The clichés are true

There are two things everybody tells you when you move to Norway: 'beautiful country...expensive', normally using precisely only those three words.  I am not going to say anything to the second part now beyond that I actually think some things aren't too expensive (cinema tickets, for instance, are virtually the same as in the UK), but that yes you can pay 140 kroner for soup here, which is very roughly £15 - although I think we've only seen that once in a museum.

On the first part though, everything is true in the most glorious way. The old, not particularly hilarious, joke about Bergen goes that a tourist arrives in Bergen and it does nothing but rain, so she asks a boy if it always rains here. 'I don't know', he replies "I'm only 13".  However, on the 105 days of the year where it doesn't rain (on average it rains 260 days a year), this is what you can find literally 7 minutes above the city:

And then you come to the fjords. Even on an overcast, coolish day they just don't disappoint: basically some of the most stunning nature I've ever seen, which my small camera does not do justice to.

And the valleys in the mountains are equally lovely (so recruit me now Norwegian Tourist Board, I'm a fan):

(So recruit me now Norwegian Tourist Board, I'm a fan.)

Afterwards

I don't have anything profound to say about the terrible events of last Friday. All I wanted to say is that I think Norway's response is one of the most admirable and beautiful I've ever seen. Oslo is a city of flowers.

How to speak Norwegian eller Hvordan snakker Norsk

Sadly, I can't define in one blog exactly how to speak Norwegian: 9 weeks in and we are still only able to speak in the present tense.

But these are some things I have gleaned from our first set of lessons with the marvellous Carl Henrik:

• English people are incapable of rolling their r's to the degree that Norwegian requires - they appear at the end of all verbs in the present tense, and can determine the meaning of many words as well, so all in all are fairly crucial. Carl Henrik spends half his time in class trying to get Ben and I to roll them sufficiently. So I spend my time walking around Oslo practising 'rrrrrrrr' and 'purrrrrr', sounding like a slightly demented lawnmower/motorbike/cat that is about to explode.  The longer I do it the more high-pitched I get so in the end my voice just kinda gives way.  

• It would be easier to speak this language if I was German. Their accent naturally fits - no fair! The two languages are not a million miles apart; if they get stuck, as one of them told us, they 'just think of what it would be in German and usually it's pretty right'. Again, no fair!  Fun in a class of five, where two of us are Brits and the rest German. Carl Henrik spends twice the time trying to get us to pronounce words absolutely perfectly as he does on the Germans.

• They have the masculine/feminine/neuter (en/ei/et) division of words, but no real rules to work out which words fall into each category. Nothing for it but to memorise them all on a case-by-case basis:
• et brev 
• et glass
• et eple 
• en hund 
• en dress (which is a suit!)
• en kjole (which is a dress)
• ei jakke (but this can also be en jakke - you can choose, which is very democratic)
• ei dame
• ei stekepanne    etc

• The definite article moves to the end of the noun in sentences when you are talking about a specific item:
• et bord = a table
• bordet = the table
• 'Glassene står på bordet'  = The glasses stand/are standing (one present-tense verb can express either sense) on the table 
• Jeg har et bord = I have a table

• They sometimes like to move the possessive pronouns (if I am remembering my grammar terms correctly - I may mean reflexive pronouns) to the end of the sentence, which can take some thinking about:
• 'Mellom klokken ti og klokka fire, skriver jeg på boken min' literally means 'Between 10 and 4 o'clock, write I on book my'

• You have to remember the 3 extra characters they have at the end of their alphabet, meaning their alphabet runs from A to Å:

1. Æ = short 'a' sound like in 'cat'
2. Å = sounds like 'aw' or the 'ou' at the beginning of ouch
3. Ø = sounds like ur

•  They tell the time in a way that is possibly harder than it needs to be: 

1. If you want to say 1.30 you have to think ahead to the next hour and say that it is halfway to 2: Klokken er halv to.
2. If you want to say any time between 16 and 29 minutes past the hour you have to work out how many minutes that is before you get halfway to the next hour.  So 5.18 = Den er tolv på halv seks  (12 minutes before halfway to 6)
3. To say that it is anywhere between 31 and 44 minutes past the hour, you work out how many minutes that is after half way to the next hour. 7.37 = Klokken er sju over halv åtte 
4. Just after you've grasped this, you then learn that they also use the 24-hour digital system which frankly seems simpler. They just say the relevant numbers, so 20.55 is 'klokken tjuer femtifem'

• One word can have two meanings, and it is the pitch/tone that determines which meaning applies. This is incredibly hard to do, maybe harder to try to explain and frankly I either usually can't hear the difference or just can't get it right! Again, this is something poor Carl Hendrik battles away with in lessons:
• Example: hander = hands OR happens
• Single tone hander = hands
• Double tone hander = happens  (you have to kind of start at one pitch, go up slightly, and then lower your pitch to one that is lower than where you started)

But for all this, I like learning Norwegian. There are words that are the same as the English (student), words where you can obviously see the connection (bok for book), and words that seem like a slightly more archaic version of English/other dialects (barn = child, so you can see the connection to the Scottish bairn). Some sentences are constructed in exactly the same way as well so that helps. I also like that our English-Norsk dictionary tells us how to say drive-by-shooting in Norsk; not sure how much that will come in handy, but it is skudd fra forbipasserende bil. 

Vi prøver lærer og håper vi har suksess!  Or should that be Vi prøver lærer og håper suksess vi har? Or maybe Vi prøver lærer og håper har vi suksess? Time for another class...

Vigelands Park

Vigelandsparken is one of the biggest parks in Oslo. It was designed by Gustav Vigeland, one of Norway's most famous sculptors. (Nope I'd never heard of him before I moved here either.)  I suppose in some ways he is the equivalent of Gaudi in Barcelona. The park is filled with his sculptures:

The most famous sculpture is The Angry Child (Sinnataggen), which the locals have rubbed smooth over the years:

In the centre, a fountain falls from an enormous bowl that represents the burden of life:

A twenty-metre-high obelisk that depicts the cycle of life is the main focal point:

The figures on it fight, play, teach, love, eat, sleep and climb over each other as they try to reach the top. The locals are also very fond of climbing onto the sculptures that surround the obelisk.

The park is extremely popular in the summer. People barbecue, drink, and play traditional games like Kubb (two teams aim to knock over the other team's wooden blocks by throwing wooden sticks at them, and then knocking over the King in the middle):

And given that we currently have lovely long days (or crazy long days if you're trying to sleep) where darkness doesn't really ever arrive, and the sun starts to rise at 3am, the park is used ALL the time. This is what people do at 11.30pm:

1. Walk their dogs (you might need to look closely)

2. Jog

I've also seen people playing frisbee.

Anyway it's a really pretty, tranquil space:

Total Blackout

No, this isn't a blog about a cross-Oslo power cut, but my so-far favourite/weirdest Norwegian TV show.

The setting: a disused warehouse (which actually looks a bit like the one they blew up at the start of Mission Impossible III but isn't). Six wet-suited contestants (boy can you see too much of these people's anatomy) compete for the princely sum of 2,500 kr., or in the grand final 5,000 kr.  Some of you may have already guessed this show's m.o. but just in case: all the rounds take place in complete darkness. The contestants can't see anything; we can only see them because the show is filmed on night-vision cameras.

There are 5 rounds, including some of the following:

1. In pairs, 3 teams in turn have to identify by touch alone 5 objects in large fish tanks. These objects include your usual fish-tank objects: a teddy bear, two child's baby dolls, a woolly hat, a (thankfully live) human head, a snake, rats, and cockroaches.

This round usually involves a lot of screaming, swearing and occasional blood: the rats have been known to bite.

2. Each contestant has to identify the age or weight of 4 people again using only touch. The twist to this round is that the people being felt (or, let's be honest, groped) are wearing only their underwear. They range from the fit and firm twenty-year-olds - the contestants tend to spend a lot of time feeling these ones - to fat men and women in their fifties and sixties.  Much slapping of arms, bums and cupping of breasts ensues.

This tends to feature a lot of shrieking, especially when the contestants get to the older people - the stomachs and body hair tend to freak people out.

3. Each person has to stand on a mat like the kind we used to have in PE. They have to jump at the exact moment before a metre-long ruler on a rotator swings 180 degrees. If they don't jump at the right moment they get slapped in the shins.  This isn't the most thrilling round, but obviously they can't see the blade so they usually do get hit first time round. The worst I saw at doing this was a guy who failed to get this right at least three times. Blood was drawn.

Much swearing usually features again here - fi faen! (Google translate it.)

4. Three sumo wrestlers await the contestants, standing on a bouncy castle-style mat. The mat has been oiled. Each contestant has to retrieve an item attached to one of the wrestler's belts - last time it was a rubber duck like the kind kids play with in the bath - having obviously slipped/wrestled their way past the other two.

5. This round is a little harder to describe. A small obstacle course has been set up, with two ramps.  All of it is soaked in water/oil so is again very slippery. In pairs, the contestants have to climb over the first ramp and then slide their way down to a small tank which is full of live eels. They usually end up sliding into the tank with the eels, triggering (you guessed it) a lot of screaming.

One of them has to pick up the eels and pass them to their partner, who has to climb up the second ramp  and deposit them in another tank.

6. The contestants take it in turns to crawl through a cruciform set of plastic tunnels. The tunnels have been filled with - here's another theme - rats. But they also have items of food in them, each under a cake dome: lemons, cheese, cupcakes. Each contestant has to find their way through the tunnels and retrieve the two cheeses.

The tunnels are built at a height where you can only kneel in them and are no wider than the average person - claustraphobics need not apply.

Bear in mind that all of the above takes place in complete darkness.  The rounds petrify people way more than you think they should sat on your sofa.

One person is eliminated after each round. Elimination involves being told 'Tre, to, en, hopp' and then they all jump onto a piece of heavy-duty paper/cardboard which has the symbol for radioactive material printed on it. The floor gives way under whoever is being eliminated and they disappear down a garbage chute.

The only thing that is disappointing about this show is the normal final round which is ridiculously tame and lame compared to what has come before. The two finalists are put into a room filled with fake cobwebs and plastic spiders. The winner is whoever can collect the most spiders in their plastic bucket. There is a live tarantula in the middle of the room, but it is in a tank and there is positively no threat from it. Yet this is presented as the most terrifying round of all.  Give me REAL venomous spiders and then I'll feel the danger.

Anyway, this show plays on one of Norway's biggest channels - TV Norge (I guess the equivalent of ITV) at half eight on Wednesdays, although sadly the season has just finished.  I sadly can't provide photographs but you can find videos and full episodes at the links below:

http://www.google.no/search?q=total+blackout&hl=no&prmd=ivns&source=univ&tbm=vid&tbo=u&sa=X&ei=8ofwTa6BMcfdsgb50-yHBw&ved=0CFQQqwQ&biw=1803&bih=898

and on YouTube.  Enjoy!

Oslo Fjord

Occasionally, I'm going to try to give an idea of what Oslo and the surrounding area is like. A few weeks ago we took a 2-hour cruise around Oslo Fjord. It isn't regarded as the most spectacular of the Norwegian fjords, as it has no towering cliffs and waterfalls etc, but I think it is pretty and charming. The fjord is 100km from top to bottom and filled with islets, some of which are privately owned.We obviously saw just some of it:

The islets have homes and holiday homes on them, although most of them have bans on new buildings. There is huge demand for these houses as they don't come up for sale very often and when they do prove very expensive. The houses have to be painted red, green or yellow according to local rules, and are all wooden. I didn't get the best pictures of them, but these hopefully give some idea:

We saw locals fishing and many, many boats.  The fjord is an active, working space not just a picturesque vista.

I found the whole trip beautifully tranquil.