Ah, Norway! The Mother Land, well my mother land at
any rate. This is my seventh visit to Norway. It feels like a second home
and that feeling is magnified with my name and complexion causing me to be
routinely mistaken for a local.
I have a wacky love/hate relationship with this place.
I love the landscape. I hate the food.
I love the summers. I hate the winters.
I love the women. I hate the men (Read: I hate competition).
I love their awesome transportation system. I hate that everything is so damn
expensive.
I love that they are on the leading edge of technology. I hate that every
person on the street has a cell phone and that they would sooner chop off
their dominant hand, rather than be parted with it.
Everyone should go to Norway at least once, but if you really
want to take in the country and not live on a diet of bread and jam two meals
a day while you’re at it, you will have to cash in a few very ripe savings
bonds in order to have the kroner (Norway’s currency) to make this realistic.
Norway’s standard of living makes it one of the most expensive countries
for Americans, or anyone else for that matter, to visit and God help you if
the dollar is weak, like it is now. I have been hauling around this mildly
informative and prohibitively heavy copy of the travel guide “Frommer’s
Europe.” I learned very early and very painfully that despite being
dated 2003, Frommer’s calculations from kroner to dollars is probably
from about 2000 when the exchange rate was nine kroner to the dollar. Now
it is 6.85 kroner to the dollar. This difference gets very noticeable when
you are pricing hotel rooms. The Frommer’s quote on my freshman dorm
sized hotel room in Bergen was $82 a night. That price ramped up to an aneurysm-inducing
$108 when I did the conversion with today’s rates. Stupid Frommer’s.
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Anyhoo, if you get past the prices (which you won’t),
Norway is the place to be in the summer. I have never been anywhere as beautifully
scenic. And I’m not just talking about the countless mountains, valleys,
glaciers, waterfalls and fjords. Everything here is scenic. The houses,
the squares, the streets, the urinals… The gutters could be
on a postcard if you framed it right. Even in the big cities like Oslo and
Bergen, you get a distinct small town, quaint vibe from the buildings, people
and cityscape. Aside from the occasional American, eyesore hotel jutting up
in the middle of the city (the mere mention of the name “Radisson”
to a Oslo resident will spark a nostril flaring, stuttering diatribe about
how that building ruined the skyline of the entire city), structures usually
tend to be limited to five stories or less, meaning that even from the top
of a small bump in the road, you can catch a long and wide panoramic view
from any point in the city all the way to the water. If you ignore the sparkling
new malls that have begun to pop up, the Norwegian architecture and city planning
hasn’t changed drastically over the past few hundred years. New houses
and small buildings are built in the same style as the structures across the
street that are upwards of 200 years old. Many streets are still laid the
in classic style with tightly packed, small cobblestones, in an overlapping,
synchronous rainbow design. (Pictured) The cobblestone streets you traverse
could be less than a year old or over 100 years old. Once the agonizingly
slow work of laying the cobblestone streets is completed, they need little
repair and seem to be impervious to the maddening pothole problems that plague
most cold weather cities in the U.S.
The mere fact that I am devoting so much time and space to normally
tedious subjects such as the damn cobblestone designs in the street is a sign
that these minutiae are all part of what makes spending time in Norway so
fricking cool.
Transportation around Norway is another subject that gives me
a sweet buzz. With all of the mountains and fjords that they have to get over,
around and through, even a mere 100 mile trip as the crow flies can take six
hours or more on the ground after you negotiate all of the barriers that you
have to traverse. This is a desperately welcome change from driving in the
Midwest. Long drives in the Midwest are a coma-inducing, flat, straight, ride
of boredom with nothing to look at except fields, 237 Dairy Queens and the
occasional herd of cows. There’s nothing big in the way, so you can
set the cruise control at 90 MPH, steer with your pinkie and be at your destination
in short, but dull order. On the flip side, the countless geographical obstacles
in Norway make long drives a treat for both the driver and passenger. The
passenger has the pleasure of gawking at the lush mountainsides, waterfalls,
valleys, streams and fjords. Meanwhile, the driver gets their thrills and
natural adrenalin shots to their system with the incredibly narrow, twisting,
steep, “two lane” (at the best of times) road design. The anorexic
pavement width adds to the heart stopping experience of a having a truck barreling
down on you from the opposite direction at full speed and swooshing passed
with only inches to spare between your side-view mirror and the rock-face,
while your vehicle flirts with the edge of a 1,000 foot sheer drop on the
passenger side with nothing more than a small, cosmetic guard rail that wouldn’t
stop a dog at a full sprint from going over the edge, much less your car.
It gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.
During my trip to the Arctic Circle, I was forced to take a
14 hour, over-night bus trip from Bergen to Trondheim. In most countries,
particularly in the U.S., the mere thought of taking a 14 hour bus ride anywhere
would cause one to slip into visions of a cramped, dirty, uncomfortable ride
of horrors. Not in Norway. Cruising along in a finely tuned, balanced and
shockingly clean bus with spacious, comfortable seating on immaculate roads
and unforgettable scenery zipping past, it becomes difficult to tear yourself
away from the show going on outside your window to read your book or even
sleep for that matter. Speaking of books, I was voraciously reading “Dark
Star Safari,” by Paul Theroux for the first few weeks of my trip. The
book documents Theroux’s ground journey through Africa from Cairo to
Cape Town. I felt a little spoiled and girly sitting in my sterile and punctual
bus while reading accounts of Theroux waiting hours and sometimes days for
the pleasure of hitching a ride on the back of passing trucks, perched on
top of sacks of beans or even clinging to the roof of the truck’s cab
on unkempt, roads peppered with unholy potholes, getting wind blown in the
desert heat, eating sand and being shot at by starving banditos. Eventually
my guilt drained away when I realized that at any point while planning that
hideous trip, he could have just said “Fuck this” and retired
to his home in Hawaii.
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Due to it’s position on the global latitude scale, the
term “night” takes on a very relative meaning in Norway. Even
in the south, Norway only gets about three hours of dusk (never pitch black
night) in June. This phenomenon causes tourists like me to constantly lose
track of time. 11:30PM can sneak up on you really fast when the sky stays
illuminated until well after midnight and the streets are still bustling with
people of all ages. You’re only hint that the night is wearing on is
that restaurants will eventually herd you out the door and you catch a glimpse
of the clock in the main square which reveals that if you had a regular day
job, you would have been getting into bed right about then.
Just when I thought cell phone abuse in the US was getting unreasonable,
here come the Norwegians taking cell phone absurdity to the next level. To
Norwegians, cell phone are like an extra, indispensable appendage and unlike
less important items, like say one’s wallet or house keys, a Norwegian
and his or her phone are rarely parted. The coverage of the Norwegian cellular
network is impressive. I saw people happily making calls from ferries miles
off shore, the tops of very tall, desolate mountains and even from inside
miles long tunnels.
These days, kids can expect to get their first cell phone at
age 10 or 11, so the paralyzing dependency on cell phones is programmed very
early on. I learned quickly that this proliferation of cell phone use in Norway
was not only getting me all riled up on a personal level with everyone’s
cell phone being in constant use, but the phenomenon also bites me in the
ass as a tourist. With cell phone use becoming so common, the Norwegians have
actually started to dismantle their public payphone network! I had to walk
around downtown Bergen for over 15 minutes before I found a payphone. I was
so put out that the first thing out of my mouth to my friend whom I had not
seen or spoken to in two years was “You people need more public phones!”
Text messages are sent and received on Norwegian cell phones
much more often than actual phone calls due to the billing tactics of Norwegian
cellular providers. While an actual call can cost up to a dollar a minute
on some plans, a text message can be sent for a relatively scant 12 cents.
This method made little sense to me as I was witness to several of these text
message exchanges and it seemed to me that by the time they finished their
conversation, they had probably each racked up a higher bill than if one of
them had just broken down and called the other. Despite having to compose
a message with the ridiculously slow and clumsy dial pad, Norwegians are still
able to zap off quick messages with the help of built in word recognition
software and frequently used word shortcuts.
Another weird spin on cellular service that one should know
as a tourist in Norway is that the caller pays for the convenience
of the call, not the recipient as is the practice in the States. So, if you
think you are just going to drop five kroner into a payphone and call your
buddy’s cell phone for a nice long chat, think again. The payphone will
demand more money out of you almost immediately or disconnected the call with
almost no warning if you don’t comply. Even a brief call to a cellular
phone can totally empty your pocket of change in the short time it takes to
arrange a dinner date.
Sometimes the dependence and priority that Norwegians give to
their cell phones borders on being tragically comical. I have a friend (not
me :P) who was more than a little offended one night when he and his Norwegian
woman were making sweet love by the fire and her cell phone started chirping
“The Theme from Shaft.” It was a text message from her aunt. She
stopped everything (yes, everything) and responded immediately. Just
as they were getting back down to business it happened again. Then again.
The flipping text conversation with her aunt took precedence over doing the
horizontal mambo! This slayed me. If it were me, I would have fought fire
with fire and started up a game of “Golden Eye” on the Nintendo.
I bet that would’ve fixed her wagon.
Being a tourist in Norway gets even more confounding the first
time you have face the challenge of hailing a taxi. In places such as Mexico,
the instant you step one toe outside your hotel, you are almost forcibly “helped”
into at least three different waiting taxis. If you are lucky enough to escape
that, you are still harassed every four seconds as you walk down the street
by passing cabs and their novelty horns playing “La Cucaracha.”
This is not the case in Norway, where their livelihood doesn’t depend
on your tips. Hailing a taxi in Norway is like trying to convince an ocean
liner to stop for you. Whereas a Mexican taxi driver will screech to a halt,
back up traffic in four lanes and cause at least two accidents to get a fare,
if the Norwegian taxi driver is going too fast or does not have an appropriately
safe place to pull over to pick you up, he keeps right on going. I was ignored
for six blocks one morning with the overloaded Office tearing down my shoulders
and my suitcase rattling over the cobblestones. My appearance was clearly
screaming “Tourist on His Way to the Airport,” but nevertheless
I was passed by five empty taxis and I only managed to score a ride after
I had walked all the way down to the taxi stand at the harbor. I was casually
greeted by one of the guys who had cruised lazily past me four blocks earlier
while I jumped up and down, flapping my arms like a man-seagull hybrid. When
he innocently asked “Do you need a ride?” with a perfectly straight
face, I actually wondered if he and his friends were playing a sick joke on
me. It was exasperating. If you are coming to Norway and want to successfully
hail a cab in short order, I would recommend standing in the street with your
pants down and your hair on fire. Good luck!
The Norwegian women need little description. The stereotypes
that have endure in American TV and movies are pretty much accurate. They
are all gorgeous with, er, proportions that would leave even hardened
members of the Accredited Heterosexual Women of America with their tongues
wagging. I warn all males going to Norway for the first time to avoid driving
or operating heavy machinery until they’ve had time to acclimate to
the babe-factor, because disaster in the form of blond hair and ample cleavage
is waiting around every turn. Not only do these women have a natural, soft
beauty and perfect skin that will leave you melting into your shoes, but they
are among the more risqué dressers in northern Europe. It is rare to
see a Norwegian woman on the street in anything but low-riding, astonishingly
form fitting pants, with bare bellies and a plunging neck-line. I’m
tellin’ ya, these pants are tight. How tight are they? They’re
so tight that you can tell what… er, nevermind. That metaphor was going
down faster than a hooker in a…Arg! Enough with the one track mind already!!
As a man, I can attest to the fact that it is extremely difficult
to stay focused and productive when you are falling in love at first sight
117 times a day. Not only can I not perform basic tasks like feeding myself
while in the company of the average Norwegian female, but no-brainers like
walking in a straight line become a challenge on busy streets. I’ve
taken my people watching hobby to a new level in Norway. Normally my favorite
places to people watch are the State Fair and the Mall of America for the
undiluted weirdo quotient, but in Norway it’s pretty much all gravy
my friends.
Speaking of weirdos, it could just be my imagination, but Norway,
in fact all of Scandinavia, seems to have a higher well adjusted to, uhm,
“eccentric” people ratio than any other place I have been, including
the East Village in Manhattan. Whereas the normal to weirdo ratio is generally
something like 25: 1 in most places, Scandinavia is teetering on something
close to 12:1. And they all want to talk to me. I’m not sure what I
put out there to attract them, but something in my mannerisms speaks to these
people and unfortunately they feel the urge to speak back. The Cookies love
me. They are mostly harmless and I just chalk it up to the general entertainment
value of traveling in Scandinavia, but every once in a while you get an angry
one and that’s when things get dodgy. I have a very fine tuned sixth
sense that can pick up on the weirdo vibe on someone often before they even
say a word to me, so I am rarely taken off guard, but if the old Cookie Sense
tickles me in a certain way that says “danger,” I brace myself
and get crouched down for a quick exit. I can’t say why, but the mean
ones turn out to be women more often than not. A memorable exchange with a
Cookie at a bus stop in Copenhagen went a little something like this:
Phase 1. Acquire the target. I knew she was there the instant
she inched into the outer range of my Cookie Radar. I glanced in her direction
and it was clear that she already had me in her sights. I nudged my friend
Marianne to get her attention. She had already been witness to several encounters
with me and the Cookies during the week that we had been traveling together
through Scandinavia and understood the situation immediately.
Phase 2. Evasive maneuvers. The Cookie swaggered up to me and started right
in on me with the story of how her evil husband had left her. I nodded and
smiled as I started steering my friend into making baby stepping towards the
front of the bus stop.
Phase 3. Defense. Like turning on a light switch, the Cookie went from wanting
to be my best friend to hating me. Her eyes went dark and she said “If
you didn’t like me, then why didn’t you just say so!?!”
loud enough for most of the rest of the bus stop to be involved in the moment.
Phase 4. Retreat. Just then the bus pulled up, I said something to the effect
of “No, really! I think you’re great! Let’s do this again
some time!” as my friend and I cut in front of about 12 people and clamored
onto the bus.
So far, I have not been accosted by a single Cookie on this
trip. It has been 12 years since I last traveled extensively in Scandinavia,
so perhaps my natural Cookie pheromones have all burnt out with age.
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Only slightly less distracting than the women is the Norwegian
chocolate. Wow. It’s beyond description. While with supreme effort,
I can just barely control myself around the women, the chocolate is another
story entirely. Even the basic convenience store chocolate puts everything
we have in the States to shame. Typically, when I arrive in Norway, I just
check my dignity as soon as I get off the plane and stuff my face with chocolate
all day, every day and then buy about $100 worth at duty free on my way out
of the country. Pride, schmide. I want my friggin’ chocolate! I have
had to develop a special way to carry my Coke and chocolate in one hand as
I navigate the city, so I still have a hand free for doors, picture taking
and occasionally wiping the drool from my chin as one beautiful creature after
another passes by. I accomplish this with a complicated series of finger placements
to keep the Coke and chocolate near and at the ready for consumption. (pictured)
There is even space to keep the wrapper of the chocolate as I peal it from
top to bottom.
Aside from the chocolate, don’t count on finding any culinary
treasures while you are in Norway. The native dishes are a bland, white nightmare
of tasteless monotony. This would be forgivable if they also hadn’t
managed to successfully ruin common dishes from all over the planet. You name
the cuisine, the Norwegians have butchered it. The only food related aspect
that you can count on in Norway is that unless you request otherwise, no matter
what the dish or it’s native origin, it will come with corn on it. And
possibly thousand island dressing. I’m not sure how or why these two
ingredients worked their way into being indispensable parts of their diet,
but nevertheless it is forced on you a minimum of two meals a day. And if
you come to Norway and order dinner on your first day, all the while thinking
to yourself “They wouldn’t put corn and thousand island dressing
on fillet mignon, would they?” Don’t be so sure. Better safe than
sorry.
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Walking around any decent sized Norwegian city is a constant
treat. Something intangible about the people, the atmosphere (did I mention
the women already?) and exquisite, international hum in the air makes simply
sitting on a bench on a busy pedestrian street and watching the world go by
a joy in and of itself. Street performing is a free-for-all in the main shopping
and social centers of every city. Numerous musicians, bands, performers, statue
guys and the occasional drunk putting on a free show can be seen day or dusk.
One of my favorite street performing moments snuck up on me from behind while
I was sitting on the main outdoor pedestrian mall in Trondheim, stuffing my
face with my semi-hourly chocolate binge. I heard the faint noises of an accordion
player warming up behind me. Accordion players are almost more common than
10 year olds with cell phones in Norway, so I didn’t bother to turn
and check it out until a crowd started forming. Once I was certain that the
crowd wasn’t for me (I was really putting away that chocolate…),
I spun around on my bench and saw the most adorable little girl (pictured)
tapping out the same three songs over and over on an accordion that must have
weighed almost as much as she did. She was a huge hit. People were gathering
all around and shooting pictures. I whipped out my tiny Canon and joined them.
Back when I was a little more strapped for cash, I used to do my share of
street performing in Norway. The Norwegians are generous tippers to street
performers, but this little girl was on an entirely different level. She raked
in more kroner in 10 minutes of playing than I did in two hours on my best
day in Oslo. I was stunned, but she was so cute, I couldn’t possibly
get bent-out-of-shape about it.
Like much of Scandinavia, drinking at bars and clubs is only
for the idle rich or perhaps a once or twice a month outing for the average
wage earner. Just like in Iceland, Norwegians do their hardest drinking at
home, before they leave for the clubs. With the very limited hours that stores
are allowed to sell liquor, even this econo-drinking strategy takes some planning.
Liquor stores shut down at 3:00 in the afternoon on Saturdays. This caught
me off guard more than once and I was reduced to getting the weak, but tasty
Norwegian apple cider which grocery stores are allowed to sell until the comparatively
late hour of 6:00PM.
Norwegians love their statues. There are statues all over every
city. Bergen took this art and decided to have some fun with it. There are
life sized, casually posed statues of people scattered randomly about the
city center and if you happen to be walking in the dark or drunk or both,
these statues could easily be mistaken for real people. There’s a statue
of a women standing idly outside of the Mc Donald’s and one of a man
sitting propped up against the stairs to the city hall. I don’t know
about you, but seeing one of those out of the corner of my eye while I was
staggering home would most definitely scare the living doo doo out of me.
I have a feeling those madcap Bergeners know this and probably have security
cameras trained on those spots to watch the show every night and maybe edit
together a best-of video for the policeman’s ball each year. I know
I would.
One thing you can count on in the statue department is that
in just about every good sized city in Norway (Iceland too) there is a statue
of Leif Erikson, or Leiv Eriksson or Leifer Erikssen or any of a number of
other spellings, depending on what country/region/city you are in. There’s
little agreement about how to spell his name, but he is roundly admired, because
his likeness is everywhere. Being his namesake, I get a real kick out of going
around and collecting pictures of the Leifster.
I visited five cities during this trip to Norway: Stavanger,
Bergen, Trondheim, Bodø, and Oslo. Please follow the links for my lengthy
thoughts on each city.
Go to Stavanger
