From Oz to Oslo

Earlier this month, Norway was claimed as the number one best country in the world to live. Well, sort of. Each year around October, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) ranks 182 countries on criteria including life expectancy, literacy, school enrolment, and gross domestic product per capita. This enables them to calculate each country’s ‘human development index’ – which enables them to slot countries into the categories of developed, developing or underdeveloped. The media often translate this index into which countries have the highest standard of living, or are just plain the best places in the world to live... and this year Norway won!

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Before those with one-track minds get their hopes up, note that I said ‘covers’ in the blog title – plural. You see in Norway, and in some other European countries, it is common for a couple sharing a bed to have two separate covers: one for each person. Huh? This was a surprising change from the system of just one large duvet stretching across the entire bed that I am accustomed to.

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There is a strange middle language that flickers somewhere between Norwegian and English, that I like to call ‘Norwenglish’. It is a dialect spoken by those Norwegians who are maybe out of practice with English or simply not used to speaking it (or speaking about particular topics), and which - understandably - almost always results from them trying to directly translate a Norwegian phrase or pronunciation into English. Norwenglish is usually not that far from the correct English version, but far enough for you to stare at the speaker blankly for a second, thinking “Huuuuuh?”

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As well as being the time of year for Eurovision and constitution day, another annual milestone that just passed in Norway is the conclusion of Russefeiring – graduating high school students’ two-week orgy of parties, drunkenness, hormones and youthful stupidity before they buckle down for final exams. I wouldn’t normally dwell on this (as my home state has a similar ritual called Schoolies, though we have the foresight to hold it after exams and before students reach legal drinking age ), but there are so many just plain bizarre traditions involved in Russ that I can’t resist sharing.

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One thing that still surprises me about Europe is just how small some of its world famous cities are. Sure, London and Paris thrive at 13 and 11 million people respectively, but many other metropolises pale in significance. For a little geographical perspective, the city I'm from in Australia is Brisbane, which has a population of 1.9 million – less than half our biggest city Sydney’s total of 4.3 million. So when I discovered that Rome and Athens have just 3.7 million inhabitants, Brussels 2.7 million, and Stockholm 2 million, I was shocked. How could my home city, just the third biggest city in Australia and a city most tourists skip, be bigger than greats like Copenhagen, Prague, Helsinki, Edinburgh and Zurich?

As such, I was a little miffed when Oslo – distributor of the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, capital of the world’s fourth largest exporter of oil – turned out to have a population of just 600,000 people. 600,000?! Oslo has such a small-town feel to it that sometimes I actually forget that I live in a capital: like when my boyfriend points out a famous author or politician in the street and I think to myself, “Really? What are they doing here?!”

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