A-ha

Yes...it's the A-ha pop group. It's the most well-known Norwegian band in the world. The last Saturday of August, I went to see their concert in Frognerparken, Oslo (The park's rated as no. 1 travelers recommend in Oslo according to Yahoo Travel). It was a free concert sponsored by Hydro to celebrate their 100 years in business.
I went there with Morten and Vitoria. I knew Vitoria from my Norwegian language class. She's from Brazil and speak only very little of Norwegian and no English. If you read my first story, I have mentioned her a bit there. We've been friends regardless of our languagebarrier. When we talked on the phone, most of the times, she gave the phone to her husband so he could help us to talk to each other. I speak Norwegian with him. I don't have so much problem with Norwegian language in daily conversation now (Yay!). Torbjorn, Vitoria's husband, had to work that evening, so he could not join us. So, I asked Vitoria to bring her dictionary so we could communicate easier.
There were other shows before A-ha. It started with a show for children at 12 noon. At 3.30 afternoon, a famous Norwegian singer--Sissel Kyrkjebø along with Oslo Bach Kor, Sølvguttene, Ensemble 96 and Annbjørg Lien would perform 'The Lord of the Rings Symphony'. Since we're not children anymore and we didn't have any children with us, we planned to get there at 3. We drove to Oslo and parked in a parking house, around 15 minutes walk to the park. We had a quick lunch in a Burger King first. Morten and I agreed that the food in BG here tasted different than the one in the US. When we got there, there were already a lot of people, children and adult, young and old. There were several big screens around. That was good as I didn't think I would be able to see anything otherwise.
After an hour, it started to rain a bit (despite the weather forecast said it'd be nice and sunny). I brought a rain jacket, but Morten didn't. I was glad that Vitoria brought an umbrella, even though I've warned her not to as it was forbidden. She was not alone as we saw many umbrellas started being opened up. And of course, many people were not prepared for the weather, they left their spots and we could get closer to the stage. As the symphony was getting to its climax, the rain was also getting heavier.
We sticked around through the end and realized there was more than an hour break until the next show. We decided to walk to the stores area and find a rain jacket or an umbrella. We saw some elves and hobbits among those who were leaving the park. It's Saturday and it's past 5 PM. It's Norway and it's difficult to find opened stores. Finally, we got to buy a small umbrella. We went to a chinese restaurant and had dinner. We had fun with our languages. Vitoria added some words to her Norwegian vocabulary, Morten and I got to learn some Portuguese words.
After dinner, we walked back to the park and found the show had already started. The rain had stopped, too. A warm-up band -- RAVI & DJ Løv (they're famous in the country) -- was playing before the grand show. Most of the songs they played were Norwegian rap. Seems like that's quite popular here now.
Finally, a little over 9 o'clock, A-ha came out. The crowd got crazy. It's nothing compared to American crowd, I thought. They were a bit more shy, nevertheless it's still fun to be there. We moved our body and tapped our feet on muddy ground during the show and had good time. A-ha rocked, even though there was a little problem when they were playing a song (the singer, Morten Harket, couldn't reach a high key!). Almost through the end, they eventually played Take on me, my favorite and the world's favorite. They had to come in and out of the stage for 3 times because the crowd kept demanding more and more. The show was finally ended at almost midnight. And we finally realized that we were very tired. We dragged our feet (that were covered with mud) leaving the park along with the crowd that poured on to the streets and jammed the traffic. It was a looong stand-up day and smiles did not leave our faces until we got home. The next day, we read on the news that there were around 35,000 people came for the Lord of the Rings Symphony, and over 100,000 for A-ha.