Ok, just a really quick update on my time here in Lisbon. The hotel is uber fancy, the weather is nice (I've been in Norway too long – 24° are already hot for me) and the conference kicks serious ass. Some organizational problems – lectures never on time, horrible catering, sanitary facilities – are more than compensated for by a very cool location, nice crowd, impressive guest list and my childlike awe at being at this place. The two days so far have been long and exhausting but super interesting and fun. Not seeing too much of Lisbon itself due do lack of stamina at the end of the day. Still managed to squeeze in a little bit of Bairro Alto and nice portugese restaurants. Here's a list of the people I've managed to see up until now: Neville Brody, Joshua Davis, United Visual Artists, PES, Onesize, Chris Milk, Xtrabold, Jason Bruges Studio, Director Kobayashi and little bit of Paula Scher (Pentagram) and Eva Vermandel. Tomorrow, the last day, it's Si Scott, Stefan Sagmeister and SUPRB. Ok, enouh with the name dropping, detailed reviews and reports will hopefully follow soon. Word.

Heading to Lisboa tomorrow afternoon to, along with over 3000 other designers, watch a shitload of more designers that are way way better than me, talk about design and show their latest design works. Maybe some other design stuff as well. Not to mention design. Offf the (designer) hook, biatch!

We'll see how the blogging from Portugal goes...

The Russ is what Norwegian high school students are called, who are about to graduate. We already saw a couple of them dressed in red or blue overalls – similar to our 'ABI-shirts' in Germany, but waaaay cooler – in Bergen, now Oslo is crawling with them as well. These kids get to party for three weeks straight, with lots of drinking, listening to terrible music and playing all sorts of traditional games. I'm too lazy to explain it all, so just read the Wikipedia article for more in-depth information. I just wanted to state the fact that I would have loved to have something like this back when I graduated 'cause it sure looks like a whole lot of fun.

There's one catch though: all this goes down before their final exams. Kinda stupid in my opinion.

Aaaaand I'm back. Took me a while yet again, but as compensation I'm hitting you with a massive three-piece update. Past couple of days have been quite busy – who would've guessed – and today is actually the first one in almost two weeks that I have time to breathe.

After Felix and Mina had left on Sunday, I had a relatively unspectacular work week (although – one of my old sketchbook scribbles is now a background for a festival flyer, yay!) until Alice and Annie arrived around noon on Friday. And that's where when of my busiest weekends here in Norway up to this day started.

A quick 'Hello', the obligatory Bleed tour and the girls were off again to explore the city for a couple of hours while I finished my work. From Bleed we went directly to Europcar to get ourselves a nice little car for the 7(!) hour drive to Bergen. Unfortunately for us, there was no small cars left. Luckily for us, the nice Indian guy behind the counter was willing to make 'specialll plice for youuu' and gave us a huge Volvo station wagon for only 300NOK more than what we'd have paid for a Golf. Second time this car rental has helped me out, really cool people.

From Europcar back to Bleed, get the girl's luggage, back to my place, get my luggage and on the road we went – at 6:30 p.m., two and a half hours later than I had planned. Predicted arrival time if everything went right: 1:30 a.m. Damn. Thankfully, after a chaotic online hunt for a place to stay in Bergen, I had found an apartment last minute whose owner was nice enough to just leave the key in the post box, where we could pick it up whenever we arrived. That place turned out to be a pure stroke of luck anyways, but more about that later.

So we drove and drove. Out of Oslo, through Gol and Geilo, with the latter being a really nice snowboarding spot – a shame I only once went to Hemsedal this season. We had a nice little improvised road picnic, drove through deserted landscapes in the dark (the exact same place where the Fritt Vilt movies were shot – kinda creepy) and finally lost our way a little bit. We were still on our way to Bergen, just not on the one I had intended. But hey, we got to ride a ferry in the middle of the night :D

We arrived pretty much on time, found the apartment fairly quick, noticed that we had booked a place in the old part of town with an incredible view and cozy interior for a very low price, and went straight to bed, dead tired. Next day, after a nice breakfast, nice encounters with the laid back home owners and some more admiring of the view, we explored the city. I'm gonna spare you the details of our touristy trip, but to sum it up: I wanna live in this town. Badly. Nice surroundings, nice people, nice everything. I've really fallen in love with this place. The only downside of Bergen seems to be the massive amounts of rain pouring down almost all the time. The record is 85 days straight two years ago. Of course, we had two perfect sunny days that weekend :)

Anyways, the day ended with a nice salmon dinner and drinking lots of Gin Tonic and Vodka with blueberries while listening to old school German Hip Hop, playing nerdy card games and – once again – gawking at the beautiful view. Sunday was pretty similar to Saturday with breakfast and sightseeing. Even managed to meet my ex-Bleed buddy Åge for a quick coffee at a cozy café and a micro-tour of his workplace at the local design school – he's currently finishing his Bachelor.

Around 3 p.m. we started our journey back to Oslo, drove through some beautiful landscape, which we hadn't seen on Friday, because, well, it was dark, saw a still snowy Hemsedal, busted the car's high beam and arrived pretty much exhausted but happy in Oslo.

And there it rained.

You know how much I love panoramic shots. Here with a full force seven piece set.

Our view at 11 a.m., 22 p.m. and 1 a.m.








Summer, Fall and Winter – all in one 500km trip.








Bergen, ahhhhh.

I've been asking myself: what makes Norway so attractive for visitors, especially visitors visiting me? When I was in Copenhagen, in my opinion the coolest city so far, merely 2 people from back home dropped by. In Den Haag that number increased marginally to 5. But here in Oslo, Alice and Annie were already guests number 17 and 18 in my humble home. I wonder...

Sorry for not having written anything in quite a while. Just too much small stuff going on that's keeping me busy besides work. One piece of advice: never underestimate the hassle of setting up a bank account in a foreign country.

Anyways, working on Bombay Sapphire again – after mostly having helped out in other big projects for the past few weeks – and hoping to produce equally good results as with the posters and flyers. Another project for a candy packaging in which I was involved unfortunately didn't go our way, but maybe I'll post a couple of my 1001 sketches for it. Sure was fun nonetheless.

Also last weekend Felix and his girlfriend stopped by from London for a short but nice 24h visit. Enjoyed a great view, had a snow fight, got my feet wet, caught some sun rays – a true norwegian spring Sunday, I guess. From top to bottom: Oslo from above at Frogneseteren, Where's Waldo? at Øvresetertjern, coffee at a cafe right next to Slottsparken.

Got a free minute here in Holland, so I'll squeeze in a couple of quick lines about last week's concert at John Dee. After seeing Girl Talk with Fredrika and Squarepusher with Stian, I was by myself again this time around when I went to the gig of japanese post rock band Mono. I hadn't listened to a single song of theirs beforehand, only knew they are among the likes of Explosions In The Sky or Godspeed You! Black Emperor and remembered Andrea once gushing about them back in Copenhagen.

But damn, it was good! Of course not the same sort of 'experience' as a Gregg Gillis, but intense nonetheless, on another level. These four produced sound full of bombast and opulence while maintaining a sort of cool, japanese indifference towards both crowd and, as it seemed, even their own music – with occasional outbursts of emotion towards the end. I loved how almost all their songs, 90% of which stretched over at least 10 minutes, usually started very minimalist and quiet but then developed into these massive walls of melodic noise. Definitely go see them, should they ever be in your area.

P.S. I promise this was the last concert post for a while, next one's in late May :)

Nothing big, just got two nice little trips ahead of me. First, in the beginning of April I'll be heading to the Netherlands to visit a couple of friends in Amsterdam / Rotterdam / Den Haag. Coincidentally people I know from all sorts of places (Erlangen, Darmstadt, Copenhagen, Paris) are currently residing in that little country. And second, Bleed is graciously allowing me to join them on their 9th anniversary trip down to Lisbon to attend the OFFF design conference in early May. There, Svein has been invited to speak alongside such greats as Sagmeister, Neville Brody, Si Scott or the people from Universal Everything.

Other than that nothing much. Work work work. Sleep sleep seep. Do stuff do stuff do stuff. I'll hopefully be putting up some sketches from a new scribble book on Monday. Yay and Toodles.

Whoopee! Today I went to my first ever official print start :D Now it's not like I haven't seen an offset print house from the inside before or that I haven't had personal projects produced professionally yet – I'm counting big scale digital print as professional – but it sure is a different feeling when it's your first real project coming fresh out of the press. Even more so, if you're the one who's saying 'Go' after reviewing the first test prints...

Nice service too: Beni, my project manager, and me got picked up by the guys from RK Grafisk, drove to the print place, had everything explained to us while watching the set up of the plates and then looked at the first results. Found a typo on the flyers, so they started with the posters first while we corrected the mistake. But hopefully by tomorrow afternoon everything will be done and ready for action. And typo-free.