After years of thinking about trying something new, in regard to both job and place, I finally moved to Norway in January 2025. I’ve been meaning to post a small update here, but it took me a while to take the time to do it.

To start off: It’s been good! Great even. I had some expectations about how it would be to live here, and most of them were exceeded. ☺️

I think what contributes a lot to this feeling is how good my new job has been. I started my new position in February and I pretty much have no complaints so far. I was a bit concerned about the massive shift from part-time + short commute to full-time + long commute, but surprisingly, that hasn’t been an issue at all. And I’m very grateful for that. The work is fun and interesting, and my colleagues are very nice. I actually like being at the office, and even though they allow me to work from home, I choose to work at the office most days. I think that’s a very good sign.

Another thing that’s been good is climbing. I finally got back into climbing regularly! Through Helmut, I met some people and found new climbing partners. There’s a great climbing gym right on my way home from work, and we got there most weeks. Even though spring has barely started, we’ve gone climbing outside twice already, and that is just fantastic. I missed that, and I’m really looking forward to more climbing soon!

I moved in with my friends Johanna and Helmut, into their spare bedroom. Life with them has been very harmonic. Of course there are always small annoyances and disagreements, but those don’t really matter compared to the joy of spending so much time with two of my closest friends. It really feels like we’re a small family (although without kids yet, fortunately haha). We live on an old farm and there’s always things to do. I’m learning a lot while helping out with various projects around the house and property. Admittedly, it’s a bit much sometimes, often things happen on very short notice, and my personal time gets compromised even more, but it also keeps it very interesting around here and I’m slowly trying to find balance by retreating at times to do my own stuff. It’s often not so easy, though.

As I look out of the window right now, it’s raining heavily at around 5ºC. That’s just about the same weather as we had in January and February, though it’s the beginning of May now. It’s very Norwegian (or maybe it’s just in this part of Norway) to talk about the weather, but it has been pretty shitty indeed. The weather is generally fluctuating a lot here, but this year it has been worse than average. I bought a season pass for the local ski resort (on discount in November), hoping for a nice snowboarding season, but most of the time, the weather really wasn’t inviting at all. I ended up going a few times and had some really good sessions, just way fewer than I was hoping for. Overall, I guess you just need to learn to enjoy and take advantage of those days where the weather is good, and I think we did a pretty good job. 🙂

One thing that I’m enjoying very much is riding my new e-bike to work almost every day. I splurged on a very good e-bike in early April and have been using it a lot since. My commute is about 20 km each way, with lots of hills and a few steep sections, so having a motor makes it so much better. It takes me about 45 minutes, which is roughly the same as taking the bus, so I’m not even losing out on time. It’s also a great start into the day, and even with assistance it’s a decent workout. Very good addition to my life here!

There’s probably a lot more I could talk about, but I’m stopping here. Better to finally have a post out than to procrastinate even longer on it. I hope you are doing well! Let me know if there’s anything in particular I should write (or maybe even make a video) about!

I think I will add a separate post with some photos later. I haven’t been good about sorting through them at all. 🙈

See you soon. 👋