Category: Little Voices archive entries

Reading the paper this morning I found a story which exemplifies something of Norwegian rural life. Norway’s an odd country geaographically. Long and narrow, with fjords and mountains galore dividing one valley from the other. Not to mention large areas being pretty much uninhabitable. This has meant that a lot of communities ‘on the edge’ have, historically, but also currently, been pretty isolated. Hence the relevance of the story. Apparently, in the little village of Hellemobotn in Nordland, the 150 inhabitants have thus far had one phone booth between them – as in: That’s the only phone in the village. When it rings, whoever’s nearest has to go pick it up and locate whoever the call is for. As one of the inhabitants says, luckily the children enjoy doing the running to pick it up…

But now the village will be put on the mobile network map, a new transmitter or two going up, I assume, so all 150 will now be able to get a mobile phone.

I’ve finally managed to get some work done on the css for nmwl.no. Almost there now, just a few more tweaks and I’ll be ready to start sending the links to a select few – and possibly post it here ;)

But now I’m going to do the dishes. I need to move about a bit to loosen my back up again. It’s muttering.

Good thing about Life in Norway: Holidays in Sweden…

We went to Sweden a lot for holidays when I was a kid. Almost every year, in fact. A few years we went to Denmark instead. That was good too.

I know this doesn’t sound like it’s a benefit of being Norwegian, but believe me there is a logic here. Sweden – or at least Värmland – is a good place to spend your childhood summers. It’s familiar because it’s a lot like Norway, on the other hand it’s sufficiently different to be exciting – and it is, after all, a different country. They speak a language you can understand – and they understand you – very reassuring when you’re off exploring in case you get lost and need to ask for help. In addition, most Norwegians have been reared on Swedish tv-series based on Astrid Lindgren’s books, and they all have an atmosphere of summer, holidays and fun. This, combined with all those long summer days of doing nothing, makes it very weird nowadays when I have to deal with Swedes at work, as I unconsciously associate Swedish with holidays and dealing with it in a work-context is all wrong.

I collect a lot of stuff. Books, of course, but also… uhm, no, better not start. Let’s just say I have a hard time getting rid of things. However, some collections are odder than others.

We all get spam (if you don’t, well, I was going to say ‘Thank your lucky stars’, but I actually find spam quite amusing at times, so maybe not). Most of us are frequently offered to have our penises enlarged (100% guaranteed – not very difficult is it? 100% of 0 is 0 as far as I remember from maths), our mortgages remortgaged, our visa gold card approved and the chance of a lifetime to help move money from some African country (normally Nigeria) via our bank account, for which we will receive ridiculous sums of money as ‘commission’. Have you ever wondered what would happen if you answered one of the latter type? Well, someone did (wonder and answer, that is) – it’s a classic.

Whenever I’m abroad I tend to marvel at how difficult it is to get hold of proper, wholemeal bread. Most places you get some sort of ‘brown bread’ as an alternative to the fluff that is white bread, but more often than not the thing that makes the bread brown is just colouring rather than any fibre content. Well, that’s one thing we know how to do in Norway, bake bread with enough fibre (wholemeal flour, whole wheat corns, seeds of various kinds – especially sunflower seeds – that’s what I normally add when baking bread).

The sun is up. It looks like the rain of the last few days is gone, too. That will make the people who are not spending most of today in front of the computer blogging (and the rest of today sleeping) happy.

I’ve mentioned it before, of course, but the Norwegian ‘independence day’, 17th of may, is celebrated in a somewhat original manner, with a fokus on the children.

I call this picture Two Towers (the one at the back is Glasgow University):

It’s suddenly daylight outside again. Which fits in nicely, as the light summer nights was one of the things I had intended to tell you about. To the very far north, past the polar circle, of course, we have the midnight sun, which is all very spectacular. However, the consequences of this is that further south the ‘night’ in the middle of summer is basically a sunset that turns into a sunrise, the sun just dipping below the horizon and no chance for darkness to set in. It’s later in the summer now, so it goes almost dark for a few hours, but you hardly notice it normally – I don’t make a habit of being awake at this time of the morning, either.