First Impressions of Oslo


Hello everybody!

To my last post trip trivia I received many answers ranging from Paris to Cuba, Miami, Rome, even Yekaterinburg! Well, the truth is that I’m in Oslo, Norway right now.

Just last night I was having dinner during the closing ceremony of the Gibraltar tournament, and now I’m writing this post from the wonderful Grand Hotel of Oslo where Barack Obama was staying when he got the Nobel prize last year.

Here is how the hotel looks inside. More like a museum, isn’t it?:


I was invited to Oslo for several reasons and tonight I had a very successful meeting, the agreement of which I will let you know tomorrow.

By the way I also had another meeting with the President of the Norwegian Chess Federation Joran Aulin-Jansson. Norway is bidding to host the 2014 Chess Olympiad in Tromso and this September in Khanty-Mansiysk during the Chess Olympiad 2010 we will find out the name of the winner. I hope that Norway will win.

Here are two on-line articles that just came out tonight about my visit to Oslo: here and here, they are in Norwegian but you can use google translator which works very nice (translation of the first and second article). Tomorrow I will have one more day in Oslo and will give a simul to the local kids and on Sunday I will be going back to Paris… to play in the French Blitz Championships!

By the way, the link to my YouTube video with game with Magnus Carlsen is here, in the unlikely case you haven’t already seen it 😉

Chess is Cool!

Posted by: Alexandra Kosteniuk
Women’s World Chess Champion