An evening at the opera

When my sister and I were planning this Oslo trip last year, I was thrilled to learn that the dates of our visit coincided with the one-night-only concert of one of the greatest performers in opera today... the awesome Cecilia Bartoli. I had to see her. I'm the only one in my family who is into this stuff but I managed to drag them all with me.

It was a gloomy, rainy evening when we went to the Operaen, Norway's multimillion-euro opera and ballet house. Rising out of the gray and the mist, the Operaen seemed like some mythical fortress of snow and ice. So Nordic!

But really, I was awestruck. This is easily the most stunning concert hall I have ever seen in my life.

Though I was happy to have a wide-angle lens to capture it all, the pictures don't do it justice. It was really hard to choose photos for this post!

Built to the tune of € 500 million (PhP 30.7 BILLION, just to boggle your mind), this is nothing less than a modern-day temple to culture and the arts. Spending that kind of public money on a concert hall makes a powerful endorsement of music that musicians all over the world, particularly in a country like ours, would kill for. 

Everything from the curving walls of clean blond wood... 

... to practical considerations such as the coatroom and cocktail tables... 

... even the bathroom, spoke of everything Scandinavian design is famous for, and makes a statement about the value this society places on culture and art. If it isn't obvious, I'm completely envious and could not want this for the Philippines bad enough.

Everything announces the importance of the experience you are just about to have: the experience of music. No usher could ever bring you as graciously or ecstatically to your seat, in anticipation of a wonderful evening, as this building can.

Which brings us to Cecilia.

I've always found early music to be a bit of a bore, to be honest. But not the way Cecilia Bartoli sings it. She brings such mastery, genius and spirit to early, lesser-known works, that you literally sit up on the edge of your seat and hold your breath listening to her.

She sang pieces from her Grammy-winning album, Sacrificium, which features works originally written for castrati, prepubescent boys castrated for the sole purpose of performing some of the most difficult pieces ever written for the human voice. 

And the costumes! Her knee-high leather boots, billowing pirate-type blouse, swirling cape, scarlet taffeta bustle, and giant red feathers added drama and flair to a bravura performance. Brava Cecilia!

I was so glad that my mom, who's not the biggest fan of opera, really enjoyed it. 

Operaen is the only concert hall in the world where you can, and in fact are meant to, walk all over the building, and all the way up to the roof from the ground floor.

So after the concert, that's just what we did. With the sunset sky in the background, it was absolutely perfect.

It's a wonderful, welcoming space to walk, sit, play and see the city, bringing a new dimension to arts that are seen as dull and exclusive. Plus it's photogenic with a million angles and planes to play with. Camwhores will pee all over themselves with delight. We almost did!

Marlon posed for his Fortune 500/Time Man of the Year cover.

My sights are set a bit lower. Hanggang level lang ng Lookbook and Chictopia, haha.

We took the coolest family photo ever: Marlon and I outside, and Mom and my sister inside.

And my sister took this photo of us kissing. Aww.

I feel so lucky to have been able to watch Cecilia Bartoli in such a gorgeous space. Truly the highlight of the whole trip. 

Off to Oslo

If you had told me years ago that my mom, sister and I would be holidaying together in Scandinavia one day, I would have scratched my head and wondered how the heck that would ever happen. But life is funny—and awesome—that way. 

One of the biggest perks my sister got from her assignment in Oslo by her Norwegian telco employers was a free business class ticket for my mom. Getting my mom to overcome her fear of flying and finally agree to fly to Europe was a battle and a half, but the free ticket definitely sweetened the deal. 

The last time my mom visited both of us was when we were still living in Singapore and my sister in KL. My sister accompanied Mom on the flight to Singapore and spent the weekend there, establishing a new sort of family tradition we now call "the handover." So on my mom's last weekend in Oslo, Marlon and I  decided to fly up and do the handover there. 

Oslo in May felt to me like Amsterdam in March: cold and windy. Fortunately, our first day there was gorgeous. We went out to the harbor, and it felt like the city was doing its best to welcome us by mustering up some blue skies and sunshine. Still, the breeze was stiff and chilly and I had to get used to having different parts of my body be prickling with cold and sweating profusely at the same time.

The Oslo harbor has some of the most coveted residential real estate in the city, and it's easy to see why. 

It felt like what Robertson Quay in Singapore aspires to, or maybe even a Serendra or Bonifacio High Street with the sea.

It's so clean-lined and modern, it feels kind of like an architectural rendering or mockup of a future development. 

We waited at the ferry terminal while my sister went to pick up our Constitution Day parade tickets at the Radhuset, or City Hall.

Our plan for the day was to hop on a båt (ferry) to Bygdøy, one of the islands within Oslo's harbor, to see the Viking Ship Museum and Folkemuseum. While waiting for the ferry, my sister taught us how to pronounce the special letters in the Norwegian alphabet. For example, "å" sounds like "wa", so båt is pronounced "bwat." Alexander Skarsgård is "Alexander Skarsgward." Very Pinoy swardspeak! I like!

The ferry to Bygdøy took just around 10 minutes. From the dock, we walked another 10 minutes to the Vikingskiphuset, or Viking Ship Museum. In Dutch, it would read Vikings Chicken House—kip is chicken!

I went through a phase when I was completely obsessed with Greek mythology. One of the books I read was Edith Hamilton's Mythology, which combined both Greek and Norse mythology in one volume. It was easy to get into Norse mythology from there. So I've always been fascinated with the Vikings. In my boy-crazy adolescent years I used to picture them as hot blond conquerors. Oh, how hormones can distort history.

So the Viking Museum pretty much blew my mind. It contains four (mostly recreated) Viking ships excavated from burial mounds in Norway. Vikings were buried with their ships and possessions for the journey into the afterworld, revealing the dramatic "burial at sea with flaming ship" to be a Hollywood trope.

This graceful ship was buried with a Viking queen, with all her worldly goods: everything from jewelry to weapons to cooking tools to clothes to four of these massive, intricately carved wooden carts. Parang SM lang: we've got it all for you!

The scale and power of these ships are truly impressive, revealing the might and skill of a supposedly primitive civilization. You sail, sometimes row, for hundreds of miles across the world's coldest seas, subsist on dried scraps of meat (basically, tapa) without a roof over your head, exposed to the harshness of the elements. Then when you get there you have to do battle, conquer bloody everyone and sack bloody everything. That can't have been easy.

After the Viking Ship Museum, we walked to the Norse Folkemuseum, a sprawling open-air conservation area that features recreated buildings from different regions and periods in Norway's history. What is Nayong Pilipino?

I keed, I keed. This is the oldest open-air museum in the world, so we can safely assume Nayong Pilipino ang nanggaya. I thoroughly enjoyed wandering through this museum, which had everything from houses to schoolhouses.

I love the clean lines and unadorned simplicity of their architecture. And I was delighted to learn that the Scandinavians were into roof gardens long before being green was chic.

Nothing looks touristy or kitschy. Buildings are recreated with careful attention to detail. 

Some, like the Stave Church from 1881, were bought, disassembled and rebuilt here piece by piece. 

We arrived just before closing time, so we were only able to catch a fleeting glimpse of the museum hosts in their traditional folk costume. 

One thing I liked that we rarely get to do was take a nice family portrait. Our last one was during our New Year's trip to Bohol, and before that, at my wedding. Luckily Marlon was there to play photographer.

The four of us took the bus back to the harbor for dinner at Solsiden, one of Oslo's best seafood restaurants, where we discussed... my sister's future. Haha.

She'd warned me that eating out in Oslo is expensive, but I didn't realize how expensive until we actually ate out. Marlon and I have dropped our fair share of cash on meals, but masakit talaga sa wallet ito. We had a similar meal at Restaurant Red here in Amsterdam, and the value for money there was significantly better. With the exception of two lunches, we had all the rest of our meals at my sister's apartment after this one. At least this particular dinner was worth it. The seafood was indeed excellent.

Anyone who would have looked over at our table would have laughed to see four Filipinos working furiously to scrape every last speck of meat from those lobsters. Thank goodness we come from a seafood-eating culture na marunong maghimay at magsaid. Ang mahal kasi eh! 

Coriander & co.

Back in Singapore, our condo unit had a balcony with a tiny box filled with soil. "Look, sweetie! We can plant an herb garden!" I sighed with all the dewy-eyed rapturousness of a new wife. In the three years we lived in that condo, you think we ever got around to doing it? Hah.

It turns out all I needed to bring this long-slumbering herb garden fantasy to life was... spring. Just as a deadline spurs a procrastinator into action, the thought of "I can only grow things outside until September!" provided the impetus to finally start cracking my green thumb...

Which started out looking a lot like a black thumb. The first few pots of herbs I bought died a fiery death, sun-dried to a McCormicky crisp during the week that we were away in Portugal. Burned by that experience, I resolved to try a new, two-pronged approach with the replacements I bought. 

Part one consisted of repotting the herbs in bigger pots. Marlon's logic: bigger pots, more soil, longer to dry out. The afternoon before we left for Oslo, he biked to the nearest Blokker (a Dutch chain with very affordable basic household items) and came back with these stainless steel metal window boxes.

I did the replanting out on the balcony. It was nice to get my hands dirty, literally. I used to love watering the garden and digging up weeds when I was a kid. I haven't felt soil between my fingers in ages.

Part two of my survival strategy consisted of showing my herbs some love: by naming them and talking to them. (Alert, cuckoo gardening lola in the making!) I was toying between Fernando Cilantro and Alexander Coriander for the (duh) coriander, but ended up going with Alexander. (I think it was influenced by Patrick's wife giving birth that weekend in Athens and naming the baby Alexandros.)

Paisley Parsley was christened by Therese on Twitter, and appealed to my deep and abiding love for paisley. Marlon later countered that we could have gone with Bob Parsley instead and given Alexander a gay Rasta boyfriend. It's hard to admit I dropped the ball on this one.

I made up for it, though, by bringing Rosemary Gil into the world. A seriously Pinoy pop culture-deprived Marlon did not get the significance of this name. The real Rosemarie Gil won my eternal devotion as the haughty evil stepmother in the 80s campfest, Nympha, where Alma Moreno played... you guessed it, a nympho.

A peek at her IMDB profile reveals a slew of classics such as Bata Pa Si Sabel, Burlesk Queen, Bagets and Nardong Putik mingling with such dazzlingly campy titles as Bruka: Queen of Evil, Night of the Cobra Woman, and Fight Batman Fight! Plus, she played (ting alert!) Tingting Cojuangco in a TV miniseries. How could I not want my rosemary to take after this fabulous woman?

Beside the divine Miss Gil is the only plant that I have ever tried to grow from seed. A species that's... uh, abundant in Amsterdam, it has yet to be named but has already begun to sprout. My black thumb might just turn out to be green after all.

Sunny days

Amsterdam has been blessed with abundant sunshine for the past few weeks, especially on the weekends. How our lives have changed: instead of driving me deeper into my bed with the aircon on full blast, hot and sunny days now draw me out into the street to do as the Dutch and soak up the sun... while it lasts. ("It's all downhill from Queen's Day" warned Rick, our running group coach.) 

One sunny weekend I got to do three things that had been on my Amsterdam must-try lists for some time. The first was to have apple pie at Winkel, a vastly popular (and always packed) cafe on the Noordermarkt. 

The apple pie here is reportedly the best in Amsterdam. I haven't met a Dutch appeltart I haven't liked, but I must say this one outweighs and outsizes all the ones I've had. The crust is almost cookie-like without being dry, and the filling is made up of generous chunks of baked apple with some crunch to it, instead of the usual mushy, applesauce-y filling. 

Another tick mark on my list went to the grassy hill (well, wedge really) on Museumplein. It's been callin' for some sprawlin' ever since I first saw it, back in January when we first moved here. 

The Concertgebouw (concert hall) is on the right, while the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum (the contemporary art museum, closed for renovation) are on the left.

Marlon and I killed a good two hours there while waiting for a dinner appointment, just reading, napping and taking pictures. Public spaces like these are another reason why I love Amsterdam.

And one Sunday, Marlon and I went totally Amsterdammer-like with a picnic at the Vondelpark. I even wore my bathing suit to the park, as the locals do when it's hot. Swimsuits and grass still don't quite fit together in my head, though.

We packed our brand-new/secondhand picnic basket with some chips, beer, cold water, and a light lunch...

... consisting of oven-roasted chicken and baby potatoes with cherry tomatoes, garlic and herbs.

Did your parents ever tell you not to read while eating? Ours did, to no avail. So out came the books...

... and the Leffe Blond beer. This is my passed-out-in-the-grass lasengga look. 

The day was so gorgeous. There seems to be so much magic in sunshine.

It can transform dogs into swamp creatures...

... and goths into happy campers.

When we found a wishbone in our lunch, Marlon and I both wished for more days just like this one. :) 

Amsterdam, all you have to do is grant that wish... and I'll love you forever.