December

Dear humans,

With a little bit of delay, here's my updates after one month living in Trondheim, Norway.
This month has been simply amazing.
The people, the city, the culture, everything seems to work simply great.
As usual, here's the list of cool/interesting stuff happened during this period.

Inner city

Trondheim is beautiful, even in strange times like the ones we are experiencing. I will not make a trivial list of things that can be done in this city, the web is full of them. But I can guarantee that it is a city to be discovered. Every time I find myself walking through its tiny streets (remember, I'm still US-calibrated) I discover new details: a singular rooftop, a bright color, a delicious perfume coming from a Bakeri... (aaah I missed Europe so much! ok, I will stop saying that, I'm boring).

Checkout this terrible collage I made with some photos taken around the city: it can't even remotely hold a candle to the real wonder of the place I've ended up!

Outer City

During this first month and a half I developed a funny way to both train, explore the city and challenge my orientation capabilities.

It is hard to believe how much things you can see when you love running!
This might actually be way-to-go approach when someone, like me:

1. Is able to wake up ~6 am
2. Loves to run
3. Want to discover new trials/cool path where to run without consulting online references

Based on the previous assumptions, with the addition of each month is composed by 4 weeks, I ended up with the following algorithm:

• Draw on the map 3 concentric circles of increasing radius depending on the day of the week, where the radius is the distance as the crow flies. An example: Monday 4 Km, Wednesday 6 Km, Friday 8 Km. Note: this is the togo distance, you need to come back too!
• Based on the week number, choose the path on cardinal direction: 1-North, 2-East and so on.

And that's pretty much it! You know how far and which direction you need to go. Now, to add more spice to the game, I challenge myself to go back to base without using a GPS. So far I got lost only 2/7 times! But this is a (nonsense) plus, do not worry.

[ Disclosure: the reason why I do this in the morning is because there's plenty of meetings and/or some not expected work to do coming up after working hours ]

With the above method I ended up reaching astonishing places with absolute no clue about them! Consider also the psychological aspect of this: there is no surprise at all if you already know that the place you are gonna reach is amazing. Is WAY more fun to end up in heaven without knowing it!

Here is me, pretending to be brave, crawling to reach the tip of a 50 m tall cliff.

  

Here is me again, in a typical 'how much longer will I have to wait in this extremely uncomfortable position before you take the picture' pose (credits to my gf).

And here is a bonus after-run lunch with home made lasagna (Sunday, no reason to wake up at 6 am, credits to my housemate)

As you might have understood, the nature here is indescribable.

New Year's Eve

Most of my colleagues are terroni of Norway, so most of them came back home for the holidays. BUT a few braves organized a freezing adventure on the Gråkallen area, a snowy hill very close to the Sentrum. We brought some wood, food, a lot of food and as a proud Italian I couldn't resist so we made Tiramisu for all. Average temperature -12 °C. But it was probably one of the best NYE I've ever had.

I guess that's it for now, stay safe and eat a lot of dark chocolate! (not that unbecoming and deplorable milk version, blah )

Oh, and happy new year!

Peace.