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Home and Away Prior MTV host and Hollywood babe Johanna Grønneberg Mesa (35) commutes between the contrasts. TEXT BY THOMAS KARLSEN
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ohanna Grønneberg was 18 years old, and she knew this: she had to travel. There was a world beyond the neighbourhood in Nesodden that was simply waiting to be explored. Full of a youthful lust for adventure and suitcases packed with self-confidence, she boarded an airplane to Australia - as far away from Norway as it was possible to go. Twenty hours later, she landed in Melbourne - after having cried the entire way from Oslo Airport. "I went into a complete panic!" Became completely unglued, just sat and cried, from when we took off until we landed, including a stop-over of several hours in Singapore." Her fellow passengers tried to console her, but the feeling did not let up: She was on her own now. The safety net was gone. PRONOUNCED CONTRASTS It turned out well of course, like it always does. After studying for three years on A ustralia's Gold Coast, she travelled further to North Dakota in the US and pursued studies in TV production. In 2006, after a short stay in Stockholm, she became a host on MTV, based in New York. "It is the one town in the world that I always dream of going back to, that I can never
ecome tired of. There is no better place b than New York in the spring." She remained in the cosmopolis for two years, before she moved to Los Angeles and MTV's California office. And she is still there. Partly, in any case - she and her husband, the rapper and music producer Vincent Pryme, are half-based in Oslo and half-based in Los Angeles. "Actually, I'm not sure where I'm most at home, but I certainly think that home is where you keep the wedding pictures. And they are in L.A." The commuting also involves her two-year old daughter Savannah having insight into two extremely different worlds early in her life. "It is of course a bit like if a child falls and hurts themselves in an American day care then you receive a certificate with three witness explanations to take with you just so you do not sue them. And the children are just as clean and pretty when you pick them up as when you dropped them off in the morning. In Norway, it's a bit more hard knocks, their clothes have the smell of water in which sausages have been boiled and they have stale liverpaste on their faces," explains Johanna.
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FACTS
Johanna Grønneberg Mesa Journalist and TV host from Nesodden, who has worked for among others TVNorge, MTV and TV3. TIP 1
At Oslo Airport "I always eat in a restaurant in order to relax, and as a rule I go for the Seafood Bar."