Some More Norwegian Oddisms

The longer I live here, the more things I notice that are very different, and sometimes somewhat baffling to me.

1. Double beds with 2 single duvets. Since I've started looking at places to live (and therefore intruding in people's homes), and also having visited some Norwegian households, I've noticed that despite having double beds in their main bedrooms, Norwegians only seem to use single-bed duvets, so that two (usually matching) single duvets lie side by side on the double bed. To make the bed, they seem to roll them up, so they look like two sleeping bags lying on the bed side by side, which just makes me feel like the bed is unmade... and surely this can't do anything for romance? I've been told, that as a result of this behaviour, choice of double duvets in shops is really slim. Perhaps I should've packed my queen size duvet from home. 

2. Shopping is done in tiny increments. Gone are the days of going to the shop once a week/once every two weeks, loading up a whole trolley, heaping mountains of shopping bags into the boot of my car, and strategizing on how best to get said shopping bags up to my third floor apartment in the least amount of trips possible (which usually involved several mad dashes between car and lift). Granted, I could probably get a car here, and then continue with this practice (without the lift), but there really isn't much point because public transport is good, and significantly cheaper than paying for petrol (it's double the price here compared to South Africa). For now I can only buy what I can carry home (which makes me really think twice about buying that dense cheese), or carry on the bus with me, which means shopping trips have become much smaller, and more frequent. And my shopping lists have become much better planned, because I can't just hop in my car to go get that milk I forgot, no, now I have to walk, and there's a very steep road between where I currently live, and the grocery store. I probably didn't need that milk anyway. 

3. The pizzas. They're huge (a medium here is a South African large, and a large is 40cm!), thick-crusted (several cm's at least), laden with more toppings than a cupcake decorated by a five year old (and they put peanuts on pizza!), and covered in a cheese that isn't mozzarella. They also cost more than anyone in their right mind should ever pay for a pizza. R300 for an average medium, R400 for an average large. I think I'll be making my own, thin crusted, simple, mozarella-laden pizzas from now on.

4. Things I think of as dessert are eaten as meals. Rice pudding is considered a lunch dish... not just a dessert. Also, waffles are snacks, or breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, whenever you want them, really. And you can put cheese on them. 

5. Norwegian sandwiches. Norwegians don't seem to like to use two slices of bread for a sandwich. They use one slice of bread with a topping on it (often tube cheese, or tube caviar, or some kind of lunch meat). Apparently this allows for maximisation of toppings. This actually makes complete sense to me, and I think I shall adopt it. 

6. Norwegian culture (at least in the north) makes them appear rude sometimes. This is definitely a cultural thing, and probably has a lot to do with differing definitions of what being polite means to me versus what it means to the average Norwegian. I've grown up in a society, that I guess, is mostly close to British, with probably some aspects of Afrikaans culture thrown in, where we're taught to say "please", "thank you", and "excuse me" to everyone. In Afrikaans culture it's still very common that men open doors for women and stand back to allow them through first, pull chairs out for them, and stand up to greet them. And although I've grown up in sort of a modern hybrid culture, where I don't absolutely expect these things to happen (I do expect "please", "thank you", and "excuse me"), when they do happen, it's nice. Although, some feminists would probably disagree with me.

I have noticed that dealing with Norwegians in everyday life, such as on the bus, or in a shop, or in a bar, is a somewhat different experience for me. Hearing "takk (thank you)" is quite rare, and I've not yet heard anyone say "vær så snill (please)" or "unnskyld meg (excuse me)". People rarely hold doors open for others, and boarding a bus is sometimes akin to experiences of junior school trips when it was a race to get on the bus first to secure the good seats. You'd definitely never have someone stand back to allow you on first! I've even been stepped on and bumped into without so much as a sorry or even an acknowledgement that it happened. I recently caught a bus that was almost completely full, and ended up having to stand, not because there wasn't an empty seat, but because some guy had decided that his giant bag needed to take up two seats on the bus, and it never appeared to cross his mind to move his great big bag off the seat so that two standing passengers could sit down. I'm hoping, that in this case, he was just a bad apple, and I'll give Norwegians the benefit of the doubt that they're not all like that.

Norwegians are actually really friendly, and polite (albeit sometimes a bit more restrained than I'm used to) when you engage them in conversation, so they just don't seem to observe the niceties with strangers. But as a foreigner, living among the people here, it can sometimes feel a little isolating and cold when no one smiles at you when walking along the street, or behaves like you're invisible when getting on a bus. I have been told that from a Norwegian point of view, all the "pleases" and "thank you's" used, for example, by the Brits, can come across as insincere. And because they're used so much, have less meaning. Therefore Norwegians use "thank you", mostly with family and friends, when they're truly thankful for something. This does make sense to me, and I guess it's just a difference in culture, but it's definitely taking some getting used to! I say thank you a lot, probably more than the average South African even. Maybe I should rethink this? 

7. The light. I know I'm repeating myself and that I talked about this in a previous blog post, but it is taking a lot of getting used to, and it seems like the longer I'm here, the more the 24 hour light is affecting me. While initially I didn't seem to have a problem with it (which probably had to do with recovering from travelling etc.), with the increasing amount of sunlight, so my inability to sleep seems to grow exponentially. I have never been one to suffer from insomnia, and I've never slept this lightly. In fact, historically, I've struggled to stay up past 12pm, and I have been such a heavy sleeper that I've been oblivious to house alarms, cats sleeping on my head, and the revving of Harley Davidsons in my lounge at 7 am! 

However, both my sleeping mask, and my cover-my-head-with-a-mountain-of-pillows tactic, have stopped being effective, which I think means the sunlight is starting to affect me psychologically (bring on the padded cells). I have stopped feeling tired almost completely, and the majority of this blog post was, in fact, written at 4 am, when I'd reached a desperate enough point that my options became: 1) get up and go for a run to beat my body into a state of tiredness, 2) tape every item of black clothing I own to the windows in my room (or tape them to my face... I prefer the windows though), 3) eat everything in my fridge, or 4) give up on sleeping altogether and write a blog post. As you can see, I chose "write a blog post".