It is 7 days until Christmas, and here in Norway everyone is counting down the days left. Advent, the preparation for the celebration of the nativity and Christmas, is very important in Norway (whereas I don’t think I even understood what the word advent meant until I came here).
(All the photos I've included in the post are my own, from this and my previous Christmas in Norway.)
The goal in Norway at the moment is to see and be seen – literally. As you’ll recall from my previous past about Life in the Land of the Midnight Sun, as the country edges further into winter, the days become shorter and shorter... at the moment sunrise is at 8:56am and sunset is at 3:18pm. (And until winter solstice, the sun will rise 2 minutes later each day and set 1 minute earlier. ) With all that darkness, Norwegians become very concerned about visibility, and start wearing reflective gear so that they can be better seen by cars. The reflective gear ranges from vests and wrist bands to stickers and reflectors that dangle from your clothing.
One thing I find fascinating about life in Norway is how distinctive the seasons are. Even if you ignore temperature, autumn very clearly looks like autumn, spring is very clearly spring, and... well, you get where this is going.
Solveig, Arnfinn, Gunnvor, Håkon, Borghild, Kjetil, Mette, Børge, Berit, Eivind, Tove… No, I haven’t started speaking in tongues, I’ve started listing for you some Norwegian names – both common and not so common.
Norwegian names have fascinated and flat-out confused me for as long as I have lived in Norway. This is not merely because of their bewildering pronunciation (when my friend Tone – essentially pronounced ‘tuna’ – first introduced herself to me, I thought she was joking), but also because of the impossibility I encounter in trying to guess the gender of their owners. Out of interest, the names I have listed are girl-boy-girl-boy... would you have guessed?
Yesterday, Norway celebrated Halloween. Well, that is perhaps an over-statement – it’s more like “some costume stores and several kids celebrated Halloween”.
In Norway, Halloween is literally a made-up holiday. A few years ago it was simply some weird tradition people saw in American films and TV shows, but as another blogger pointed out, there is only so long you can hold children away from any holiday about monster costumes and candy.
Before coming to Norway, I thought that taking cod liver oil as medicine was something that stopped with quack sideshow snake oil sellers back in the 1900s. Cod liver oil sounded like an old wives’ tale, like rubbing half a potato on your hands under a full moon to cure warts. It turns out that it’s not just folklore, and that Norwegians are very serious (though not always enthusiastic) about taking it.
Last week I completed Level 3 of my Norwegian language course! Hooray! (Of course, this would feel far more gratifying if it weren't for the fact that I still have four more levels to go. ) To mark this achievement, I thought I would provide a little Norwegian exercise for you, to test your skills at reading Norwegian, see the Norwegian language in practice, and because I had to take a Norwegian test last week myself! You will see that sometimes Norwegian is not so different from English...
And if someone had told me at the beginning of the weekend that I would be sitting in the darkened ritual room of the local Freemasons, I wouldn’t have believed that either…
If someone at the beginning of that weekend had told me that I soon be watching the national bridge tournament in a former Olympic stadium, I would not have believed them...
One Friday night back in July my boyfriend and I found ourselves in the far from typical situation of having access to a car, while his parents were away on vacation. A spontaneous decision to take a daytrip to Lillehammer soon turned into a plan for a weekend away, and early Saturday morning we packed our things and jumped in the car.
Since I first came to Norway over two years ago, it has been a goal of mine to travel to the north of Norway to experience the midnight sun. Unfortunately, during my first stay in Norway I did not have the opportunity to do so. Fortunately, my best friend here (another foreigner, a Swede) also wished to see the midnight sun – so in July, a few weeks after the summer solstice, we journeyed to the cosy northern town of Tromsø for a long weekend getaway.
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) To mark this achievement, I thought I would provide a little Norwegian exercise for you, to test your skills at reading Norwegian, see the Norwegian language in practice, and because I had to take a Norwegian test last week myself! You will see that sometimes Norwegian is not so different from English...
WIDGETIZE