If you are going to Norway to work in Oslo and need to rent an apartement, then Utleiemegleren is the easiest option for you. It is the largest service in Norway that rent out apartements and they have a lot to offer in Oslo.

A new site promoting travel to Haugesund on the south-western coast of Norway has just been launched. The site promotes Activity Breaks in the categories: Skiing, Fjord Trips, Fjord Walks, City Breaks, Fishing and Culture.

The site targets the UK market and boast 3 weekly flights from London Stansted to Haugesund Lufthavn Karmøy in the Winter and daily flights in the regular season.

For more information, visit: visithaugesund.org.

Every year in August the city of Haugesund turn into a massive festival to celebrate Jazz music.

If you are visiting Norway, you can check out these resources to get on track:

• VisitNorway.com – The official site by the tourism council of Norway.
• Wikipedia – General fatcs about Norway.
• VisitHaugesund.org – Trips to Western Norway, mainly from UK.

If you are travelling to Norway and want to see Premier League matches while you are here, I would suggest that you find a Sportsbar called Horgans in the Hegdehaugsveien, just behind the Royal Castle.

They show every match and have great food and beer + a very friendly crew that always are up for a chat.

EUROPE is the new Caribbean, and Celebrity Cruises has rescheduled one of its Caribbean cruise liners, the Century, to meet the demand for cruising in Europe.

Luxury Silver Sea cruises offer Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea, and Conde Nast favourite Celebrity Cruises visits most of Europe, including the Balearic Islands and the fjords of Norway.

For the 2006 summer season, Inntravel introduces walking holidays in the  Douro, the Azores and Lesvos, as well as a walking tour in Sicily.

Amongst the new destinations are three UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The 2006 programme, until now called Summer Inn-Active becomes Walking and More and offers selection of independent walks, as well as thrilling journeys by rail, boat or car. Choose from routes in Slovenia, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Austria and Norway.

The Norwegians serve rice pudding with one whole almond slipped in. The person who gets the almond is promised great wealth in the year to come.

A pan-European survey of TV viewing by global marketing outfit Research Intl. found that people over 50 watch for information while those under 30 want entertainment.

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Germans are leaving their country in record numbers but unlike previous waves of migrants who fled 19th century poverty or 1930s Nazi terror, these modern day refugees are trying to escape a new scourge – unemployment.

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Switzerland joins Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, which already have instituted smoking bans.

Andreas Viestad, Norway’s top food writer, bit into a crackling crusted pork chicharrane, closed his eyes to concentrate and said it reminded him of Christmas.

He was seated at a table outside the Palacio de los Jugos at Flagler Street and 57th Avenue on a recent first-time visit to Miami. The affable host of the public television series New Scandinavian Cooking and author of the companion cookbook, Kitchen of Light, was in town to give a talk at a conference for the Norwegian Travel Industry.

After wiping a trace of pork grease from his mouth, the boyish, 32-year-old Oslo native explained that ribbe — rib roast of pork with a layer of cross-hatched crackling — is the most popular Christmas dish in his country.

Don’t forget that from the 1st January 2006, E111 forms for healthcare cover will no longer be valid and that you will need an European Health Insurance Card instead.

Nationals of Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway are covered in all EEA countries but not in Switzerland. People who do not have UK, EU, EEA or Swiss nationality are covered in all EU countries but not in Denmark, Norway, Liechtenstein or Switzerland. In Iceland, these people are covered for emergency treatment only. Swiss nationals are covered in all EU countries but not in Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway. Dependants of EEA nationals who are ordinarily resident in the UK are covered in all EEA countries and Switzerland, irrespective of their own nationality.

Oslo, Norway, and Athens, Greece are among the very few cities in Europe that experienced recently the replacement of their major airports. This fact coupled with the relative comparability of the two countries and their traffic has made them a very interesting subject for study.

The new Gardermoen airport serving Oslo replaced the heavily constrained Fornebu in October 1998, while the old facility serving Athens, Helliniko, was superseded by the new Eleftherios Venizelos (“Spata”) airport in March 2001. In both cases the new airport facilities are located much further away from the respective city centres than their predecessors.

In both Greece and Norway, which are located on the Southern and Northern edges of Europe respectively, the airports of the capital cities are not major hubs used by connecting passengers, but in most cases the final destination or origin of travelers. Although Norway is not a member of the EU, it belongs to the European Economic Area (EEA) and adheres to all the rules of the fully liberalized EU air transport market. In both countries, on account of their geography and topography, air travel is a major means of transport within the country as demonstrated by the relatively high propensity to travel by air in both countries. Furthermore, the two new airports account for similar volumes of passengers and have substantial amounts of domestic traffic.Finally, the major carriers of these two countries are not among the largest players in international aviation. Norway’s SAS is the world’s 36th largest carrier in terms of RPKs, while Greece’s Olympic is 95th.

The European Union agreed to deregulate airline travel with eight southeastern European nations, Norway and Iceland, seeking to boost air traffic and tourism.

The agreement expands the 25-nation EU’s single aviation market by 52 million people to more than 500 million, allowing airlines to fly between any two points in the area and aligning regulatory standards. The eight southeastern European nations are Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, and the United Nations Mission in Kosovo.

I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that’s when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America—perhaps the curse of a minor language—but his influence is certainly felt; Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century ‘came out of Gogol’s greatcoat.’

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/051226crat_atlarge

Initial scientific results show Norwegian killer whales are the most toxic mammals in the Arctic, says WWF, the global conservation organization.

Previous research awarded this dubious honour to the polar bear, but a new study shows that killer whales have even higher levels of PCBs, pesticides and a brominated flame retardant.

Travel guru Rick Steves has a new book out called “European Christmas,” full of recipes, history and descriptions of the holiday season in seven countries — England, Norway, France, Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland.

The $14.95 book, from the Emeryville, Calif., Avalon Travel Publishing, is a companion text to a PBS special, “Rick Steves’ European Christmas,” scheduled to air through the end of the year on PBS stations nationwide; schedules are at www.ricksteves.com.

The book offers less of the nitty-gritty practical advice Steves’ guidebooks are known for, but you’ll still find recommendations for holiday sightseeing around the continent, from the Norwegian town of Drobak, 20 miles south of Oslo, where red-clad elves fill a Julehus (Yule house) in a converted church, to Germany’s holiday markets, such as the one in Nurmberg.

You may have heard that Stockholm is the cleanest capital in the world, that Finland leads in sustainable forest management or that Norway is one of the world’s leading renewable energy suppliers.

The Nordic countries rank highest in environmental sustainability”. These are the conclusions from the most recent update of the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI), a project conducted jointly by Yale University (USA), Columbia University (USA), and the World Economic Forum.

According to a 142 nation study released at the 2002 meeting of the World Economic Forum in New York, Finland leads the world in environmental sustainability, followed by Norway and Sweden in second and third place respectively. Nordic neighbours Iceland rank eighth on the list and the Baltic republic of Latvia climbs up to an excellent tenth place.