10 things about NORWAY!
written in Norway, but am posting it from my friend Becky’s office in Lugano, Switzerland…
I write this from the train from Hamar to Oslo, looking out the windows at a new, but quite familiar landscape. The rolling glacier cut hills, farms, evergreens, steeply roofed houses (a sure sign of heavy snowfall areas), farm equipment, lakes and rivers, are identical to the green and hilly parts of upstate New York that are my ancestral stomping grounds (both personally, and for many generations of Loves).
Is this Norway, or the average rural road near Ithaca? (note, no photoshopping, here, it was this grey)
The only thing that you don’t see in upstate NY, is what I am on using right now, exceptional public transportation; This train is very nice, spacious, and I have light/air controls above my head just like an airplane!
A Norwegian recommended that I get out of Hamar, and take some time to see the “big pile of rocks” (their exact word choice) that is the rest of the country. I unfortunately did not have time to leave Hamar, but I feel like I saw a lot. Here are my quick impressions of 10 things about Norway
if any Norwegian wants to reply with “10 things stupid visiting Americans tend to miss when they visit Norway”, I welcome you to do so!
1. Cell phone quiet areas
One of the cars on the trains is “no cell phone car”. It was very pleasant, quiet, and the several other occupants quietly are reading the morning paper, as I am watching the scenery & writing this… I think there should go on the long list of “international good ideas” that many countries would be very well off adopting…
2. Porn and Donald Duck
The conservative right wing in America often wants you to believe that if nudity/sexuality/human body familiarity becomes no big deal, then somehow society falls apart and becomes a Sodom & Gomorrah nightmare worse than any Mad Max/road warrior movie. I point to the obviously functional societies in Europe, and the fact in Europe the human body & human sexuality is very publicly visible, In fact much easier to see than cigarettes.
However it still weirded me out, repressed American that I am, to see in the airport café, “HOT 60+ Mature Action” stocked on the magazine shelf within a foot of a kids-centric Donald Duck Magazine. (Donald Duck is HUGE in Norway).
3. Cigarettes=Death
Check out these warnings on cigarette packs. They take cigarette danger REALLY seriously, good for them! Cigarettes shorten the life of many smokers, and kill lots of them outright. The last time I checked, pictures of naked people don’t do that.
They had lots of creative messages, check out just a portion of them in a larger picture I took.
4. Breakfast in Norway.
I could have been experiencing an anomaly, as I mostly ate in the hotel next to the rink, but I don’t think so. Breakfast here is lots of meats, eggs, salty fish, coffee, fantastic yogurt and cereals. The choices were similar to my favorite USA “Wisconsin-style Breakfast”. All I can say as I pat my full stomach is “Yum!!”
5. Adjustable height showerheads
I should have taken a picture of this, it looks like a normal shower head, but is adjustable on a horizontal pole. This is a small thing, a detail, but as I am a shade under 6 feet tall, and my wife is 5’3, where can I buy one of these for my house? It’s also really nice when you want to get the water REALLY focused on certain tight lower back or neck muscles.
6. Moose-eating Parties
I was informed by a Norwegian skater that he was going to be attending a moose-eating party. The Norway moose population is like the local deer population in upstate NY, people crash into them all the time in cars, with disastrous results, and 25,000 are taken by hunters every year.
I think he was disappointed in my complete underwhelmed non-reaction, but I had just been in a discussion about a particularly VILE form of Scandinavian culinary delight. This is the Icelandic tradition of eating putrid skate. No, not a skate like I use, I mean eating a rotting sea creature (chased with shots of extremely strong liquor). Really, I am not kidding, putrid skate supposedly smells like cat piss. Check out this news report.
Compared to that, moose is a great meal. In fact, I bet Americans have a long traditions of eating moose, that is why there are almost no moose left!
7. KickSleds
Very common on the streets of Hamar, I saw many 50+ year olds gliding about commuting on these. On uphills you just push it like a shopping cart, on downhills, you stand with your feet on the runners and coast, and on the flats, one foot is on the runner, and you kick it along like a skateboard. Two kicks, switch runner, two kicks, switch runner.
Most of the kicksleds I saw had people’s names written in the wood slats, and also had bike locks to prevent them from “disappearing”. Kicksleds are not recreation, they are practical transportation!
8. Norwegian Humor
Where is this stereotype of cold & stoic Scandinavians? Most Norwegians I met were quite funny. Not only did one of them discuss moose-eating parties, but another seriously recommended that I take a train to an inland town called “Voss” and go to a certain café where I could order whole smoked sheeps head (eyes and brains included). Now I am a very culinary adventurous American, so maybe he was taken aback when I started asking specifics about how far it was from Hamar? Did the trains go there? If I could have taken an easy train to try this, I would have. But it was over 5 hours each way.. Damm!
9. Euro-Sport
Norwegian TV also covers winter sports on with much more respect than American TV, they show Biathlon, ski jumping, speedskating, and XC skiing as SPORT. Not some odd sideshow full of “personality profiles” because they really have no idea how to show it as an athletic challenge Also, Norway is damm proud that they pretty much stomp all over the world in many winter Olympic sports.
One of the other skaters used to be a ski jumper, I asked him about that sport, and he really went off. He said “yeah, I miss jumping, but now it’s a whole bunch of skeletons on the hill, super skinny anorexic lightweights who focus on gliding off the hill, not jumping. The Nordic combined is now the true ski jumping, as those guys have to have muscle on them to do the cross country ski part.”
10. Vigeland Park in Oslo
I have walked through most of the major New York City museums, if anything this was more moving. This park is a lifetime of work by Gustav Vigeland. There are over 212 stone figures, all depicting stages of human life & emotion. In the center is this incredible obelisk. 17 meters high, weighing several hundred tons, carved of one massive piece of Norwegian granite. There are 121 figures all wound around each other in the obelisk. Incredible. It took 3 stonemasons 14 years to finish just this central piece.
Before you die, resolve to take a walk through Vigeland park, and let all these stages of human emotion, age, and life depicted there, soak into you, it’s INCREDIBLE.
Here is a larger picture view of a few of these sculptures. I was so torn as I was there, take pictures, or just wander and let it soak in??? I decided to take pictures because I knew I wanted to blog about it (a rare moments when this blog changed how I acted in the real world) but now I want to go back to Vigeland, and stroll for hours and hours.
Filed under: on the road
Hey Andrew! Thanks for the great pics and insight! Years ago, a biathlete friend of mine was racing in Norway. I guess they had Wed. night races or something. So the U.S. Team signs up for some training. Norwegian after Norwegian citizen racer passes them and my friend thought, “What is this? Beat the American night?”. Seems no one even knew the guys were American. But Bonanza was on at 9:00 PM and everyone back then was just smokin’ fast through the race to finish in time to see the most popular program in the country!
And I heard stories of VERY elderly ladies with a ton of clothes on their kicksleds flying down hills and cornering on two runners to get tot the laundry. No wonder they are all Nordic Gods over there.
Also Andrew, I noticed everyday while I was there: speedskating or speedskaters were in the press either on TV or newspapers! When does that happen in the US? Great to see and experience the unusual popularity in speedskating and winter sports…Couldn’t help but notice the apathy of the rest of passengers on the domestic flight back to SLC from Chicago who were not watching the NBC sports Winter Olympic preview featuring skiing, speedskating and other winter sports upcoming next February. Instead, we have Oprah, Jerry Springer and soaps..back in commercialized white breadland of America..
Smoked sheeps head is also an icelandic delicacy. Hannes and Sofia used to have one sent from Iceland for their all night parties in Ithaca.
I think what you are calling salty fish in your breakfast picture looks like what we call smoked salmon or lox also very expensive in the US.
Are you sure you aren’t talking about the showerhead being movable up and down a “vertical” pole. Easy to get a converversion kit to make any shower into one.
(note from andrew: THANKS MOM, I CHANGED MY TYPO TO VERTIAL, YOU ARE RIGHT… )
#1 for me was the coverage of Winter sports on TV and in the news. Everyday I was there I saw skaters either on TV or in the newspaper. Unlike the US where on the way home on the plane from Chicago to SLC they showed a Winter Olympic preview and nobody seemed interested at all! Nothing else to do on the plane and still nobody watched! Someday I will return and stay much longer…Mark C.
Did it look like any of the figures on the obelisk resembled a skater in the starting position or the traditional skating position?
no, I think in that large pile of naked bodies, someone wearing skates would be a rather bad idea…
oddly enough, the statues, although all nude, really were not about sex, and did not feel that sexual, it was more about emotion & some essential intensity…
It’s time to bring the excitement of speedskating to the Pacific Northwest.
I can’t believe you don’t have adjustable shower heads in the US! It is the default shower gadget here in Europe and I believed it was so everywhere. But of course now that I think of it, we didn’t have them in Canada either. How soon one forgets such details.
Proud to say that I can cross off a walk-through-Viegeland park from my things to do before I die list. I completely agree - the sculptures are stunning. It’s a remarkable place - very atmospheric for a park.
Incidentally I must correct Wendy upthread - Icelanders do not eat smoked sheeps’ heads, but singed sheeps’ heads. Not the same thing at all. And we take the brain out first.
Andrew, if you can get me a fresh sheeps head (any contacts still at the vet school?) I will ask my bro-in-law to smoke it for you. It may not be as exquisite as his smoked trout, which is to die for, but it’ll be different!
I implore all of you to never eat sheep brains. It is believed that mad cow disease originally came from a similar disease in sheep, known as scrapie. Please don’t eat brains of anything, just to be safe, and that also goes for the spinal cord.
I hope to never know this first hand, but according to a human pathologist friend of mine, human brains are the consistency of flan. The dog brains I worked with were for the most part preserved in formaldehyde, so they were rubbery. But I do love my flan.
Making progress is serious business for you right now. Your focus is so honed that you don’t even notice the usual distractions waltzing by you. Let your loved ones know what you’re up to.
I don’t usually give much creedence to horoscopes, but this statement found today on knology.net for Capricorn’s, which Andrew and I are, definitely is about as concise of a “charge” one could give to either one of us.
I happened upon knology.net, as it supports the email server used by the sales contact for twincambearings (ILQ-9 BCB’s). I was looking for some inline frames and bearings while inlining was on my mind. I’m racing on Saturday, in Burnaby, BC, to revisit the first race on ice in Short Track.
Without this post becoming too much like a blog, I’ll try to keep this short.
In Burnaby, on Saturday, Jan 17, 2003, I competed in four distances, in which the first three I placed 3rd, 2nd, and 4th respectively. Five skaters to a heat, the top two advance to a faster group, the bottom two drop to a slower group, and the middle one stays put. Needless to say, after three heats, I was back where I started. By the time I got to the races that day, I had already been up since Thursday afternoon; I tried to nap between heats.
Frustration drove my desire to win so much, that in the 1000m, the last heat, I was 1/4 lap in the lead at lap one, and stretched my lead to a 1/2 lap at the end. I wanted to win so bad, I mentally was ready to risk DQ and get to the first turn, first. I got on the heels so good, it felt like powder skiing in the PNW.
So back to the horoscope. It seems to fit Andrew well in his pursuit in accomplishing his fill of PR’s. For me, it fits like a “T” to my business venture for an indoor speedskating facility. The focus is narrow, but purposeful.
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Awesome! Your blog ROCKS! Man… If I was you I would be proud, so you should! Laterz dude….