There's a new BookCrossing zone in Oslo!!!

Yay me!!! :-D

I've finally got the new BookCrossing zone downtown set up, after only x months of waffling about over it. Let's not think about the past at a glorious moment like this. Seriously, I've been way too slow getting this done, but it's not all my fault. Partly it's because I am slow ... and partly it's because the woman in charge of the place where I've set it up has been on sick leave for weeks on end and so naturally hasn't been able to answer her emails very efficiently. But mostly it's my fault. :-) Still, all water under the bridge now and so on. I am SO happy that the zone is finally set up and we have a real place to have meetups and direct out-of-towners to and all that. You may remember the sad way in which we lost the previous zone. :-( This time I've labeled the shelf with my contact information, so that hopefully nothing like that will happen again.

This time the story isn't sad, but funny. And it makes me look like an idiot, but that's how it goes. My bad. :-) What happened was that we picked a place for meetups and agreed to try to get a zone set up there. This was a place in Oslo Central Station called Beans. Just a coffee place, but in a good location and pretty nice. For a train station, you know. :-) I took charge of the project and agreed to do the legwork. So, I found out what company was behind the cafe and contacted them. I got a positive response, they didn't quite get the BookCrossing concept but they thought it sounded good. So after some back and forth and explaining and agreeing I asked if it was OK for me to come set it up, and suggested a good place for it. The manager - of Beans, as I thought - said that it all sounded good, but not sure what you mean by 'corner by the escalator', we don't have any escalator in our cafe ... ? Umm ... OK ... what?!

Well, to make a long story short it turns out that I've been emailing and getting agreement from a totally different person in a totally different place!! :-D Well, maybe not totally different - this place is in the central station too. It just isn't Beans. It's La Baguette, another cafe owned & operated by the same chain. So I just got the wrong email address off their homepage to begin with, and never figured it out. :-D

Obviously at that point I couldn't very well start saying Oh, OK, sorry, I'm not interested in you after all, then. I mean, really, I couldn't. So I decided to just work with what I had and put the zone up there. And after thinking about it I do in fact think that this location is even better. So it's really an improvement all round. I just felt pretty damn stupid when I realized what I'd done ... !! :-D

Hopefully all the other Oslo BookCrossers won't be too upset with me. ;-) The zone is up and running now, whatever they say - it's called OsloS-OBCZ and you can see its virtual bookshelf here. BC meetup's once a month and all booklovers are of course heartily welcome. :-)

And now, pictures!!

The great work in progress. Fortunately all the parts were there ... as usual. They normally are, and anyone who says otherwise is just full of it.

Done! I think it took 23 minutes to build the whole thing. All I can say is, go IKEA ... !!! :-D

All done, books and all. Now I just needed to get it downtown ... o_O Big thanks to my friend Dag-Erling for giving me a ride!!! :-)

The zone!! In place, with books and everything. Well, pretty much ... there aren't a whole lot of books yet ... but that will be fixed soon, more books will be added this coming week. This shelf is also bigger than the one we used to have, three levels instead of two. Room for more books ... ! which in fact we can quite use, because the old one used to get almost overfull. Not a problem here so far. :-) But we'll see, we'll see ... ;-)

Location is everything, supposedly ... and with that in mind I think this is pretty damn good.

The cafe. Looks pretty nice, doesn't it? Stop by anytime! :-D