Hangin with the Crown to the Prince of Nor to the Way

17th of May is a huge deal in Norway. It is a day where you eat as many ice creams as possible before you bulimically throw up, pretend you are in an eating contest where the food of choice is hot dogs, you parade around hailing your country with song, dance and a series of commercially driven toys in red, white and blue without seeming too nationalistic, and you wave to the King and Queen and whoever else shows up on the Royal Balcony. All this, just to celebrate the Norwegian constitutional day.

At expo we decided to mimic this day on May 28th as this is the day the expo center had handed us as our pavilion day. We had the great honor of hosting a series of even throughout the day, and the Norwegian Crown Prince was so lucky to have the chance to personally meet me. I even allowed him to shake my hand and relay my name in a slightly clumsy way halfway grinning and halfway staring in disbelief at this surprisingly good-looking man. All I could think was that I should pull out one of my very successful (or perhaps not SO successful) pickup lines along the lines of, "you must be exhausted cause you have been running through my dreams for quite some time". Then I remembered that he was married, with kids and a monarchy to reign over at some point in the future, and I decided to focus my attention elsewhere.

In all seriousness, it was a very successful day. We had the minister of trade and industry, Trond Giske graced us with his very noticable presence (he is much taller than I expected) and the Minister of Oil and Energy Terje Riis-Johansen also decided to pop by and have some important oil people in China. It is all about guanxi here in China, and I am sure they did a great job at creating good and sustainable contact with them. And if they didn't at least they got some good food from our very tasty restaurant.

At the end of a veeeeery long day at work we were very lucky to come by some tickets to an impressive concert that hosted the very young, talented and beautiful violinist Hemsing who played the violin like some sort of crazy angel. It was very beautiful, but very long and after a long and tiresome day at work I have to admit that she lulled me to sleep.. This concert was played with a couple of symphony orchestras and conducted by the cutest conductor I have ever seen in my life. He swayed and bopped and jumped and swirled and gave a very passionate speech that I am sure I would have greatly appreciated if I had been fully conscious. After this we had performances by Sissel Kyrkjebø who unfortunately had some problems with her voice but still sounded completely perfect in my very critical ears, Secret Garden with their newest version of Powered by Nature which was a perfect blend of beautiful and cheesy and will undoubtably be a hit in the Middle World. We also had a dance off between Norwegian "Frikare" and a chinese Kungfu group which was potentially great, but could perhaps use a little more coordination and flow. That is just one girls opinion though...

All this is one day makes for a pretty amazing day. Well done to everyone involved, and especially Maren who has been in charge of getting this whole day together. I would like to end with a: HIPP HIPP HURRRRRAAAAAAAAA!!!!
Trine:)