so we couldn't have the breakfast at any of our houses and since none of us had a garden we needed to get creative. We ended up booking a table for a hotel breakfast. That was such a great idea. We got to eat from the buffet which had everything you could ever want for your breakfast. Warm dishes, cold dishes, coffee, cake and the whole package. They even took orders for beer and champagne which was awesome. We got our champagne breakfast and we didn't have to do anything to arrange it ourselves. No cooking and no cleaning!
Restaurant hopping
For the rest of the day we did some restaurant and cafe hopping. Due to Covid regulations bars, cafes and restaurants can't serve alcoholic beverages to people who don't order food. Just to make sure a little less people go out and get plastered at the pub. Reservations can only be made for two hours as well which meant if we wanted to hang out together for more than two hours we had to book tables at different restaurants.
We started out at a nice little cafe called Cafe Opera. We shared a plate of some cheeses and cured hams so that we were allowed to drink. We had a damn good time, played some party games and laughed a lot.
We then had a booking at an Asian restaurant called Soya. We ordered some dumplings and had another great time. We met up with some extra people here and I even randomly ran into a colleague. The waiter here was a real charismatic guy who we laughed a lot with. I jokingly said to him that he should stop flirting with my girlfriend and go get our drinks. When he came back he had made a heart in my Espresso Martini which was quite funny. This guy received some tips for sure.
The last booking was at our favorite Italian restaurant called Villani. This one was only for me and my girlfriend to spend some quality time together and to end off the day. At this point we had been going at it since 9 in the morning and since work was coming up the day after we couldn't go all night.
We ordered a parma pizza for sharing and had a last glass of beer and wine. This place has such awesome italian pizzas. I hadn't tasted the parma pizza before but my girlfriend eats it all the time when we're there. It was damn good!
When we were about to leave we stopped to look at the wine loft they have. It's neatly arranged with a lot of mirrors and has a glass floor so if you stand in the stairs below it and look up it looks like the wine loft goes on for miles. One of the waiters asked if we wanted to take a look inside and of course we did.
I'm not much of a wine guy. I mostly drink beers and the occasional glass of gin but my girlfriend loves wine. She reads books about wines, listens to podcasts and often order up new wines that's being released so this was great for her. I stood idly by and took some pictures. The chamber was pretty cool.
A walk in the park
Since the weather was absolutely perfect this day we decided to go for a walk in the park before heading home. We have this awesome park close to where we live where we often go for short walks or to feed the ducks. We decided it was a perfect location to take some pictures so we went and did that.
This day was awesome and it surpassed all of our expectations. I was hesitant to even go anywhere due to the pandemic but I don't regret it one bit. Infection numbers have been slowly decreasing day by day even though the town was packed with people on this day. I'm starting to hope and think we might have seen the worst of the pandemic in Norway. There's the occasional local outbreak here and there but overall the numbers are decreasing. Come the end of July the whole country will have been vaccinated as well. Things are looking good.