Oleg's Blog

Didn't post here for a long time... And now, I think, the time has come

Well, for short, it was just great!
Everything began from the e-mail, in which Espen and Opera Software invited me and my friend (his name is Alex) to visit Opera HQ in Oslo, Norway You can't even imagine how I was amazed to see it in my inbox! From the first look at the header, I thought it was a spam Then I asked Espen personally, if he was kidding on me, but god damn!!! He was serious!

It was almost 3 month ago. I had no international passport at that time, so I started to work on it immediately. Fof now on, we have two kind of passports here in Ukraine: internal (the main passport, you get one when you are 16) and international (you get it when you should go outside of Ukraine, for additional payment).
The procedure of getting the international passport may take no loonger than one month by the law... But it took almost two months for me! That was really nervous, cause I had the tickets and the hotel reserved for the 24th of April, and I should also got the Shengen visa at the Norway embassy. I had not enough time left for it, because of the passport Good friend of mine, who works with visas in Moscow, said that e-mailing/faxing/calling the embassy will definitely speed up the process of getting visa. The more — the better! I said it to guys from Opera and they did everything of it We had our visas at the last day available — at the 23rd of April.

There was less than one day left for a journey to begin We was waiting for our flight at the Borispil airport, cause there might be a problem to get in time to the Borispil from Kyiv at the morning. We had a great time there! I met a funny old man Terry from the USA, he had his flight at the morning too. We were talking almost all night long... At the morning he gifted me a book called "Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment" by James Patterson. He said it's the #1 NY Times bestseller! He even signed it for me

As far, as there is no straight flights from Kyiv (the capital of Ukraine) to Oslo, we need to flight to Vilnius, Lithuania, and then take our next flight to Oslo, Norway. Vilnius is a nice city. Pity we had no time and ability to leave the airport and familiarize ourselves a bit with it

Anyway, we were in Oslo at 12.30 PM. We thouth it will be cold there, but the weather was just amazing! It was even hot first!

Oslo is a really nice city, it reminds me Kyiv in some way, but it's definitely far more cleaner We have a good friend Alina, who lives in Oslo. She's from Ukraine. She was our guide at the first day We was walking, sitting on the hills, watching on the fjord... Well, just having rest. Btw, we saw two arabic guys, offering hashish to us It was the middle of the day! We was amazed of such kind of nonsence and asked them to leave!

Then we met Ilya, the leader of the Russian Opera Team and had a great time till the night! We was so tired I don't even remember when I fall asleep at the hotel...

At the next day, on Friday morning, we visited Opera HQ.

Yeah, I was amazed when I saw my painting at that scale! WOW! It's a bigest honor for me to see it there
We met a lot of great people at Opera! As I know now, there are 45 different nationalities work there. That's really exciting.
Then we had a meeting with Jon S. fon Tetzchner, Opera CEO. We made a present of Ukrainian bulawa for him.

Originally posted by Wikipedia:

The bulawa (Polish: buława, Russian and Ukrainian: булава, bulava) was a ceremonial mace or baton carried by a hetman, an officer of the highest military rank (a Field or Grand Hetman of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), or the military head of a Cossack state. In Slavic languages, a bulava or bulawa is a mace or a club, in both the military and ceremonial senses.

Hetmans added an image of a buława to their coats of arms. Today the buława appears in the rank insignia of a Marshal of Poland, and is a symbol of the Presidency of Ukraine.

It seems like he really loved it! We saw him carrying it all day long! Jon called it 'Bug squasher'
Then there was a Friday Beer party at Opera. That's a social event aimed to make employeers to know each other better, and just to have a great time together. It was so exciting to have a beer with so many talanted people there! Such a strong feeling of a big friendly family Even Jon was there! It was easy to see him among others I haven't seen him drinking beer or something, but he was chatting with people and had a very nice time!

Then we went to the afterparty to the Oleg Tukh's home. He's a great guy! I drunk beer and coffee at the end of the party, but guys were drinking beer, russian vodka, finn vodka, ukrainian vodka and maybe something more... There was so many to choose from, Oleg is the one who you'd like to stay with in the case of the nuclear war We even song some russian songs there for a guitar It was really a great party! As I were said after, Oleg didn't ever make bad parties We got to the hotel about 2:30 AM.

The next day was our last day in Oslo It was really hard for guys to wake up We met our new good friends: amazing girl Uliana and another very talanted guy Alexey. Both of them works for Opera. Then we all visited the Opera theatre, Fram museum, Kon-Tiki musem and made some shopping. The weather was bad after noon. At the evening we had a great meeting with Espen, his beautiful girlfriend Stine and Øyvind Østlund at the Tullin's Cafe. Øyvind is a really cool guy! We were just chatting sometimes before, posted comments on each other's blogs etc. And now we had a chance to drink some beer together!
photo taken from Øyvind's blog

After a couple of beers we were joined by Steve, MyOpera's most favourite video-blogger Then we went to the Radisson hotel's bar. It's on the 21st floor! There was a great view of the sleepy Oslo opened. Whatever, we were having really a great time the rest of the evening!..

The next morning we had our flight back to Ukraine Honestly, we didn't want to came back... Ehhhmm..... We were flying to Prague and then to Kyiv again. Btw, I liked Vilnius much more than Prague, but that's just my opinion.

Well, that's all for short. Hope to go to Norway once more!

Find out more of my photos from Oslo at my photo album.