Goodbye dinner Moritz

This is it: Moritz' last day. He just came back from his North Cape tour and we all had decided to meet for dinner before he leaves. Kind of good bye dinner.

So on Monday December 20, we went to that Italian pizzeria "Villa Paradiso" in Grünerløkka which Moritz had never been to before. But it's a place to know, because they really do have fantastic pizza, I think. Even Italians say it's good pizza :-)

However, the day actually started with work and a Christmas lunch at the nearby Thon Hotel Opera. Not many colleagues were left in the office; most of them had already left on Christmas holidays. Maria, from Scandinavian Image, subscribed those of us holding out until the last working day, to a lunch buffet at the hotel. We simply closed down the office for a couple of hours; it's definitely not the most busiest time of the year.

So we had the pleasure of free drinks and a lot of good food at one of the hotels we all use a lot for our clients and in the meantime could have some nice chats with our colleagues before heading back to the office.

Coming to the evening now...
Moritz, Jana and I already met up at 19:30. Just having called Audrey we figured out she wouldn't be able to make it before 20:30. So we three already sat down in the basement part of restaurant and ordered some wine/beer.

As I had mentioned in my previous post [see here], Jana and I had some difficulties with finding a farewell present for Moritz. When we had the idea of getting him a trapper hat - which he totally fell in love with during the RIB-boat tour to Oscarsbord nearly 2 weeks ago - we had the problem of not finding them anywhere in town. At least no nice and "original" ones. Either the colours were not adequate, or the texture was awful or they were all over with fur or whatever.

Finally it was Jana who for some reason had to drive out of town to the Sandvika Storsenter (shopping mall) and who happened to find one of those trapper hats that might be of Moritz' taste. It wasn't a black one as we initially tried to get it, but we anyways had the possibility to change it in case he wouldn't like it.

By the way, right on my way to the restaurant, after all the searching around in town, I passed a shop (which was already closed) that sells exactly the hats we were looking for.

However, now we had a hopefully nice one. Jana had wrapped it and we handed it over to Moritz together with a card while we were sitting in the restaurant.

Moritz couldn't believe his eyes, when he unwrapped the present. You should have seen his face, because this was absolutely unexpected. Anyways, I think he was also fine with the colour brown.

Later, that is about nearly 2 hours! later - also Audrey finally came. We moved over to a bigger table and finally ordered our pizzas. By the time waiting we became all quite hungry.

As expected, the pizzas were great. I was too full though to have a dessert like the others.

Altough it was Monday, we stayed quite long in the pizzeria. Moritz had been talking a lot about his experiences in the North the last weekend and Audrey told us about her trip to France. Time passed again so quickly while we were having good conversations and a lot of fun.

At one point, though, we had to leave. We had to go back to work the next day.

We said good bye to each other and to Moritz. We wish him good luck for the future!
And who knows, maybe he comes back to Oslo one day, either because he cannnot resist Trude's ongoing offer to work for Authentic Scandinavia when he's finished with his studies, or because he figures out that Germany is too warm for wearing his new hat or simply because to visit some friends ?!