Norwegian Saga

I’ve successfully registered for courses on the web, all on my own, which is no small feat considering half of the explanations and pages are in Norwegian.

Here’s the lowdown:

NFI4120 – Old Norse – language and texts
MAS4010 – Dissertation Seminar
MAS4540 – Current issues in medieval studies with focus on history 1
NORINT0110 – Norwegian for international students, level 1

That’s what I will be studying and learning until December. I may yet switch the current issues course for “NFI4111 – Old Norse Palaeography, Codicology and Medieval Manuscript.” The prof teaching it is going on sabbatical after this autumn and won’t be back before I leave Norway in 2010. The current issues course will probably be available every semester so I can take it any time. By the way, current issues is about issues that are currently being discussed in the modern scholarship regarding medieval Europe, it is not a course about today’s current events.

Onward then. Walking along the road a few days ago to get to the streetcar (that’s how I roll here, no car for me) I noticed something that I always knew but never focused on- a lack of overhead power cables and poles supporting them. Europe has buried power/TV/phone lines, at least in some countries, Norway being one of them. In Canada that’s not the case, along almost every road there are some sort of cables hanging overhead. When I noticed the absence of cables here, and posts, it put into sharp focus the strange feeling I’d been having of openness. The plethora of posts and cables I’m used to just isn’t to be found here in Norway. So any city viewscape one looks at is just buildings, roads, and people. It gave me a strange feeling, like something was missing, which it is. It’s difficult to describe so I won’t try to say more but I will get some photos for you.

A point to Norway for tucking away their cables out of view but parking spaces on the other hand are a mess. They are definitely not as driver-friendly as in Canada. They’re small, almost always require payment no matter where you go, and are oddly placed. By oddly placed, I mean that the usual and comfortable grid pattern North Americans are accustomed to doesn’t really exist here. There’s parking on the side of the road, yes, of course. But when you move off the road to a lot of some sort, say by a store or by an apartment building it’s a whole new can of worms. Sure the spaces may be placed right up against the building, seemingly making a nice straight row of cars but the road that passes around them is either angled, full of bikes or garbage cans, or simply a pedestrian walkway. The whole problem is that real estate is at a premium here in Oslo. So everything is squeezed in together nice and tight, bikes, garbage cans, cars and people. To add to that the parking spaces are quite small as well. I can imagine if you’re driving anything other than a scooter or motorcycle or a Buddy car (an electric car from Norway that’s smaller than the Smart) you’re going to have difficulty parking here. Unless you’re European I guess, because they seem to do it just fine. For the record, I’m entirely for public transport and decreased use of automobiles.