Excerpt:

"Inside, a mahogany bar invited in random passersby and perhaps some of the hostel guests for a drink or a tiny bite. There were café tables and chairs inside as well, where two women were sitting, reading books, with backpacks on their chairs next to them. Along the wall on the left was a piano, the wooden furnish kept visible. Coffee mugs and note papers were stacked atop, and I wondered whether I would give the piano a play or not. If I would have known there was an opportunity to play, I would have brought my own notes. And overtop, as a sort of wallpaper, there were dozens of paintings mounted on the wall. Some of them were rather crude, others seemed brilliant to me. I was half-falling in love with this place already.
David went up to the bartender and asked where to register for a room, and the bartender just shifted along the bar, further into the room, where the bar converted into a registration desk with a computer and a laundry chute behind the counter. David and I shuffled along with him. I had to get out my print-out of the booking, and my passport to prove my identity. The bartender slash concierge asked me whether I needed sheets and things, which I did, so I took out the wad of cash that my mom had gotten from the bank yesterday and handed him a fifty twenty kroner note. He gave me back a ten kroner coin, and a five kroner coin. I absentmindedly jingled the coins in my hand while the concierge went into a storage room through a doorway even further down that I hadn’t seen, to get my sheets and towels. He came back with a set freshly pressed and packed in plastic foil.
I was about to go off with the plastic-packed package in my hands when David reminded me that I needed a key to actually get into my room. I blushed yet again at my forgetfulness, although I had a full seventeen years to get used to it. Or rather the part of those seventeen years where I consciously remembered that I always forgot stuff. The concierge handed me my key and went back to being a bartender, after telling me the entrance to the rooms was one street door down. I put the keys in my trouser pocket, and grabbed my suitcase with the newly freed hand to take off for the entrance to the rooms."