Norway
At the risk of turning Norway into Snorway, I want to talk about it. At some length. :)
Coming from a country like Ireland, with dark, cold winters, you’d think the Irish would be culturally insulated against similar places elsewhere. Not a bit of it.
Recently I had a discussion with a friend about how she’d been to Sweden for 2 months during the winter and found it the most depressing place she’d ever seen - and indeed, Let The Right One In depicts a suburb in perpetual twilight with well wrapped-up inhabitants trudging through endless snow.
I’ve been to both Denmark and Finland during winter, and surprised myself at how depressed they made me feel. Days were a couple of hours shorter than the already meagre Irish winter daylight we receive here, and it was several degrees cooler. None of that sounds like a big swing, but it seems that we human creatures are very sensitive to the daylight in particular, and even a small difference like this was enough to make me want to stay under the duvet for the duration of the holiday before slouching off to the airport.
Of course, this is just a winter phenomenon, and upon returning to Copenhagen in May a few years later, I found it to be a gorgeous city - civilised, clean, safe and visually pleasing. I’m sure Helsinki would be the same if I returned.
So, having booked a New Years Eve trip to the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Norway, there was a chance I might have to bring a noose with me in case the cabin fever got to be more than my Hibernian constitution could handle.
Au contraire. Norway is a thoroughly wonderful place.
The fact that it had been snowing, not raining, was the first thing the Norwegians got right. I’m a sucker for winter wonderlands, and our initial glimpse of this Nordic ausland, spied from 1000 feet up in the plane, was of navy-blue mountains topped with icing sugar snowcaps supervised by a silent, dreamy moon. To my amazement, this sprinkling of white came right down to the water’s edge, the North Sea clearly not having any moderating climatic effect. I’d always been lead to believe you couldn’t have snow that near the sea. Take that, Irish primary school Geography syllabus.
Getting through the airport, outside it was freezing, but the air was perfectly still. The lack of wind shear does wonders for your body’s internal combustion heat engine. Just don’t move too much, and you’ll retain all your own heat. So much easier to survive in than a wet gale. Irish winters are like a heat pump efficiently sucking every last kilojoule from your body.
There were six of us Irish and three sensible Norwegians. Heading in a convoy of three cars over to the mainland, we passed over a high-level bridge and below us the city of Haugesund was like a Hornby train set - perfect little wooden bungalows with glittering lights, surrounded and topped by white powdery goodness - and the best bit, every house seemed to have wired up their conifer tree in the garden with lights too, so each house had an outdoor Christmas tree. There were no roads visible at all, just cute little houses and festively-decorated arboreal accoutrements.
I never ceased to be amazed at the hardiness of Norwegians. Stopping for petrol on the way out to our ski resort chalets, the car’s thermometer warned us that the outside temperature was -29. I shivered as the Arctic levels of cold penetrated my clothes, then my skin, before freezing the marrow in my bones solid. Jon Erik, on the other hand, was wearing a top, trousers and shoes - no hat, no scarf, no gloves, no coat, but there wasn’t a bother on him.
When we arrived at the chalets after a long drive, wood for the stoves was needed for both chalets that we were renting. Despite the snow drifts and -23 degrees outside, our hosts valiantly battled all obstacles and returned with 30-kilo sacks full of kindling over their shoulders. I’d have started looking for the number for room service.
Although Norway is a phenomenally expensive place (€10 for a beer!), for the long-term resident there are many little perks to be taken advantage of. For example, Statoil have an offer that if you buy a brushed steel coffee cup off them for €12, you get free coffee for an entire year from any of their ubiquitous petrol stations nationwide. That’s a hell of a lot of free coffee.
In keeping with their hardy nature, hiking and backpacking around Norway are popular activities. They have a nationwide network of hostels which offer a variety of accommodation standards, from hotel-scaled palaces down to unmanned huts in the middle of remote forests, stocked with tins of food. In the case of these latter abodes, you’re issued with an access code that opens the door. You leave money in a box for any food you take. The whole thing works on an honour system that I just couldn’t see working in a take-anything-not-nailed-down society like our own. An annual pass for all this only costs €60. That’s a hell of a lot of free accommodation.
Many things in Norway surprised and puzzled me. For example - where’s all the traffic? The road we took out of the twin western cities of Haugesund and Stavanger ran right through our skiing resort and led straight to Oslo - yet in a minute you might see one car passing. I asked Frank, who was going out with Therese’s friend Lisa (and whose idea all this was), about it and he said you couldn’t really use the railway to get there as you had to go south as far as Bergen before you could pick up a service leading to Oslo, and flying didn’t seem to be particularly popular either judging from their tiny Ryanair airstrip.
So where was all the traffic? The only answer I could fathom is that, like their inhabitants, Norwegian cities must be very self-sufficient, so people don’t need to travel much.
To my surprise, it seems that Norway has a bible-belt. The west coast is the conservative part, and church and Bible-reading are the norm for many people. The religion is Lutheran, which emphasises staying away from alcohol. Apparently, in the smaller more conservative areas, if you start drinking, you’re redtagged by the community as a heathen. This is more than I could ever handle.
Frank told me that a thing he thought was amazing about Ireland is the way there are pubs absolutely everywhere - in every town and village, and sometimes, outside even those. Pubs can be found at crossroads with no buildings in sight. This isn’t the case at all in Norway, where the government taxed the people out of bars long ago (remember those €10 pints) and drinking at home is the norm - for the non-religious. Keeping the social function of pubs in Ireland in mind, I asked him what people in isolated small communities in Norway do for entertainment and to promote conviviality. Religion is taken seriously, so they have Friday night meetings where they read and discuss the Bible. They also have lots of clubs - like card clubs, where everyone goes to someone’s house to play cards. With a mental picture of a typical Irish drinking session in mind, I laughed inwardly.
I was taken aback by much of this stuff, having only ever mentally associated it with Ned Flanders in the past. I’ve no idea what Oslo and the rest of the country are like. I presume it’s more lively. *
Like most Germanic people, the Norwegians are pretty reserved in general. Words are used economically, where the Irish talk shite all the time. Drinking takes place slowly, whereas our group was tanked up by 7pm on New Years’ Eve. People are islands and fiercely independent, whereas the Irish couldn’t light a fire in a forest if you gave them a Primus stove. I saw a picture on Flickr once that someone had taken in Oslo. Written in the dirt on the back of a van were the words, “I wish my girlfriend was this dirty.” Someone, presumably also a Norwegian, had crossed out “was” and written “were”. It takes a serious level of interest in foreign languages to get to the point where you can correct someone’s incorrect use of the English subjunctive.
That said, it was interesting to me to watch Frank slowly come around. He was going out with an Irish girl and of course had been to Ireland many times. He got us in a way the other two just didn’t. I wonder what that must be like, to lie outside our easy way we have with each other.
* Update: I've been reliably informed that it isn't.
There. I managed to say all that, and never mentioned the Norwegian Leather Industry even once.
Coming from a country like Ireland, with dark, cold winters, you’d think the Irish would be culturally insulated against similar places elsewhere. Not a bit of it.
Recently I had a discussion with a friend about how she’d been to Sweden for 2 months during the winter and found it the most depressing place she’d ever seen - and indeed, Let The Right One In depicts a suburb in perpetual twilight with well wrapped-up inhabitants trudging through endless snow.
I’ve been to both Denmark and Finland during winter, and surprised myself at how depressed they made me feel. Days were a couple of hours shorter than the already meagre Irish winter daylight we receive here, and it was several degrees cooler. None of that sounds like a big swing, but it seems that we human creatures are very sensitive to the daylight in particular, and even a small difference like this was enough to make me want to stay under the duvet for the duration of the holiday before slouching off to the airport.
Of course, this is just a winter phenomenon, and upon returning to Copenhagen in May a few years later, I found it to be a gorgeous city - civilised, clean, safe and visually pleasing. I’m sure Helsinki would be the same if I returned.
So, having booked a New Years Eve trip to the middle of nowhere in the mountains of Norway, there was a chance I might have to bring a noose with me in case the cabin fever got to be more than my Hibernian constitution could handle.
Au contraire. Norway is a thoroughly wonderful place.
The fact that it had been snowing, not raining, was the first thing the Norwegians got right. I’m a sucker for winter wonderlands, and our initial glimpse of this Nordic ausland, spied from 1000 feet up in the plane, was of navy-blue mountains topped with icing sugar snowcaps supervised by a silent, dreamy moon. To my amazement, this sprinkling of white came right down to the water’s edge, the North Sea clearly not having any moderating climatic effect. I’d always been lead to believe you couldn’t have snow that near the sea. Take that, Irish primary school Geography syllabus.
Getting through the airport, outside it was freezing, but the air was perfectly still. The lack of wind shear does wonders for your body’s internal combustion heat engine. Just don’t move too much, and you’ll retain all your own heat. So much easier to survive in than a wet gale. Irish winters are like a heat pump efficiently sucking every last kilojoule from your body.
There were six of us Irish and three sensible Norwegians. Heading in a convoy of three cars over to the mainland, we passed over a high-level bridge and below us the city of Haugesund was like a Hornby train set - perfect little wooden bungalows with glittering lights, surrounded and topped by white powdery goodness - and the best bit, every house seemed to have wired up their conifer tree in the garden with lights too, so each house had an outdoor Christmas tree. There were no roads visible at all, just cute little houses and festively-decorated arboreal accoutrements.
I never ceased to be amazed at the hardiness of Norwegians. Stopping for petrol on the way out to our ski resort chalets, the car’s thermometer warned us that the outside temperature was -29. I shivered as the Arctic levels of cold penetrated my clothes, then my skin, before freezing the marrow in my bones solid. Jon Erik, on the other hand, was wearing a top, trousers and shoes - no hat, no scarf, no gloves, no coat, but there wasn’t a bother on him.
When we arrived at the chalets after a long drive, wood for the stoves was needed for both chalets that we were renting. Despite the snow drifts and -23 degrees outside, our hosts valiantly battled all obstacles and returned with 30-kilo sacks full of kindling over their shoulders. I’d have started looking for the number for room service.
Although Norway is a phenomenally expensive place (€10 for a beer!), for the long-term resident there are many little perks to be taken advantage of. For example, Statoil have an offer that if you buy a brushed steel coffee cup off them for €12, you get free coffee for an entire year from any of their ubiquitous petrol stations nationwide. That’s a hell of a lot of free coffee.
In keeping with their hardy nature, hiking and backpacking around Norway are popular activities. They have a nationwide network of hostels which offer a variety of accommodation standards, from hotel-scaled palaces down to unmanned huts in the middle of remote forests, stocked with tins of food. In the case of these latter abodes, you’re issued with an access code that opens the door. You leave money in a box for any food you take. The whole thing works on an honour system that I just couldn’t see working in a take-anything-not-nailed-down society like our own. An annual pass for all this only costs €60. That’s a hell of a lot of free accommodation.
Many things in Norway surprised and puzzled me. For example - where’s all the traffic? The road we took out of the twin western cities of Haugesund and Stavanger ran right through our skiing resort and led straight to Oslo - yet in a minute you might see one car passing. I asked Frank, who was going out with Therese’s friend Lisa (and whose idea all this was), about it and he said you couldn’t really use the railway to get there as you had to go south as far as Bergen before you could pick up a service leading to Oslo, and flying didn’t seem to be particularly popular either judging from their tiny Ryanair airstrip.
So where was all the traffic? The only answer I could fathom is that, like their inhabitants, Norwegian cities must be very self-sufficient, so people don’t need to travel much.
To my surprise, it seems that Norway has a bible-belt. The west coast is the conservative part, and church and Bible-reading are the norm for many people. The religion is Lutheran, which emphasises staying away from alcohol. Apparently, in the smaller more conservative areas, if you start drinking, you’re redtagged by the community as a heathen. This is more than I could ever handle.
Frank told me that a thing he thought was amazing about Ireland is the way there are pubs absolutely everywhere - in every town and village, and sometimes, outside even those. Pubs can be found at crossroads with no buildings in sight. This isn’t the case at all in Norway, where the government taxed the people out of bars long ago (remember those €10 pints) and drinking at home is the norm - for the non-religious. Keeping the social function of pubs in Ireland in mind, I asked him what people in isolated small communities in Norway do for entertainment and to promote conviviality. Religion is taken seriously, so they have Friday night meetings where they read and discuss the Bible. They also have lots of clubs - like card clubs, where everyone goes to someone’s house to play cards. With a mental picture of a typical Irish drinking session in mind, I laughed inwardly.
I was taken aback by much of this stuff, having only ever mentally associated it with Ned Flanders in the past. I’ve no idea what Oslo and the rest of the country are like. I presume it’s more lively. *
Like most Germanic people, the Norwegians are pretty reserved in general. Words are used economically, where the Irish talk shite all the time. Drinking takes place slowly, whereas our group was tanked up by 7pm on New Years’ Eve. People are islands and fiercely independent, whereas the Irish couldn’t light a fire in a forest if you gave them a Primus stove. I saw a picture on Flickr once that someone had taken in Oslo. Written in the dirt on the back of a van were the words, “I wish my girlfriend was this dirty.” Someone, presumably also a Norwegian, had crossed out “was” and written “were”. It takes a serious level of interest in foreign languages to get to the point where you can correct someone’s incorrect use of the English subjunctive.
That said, it was interesting to me to watch Frank slowly come around. He was going out with an Irish girl and of course had been to Ireland many times. He got us in a way the other two just didn’t. I wonder what that must be like, to lie outside our easy way we have with each other.
* Update: I've been reliably informed that it isn't.
There. I managed to say all that, and never mentioned the Norwegian Leather Industry even once.