Norwegian Saga

She said it went until past 01:00

A few nights ago I had a fun (read expensive) experience. I’m a foreigner in a foreign land, we all know that. In Norway many things are great and wonderful, the water is clear, the sky is blue, the women are beautiful… but the trams… are a little too much for my Canadian mind.

I’d spent the evening with Anne’s family, as I often do, they feed me and let me spend time with them. The evening of 15th was like any other, I had a dinner of fishballs (yeah, they have more ways of making fish than you can imagine) with mashed potatoes and peas and carrots. After dinner we chatted as usual. The evening wore on, as evenings do, and I decided it was time to go. It was probably around 23:30. I hurried out to the streetcar, a bit of a walk from Anne’s home, just in time to see it pull out of the stop.

“No problem, I can catch the next one.” I told myself.

I looked at the timetable and there was another tram due in ten minutes at 23:59, though it would be the 19, I needed the 18. The 19 came and went without me on it, I decided to wait for the next 18 which was to arrive at nine minutes past the hour. So I waited and waited and then realized no tram was coming. The pretty electric sign that tells riders the time to the next tram blinked out. I checked the timetable again, I had made no mistakes, nine minutes past the hour the 18 was due. So I looked at my cellphone to check the time and that’s when I noticed something else. 23:49 was the last run of the 18 (the one I saw roll by), my cellphone told me it was 00:10. I hadn’t been looking at the hours, just the minutes.

Thankfully and no doubt not by coincidence there was a taxi waiting right beside the tram stop. I called Anne to see if she’d give me a drive home but I got no answer because I misdialed her number. So I decided to take the taxi. It cost me a lot of money, 392NOK, or about 74CAD. The kicker was that I could have taken the 19 downtown and got a taxi from there and probably paid about half. Anyway, it was good times. The one plus was that unlike every other Norwegian, the taxi drove nice and fast and very much like I drive, it kind of reminded me of home on the 401.

Sweden

The next day (16 August) I went to Sweden with Anne’s family. They make a supply run to the Swedish side every so often as goods are almost half price there making it a smart economic decision for Norwegians. Not surprisingly almost every car in the store lot was Norwegian.

The drive was a little over an hour long, made so by the nature of the roads. Driving here is very different from driving in Canada. The joys of straight roads are almost unknown in Scandinavia. Therefore, drivers are limited to seventy or eighty kilometres per hour. Which is why the drive to Töcksfors, while being only one-hundred kilometres, took longer.

I stocked up on stuff there too. Being as inexperienced as I am I went to use my credit card to find it didn’t work when I swiped it. I tried three different cards but no dice, I couldn’t pay for my groceries. Sufficiently embarrassed, I let Anne’s dad bail me out and pay for my food. It wasn’t until a little later when we inspected the swipe terminals we noticed the special slot for the new chip cards. I tried to swipe my chip cards the old fashioned way which was not what you’re supposed to do I guess. You insert the card into the bottom of the terminal then enter your pin. Now I know better. I haven’t yet paid fully for the groceries by the way, I still owe two hundred Swedish crowns.

The photos below are the official border signs. They say “National border” then the name of the country, each of course in it’s own language.

People who haven’t traveled, not necessarily extensively but at least a little, don’t always realize the staggering differences in geography the world has to offer. Some places are fertile and people-friendly, such as the Canadian prairie provinces and much of southern Ontario. Other places are much less so for various reasons, deserts, snowy tundra, and mountains come to mind. Norway is interesting in this respect. It seems people-friendly on the outside. With some grass here and there, plenty of large forests, and water all over the place. But don’t be fooled, it’s all rock! That’s right, rock “intrudes” everywhere, into driveways, onto roads, back gardens and so on. Of course this is what gives Norway it’s majestic beauty, it’s greatness of landscape. It does however, make it particularly interesting to watch homes being built. Builders don’t really dig to lay a foundation they… drill? Blast? I’m not quite sure what they do to clear the rock actually, but they clear rock as opposed to dirt. Note in the photo the slope of the rock hill. I guess the homeowner can feel secure in the building’s foundation. (I apologize for the poor photo quality, cellphone cameras are not known for their superb optics or photosensors for a reason.)

Another interesting factoid about Norway: the bomb shelters. To be honest when I discovered them I didn’t know what they were, as I hadn’t asked a native Norwegian nor did I know what “tilfluktsrom” meant. But it’s hard to imagine they could be anything else. Many buildings have them and they’re always in the basement, they’re always marked with the same yellow label, they always have more than one locking mechanism, and they always close off a room. Oh and the most telling feature; these doors are about 40cm thick and made of solid steel. The first time I went through one was to go to a bathroom. I was a little unsettled by the fact that the hallway to the bathrooms had a door to it that would be so large. The male and female bathroom were down the hall, they were regular public bathrooms with attached locker rooms, so fairly large in total volume. A large number of people could certainly have found shelter there. Only later did I clue in to the fact that the door sealed the area, it was the only way in or out. Though I’m told there are other small exits in case the main one gets blocked by debris. Some of these doors I found were closed and some were open to functional areas, like bathrooms and all seemed to be older rather than newer. However, the feeling that these may have been required at one point in time, or may be required in the future. was unsettling and even a little frightening. It makes the peace that Canada enjoys that much more precious.

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.