Oslo, Norway

I was lucky enough to get a window seat on the flight from Manchester to Oslo and my face was able to bask in the last rays of sunlight that it would see until a brief sunrise and prompt sunset on February 15th.
The flight to Oslo only took 2 hours; however, we were then going to be waiting in Oslo airport from 1400 on the Thursday till 0955 on the Friday for the next flight up to Svalbard. This left us with a lot of time to kill. We checked our baggage into their "hotel" for the night and made our way to the airports train station to catch the next one into Oslo.
Oslo was a really pretty city and it was covered in a blanket of snow making it slightly magical to these snow starved British eyes (the last month not withstanding).
We headed away from the station out towards the water, which was beautiful. We then walked around the water front to the main part of town again where we went in search of a pub to rest for a few hours. Selecting an arbitrary direction to walk and with the use of some maps Stu had on his phone we soon found ourselves in a pub called The Scots Man. We sat down at a table after getting our drinks and played a number of rounds of Shit-Head and Gin rummy. Getting bored of card games each of us did our own thing for a bit, Stu was taking pictures, Andrew was writing his journal, and Frances was playing a computer game, while I was drawing and building towers out of cards. We left the pub and headed back towards the train station catching the 2015 train back to the airport. When we got back we hunted out a place to sleep for the night ending up on a bench on the second floor near the bathrooms. Settling down for the night we watched some TV on my laptop and every now and then going for a wander around. The night was a long one and around 2330 the lights in the airport dimmed slightly. I managed to get a few hours’ sleep but found myself wide awake again at 0200 when I started writing my journal. At 0400 leaving Andrew still wide awake I went back to sleep for the rest of the night waking at 0530 when people piled into the airport for check in.
We collected our bags and checked into the airport going through security in much the same manner as in Manchester and I still set of the alarms. We sat down in the nearest café and got breakfast, I had a plat of very sugary waffles. At around 0915 we headed to our gate and soon after got on the plane that would take us to Longyearbyen, Svalbard via Tromso, Norway.