President Dalia Grybauskaitė at the Norwegian Royal Palace, where she met with King Harald V and Queen Sonja

After the meeting with the Royal Family, the President gave a lecture ‘Energy Geopolitics: Reasons and Achievements of Nordic-Baltic Cooperation' in the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, dealing with geopolitical aspects of energy-related problems in Europe and underlining the need and mutual benefit of promoting active cooperation with Norway and other Nordic countries. The President also answered questions put by the students, the professoriate and guest experts.

"By this first state visit to Norway I wanted to underline and draw attention to the fact that the Northern dimension is one of Lithuania's foreign policy priorities and that our relations with Northern Europe are acquiring a shape of a very concrete and productive dialogue. Lithuanian-Norwegian relations are a perfect example of cooperation based on interests of the two peoples. Norway's political and financial support to Lithuania is very valuable and we have very good prospects of cooperation in the field of energy," President Dalia Grybauskaitė said.

Grybauskaitė also had a meeting with the President of the Storting (the Parliament) and Norway's Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg.

During the visit, memorandums of understanding concerning the implementation of the Norwegian and the European Economic Area (EEA) Financial Mechanisms 2009-2014 providing for support in the amount of 84 million euros to Lithuanian projects, and a bilateral agreement concerning the transfer of sentenced offenders to serve sentence in their home country were signed.

Sad to see, though, that Norwegian media hardly have mentioned the visit.