Merry Christmas Blues

Vegas Baby

A Beginner's Guide To Norway

Utepils And Flying Cats

I'm Not Hungry

MERRY CHRISTMAS BLUES

Moving countries is a tricky business - some do it for love, others for work, and there are still others who, like myself, are essentially restless souls with feet that itch so insistently that even a warehouse full of itchy foot powder can't soothe it.

It's odd then, that when it came to packing up, saying goodbye and pretending I was leaving grown-up life behind for the fourth or fifth time, rather than swanning off somewhere indescribably exotic, I headed for Norway.

Oslo to be precise. At first glance, it doesn't really make your soul sing, does it? The name hardly trips off your tongue and it doesn't deliver the same delicious frisson that you get from casually dropping Montevideo or Brazzaville into conversation. You tell people you're moving to Oslo and most want to introduce you to a really pleasant psychiatrist they once met at a party.

Oslo doesn't even have any obvious dangers. It's not as if I have to spend a few days every fortnight pleading with the local racketeer for a share of my salary, as one former colleague did during a stint in St Petersburg. I don't have to negotiate smouldering ruins and sniper fire to get to work, nor are Norwegian motorists as maniacal as say, your average Neapolitan taxi driver.

No, Norway's stolid, safe, social democratic, respectable. Norwegians are well-fed, well-clothed and well-off. Norway's normal.

But that's where you're wrong. Norway is the antithesis of normal. Norway takes surreal, puts it through a stainless steel Scandinavian-designed blender and redefines the word. The country pretends to be a sober, law-abiding, sane, peace-loving Scandinavian haven with as many Ikea outlets as Sweden, but it's not. It's simply that for years Norway's PR has been so good that we all believed it. (Actually, it might have more Ikea outlets than Sweden, so on that score perhaps the PR didn't lie.)

Thor Heyerdahl and his reed raft alone should prove that in Norway not everything is as it seems, but for the sceptics, let's examine things a little more closely.


The Kontiki
First of all, Norwegians play soccer in summer. That's not the behaviour of a sane sports-loving country, is it? You could argue that perhaps -20C is a little too nippy for competitive sport, but what better way to keep hypothermia at bay than 90 minutes of hard and fast football? So teams in Tromso might have trouble training once the sun sets for 6 months, but if they were serious about their sport they could always try switching the stadium lights on. Besides, a little bit of black ice on the pitch would really make sliding tackles exciting.

Norway's cuisine also offers some pretty hefty clues to the country's inescapable madness. Icelanders may bury dead sharks for the better part of 3 months before eating them, but even they wouldn't consider lutefisk the stuff of an ideal Christmas dinner.

Lutefisk is cod which has been salted and soaked in lye - the stuff soap's made from - before being washed out a bit, dried off and then boiled for hours until it's a grey, fishy mush. It's delicious. Allegedly. And it's served for Christmas dinner across the country. The other traditional Christmas meal is pinnekjøtt - that's a big hunk of mutton which is ceremonially plonked on a bundle of sticks before being boiled for 12 hours. If the lye doesn't get you, the sticks will.

There's also raskefisk, which is similar to lutefisk, but far more dangerous. The thing about raskefisk is that it's more of an experiment than a meal. The whole idea is to serve salmon when it's just minutes away from becoming salmonella. Norwegians even throw raskefisk parties. Scary, isn't it?

The language hints at oddness as well. A kettle isn't a kettle in Norwegian, it's a water cooker. A vacuum cleaner's a dust sucker. If you're unwell, you get sent to the sick house. The fire brigade's actually a firing squad. A council is a "ting" - that's thing in English. And the country's parliament? That's called the Storting - the "Big Thing".

Even people's names have a hint of the surreal. I once met a woman called Wenche, pronounced Van-ker, but kept a straight face. But try stifling a laugh when the introduction goes like this: "Hi, I'm Øivynd [pronounced "even"] and [indicating bloke next to him] he's Odd." Indeed.

Norwegians also take the idea of public ownership to an extreme. All the usual utilities and so on are state-run, but you find yourself scratching your head when you discover that Narvesen, the news agency chain, is owned by the state. There's also Tine, the state-run dairy products and packaging monopoly. And the supermarket chains buy all their stock from the government. This explains a lot, actually. Judging by the range of products on their shelves, your average Norwegian supermarket wouldn't look out of place in mid-1970s Novosibirsk. I'll get to the Vinmonopolet soon enough.


Vinmonopolet
But it's when you go out that you discover the true breadth of Norwegian insanity. The core of Norwegian madness lies in alcohol. The price of alcohol alone is insane - a pint of pils comes to roughly A$9 in an average bar, while having a dram or two of whisky is a one-way ticket to bankruptcy. There are ways around it though. All it takes is cunning, strategic thinking and a large dose of insanity.

A night out starts with deciding who's throwing the forspiel. Forspiel - and its later, darker, infinitely more frightening cousin, the nachspiel - are probably the only way to achieve proper Norwegian levels of drunkeness without having to take out a second mortgage. (And yes, the literal translations are foreplay and afterplay. The object of desire? Alcohol.)

Once you've chosen the venue for a forspiel - usually the home of a friend who has just returned from a holiday abroad and has stacks of untouched duty-free booze and fags - you haunt the supermarkets, looking for discounted beer, however oxymoronic that may seem in Scandinavia. Once you've found beer at a reasonable price, you have to act quickly and decisively. Be ruthless, there are at least 150,000 other souls stalking Oslo's Soviet-style supermarkets, hunting for an almost affordable six-pack or 12. If you find cheap beer, it's your duty to buy it all immediately. As I said, it's madness. Financial madness.


Inside the Vinmonopolet
Once you've secured a beer supply, you need wine and spirits. The cheat's way out is to go to Vinmonopolet - as the name suggests, it's the state-run wine monopoly and therefore the only place you can buy anything alcoholic that's not beer - but not only is this too easy, it's too expensive. There are some other drawbacks as well - you have to queue - for ages - to be served for a start. And you can't look at the bottles before you buy. You take a wee ticket from a machine, pick up your copy of Vinmonopolet's price list, wait your turn and make your choice. If you're really lucky, they'll actually have what you want in stock. It's catalogue shopping, but you do it on the premises rather than from home.


Take a ticket

Check the price

To save the irritation and time-wasting of queueing at Vinmonopolet, you either do a run to Sweden - alcohol's roughly 33% cheaper there - or you build up a network of booze mules.

Norwegians have a reputation for being open and friendly and warm-hearted - they invite foreigners to Norway on the scantest acquaintance. While they are friendly, they're also doing it for the duty free. After a few months in the country, you're doing it yourself - you offer house space to every person you've ever met who lives outside Norway. They get a timeshare on the sofa in return for all the booze and cigarettes they can carry in without alerting customs. It's a fair swap - you bring in cut-price luxuries, I'll take you to a raskefisk party.

Now, once the alcohol's in place, all you have to do is drink it. Forspielen normally start as early as possible - you've managed to get your hands on alcohol, it'd be a crime not to drink it all before you go out. Besides, who can afford beer at club prices?

Once there's not a drop left in the house, you're ready to hit the streets. Literally. Norwegians have an uncanny ability to fall over in a drunken stupor without harming themselves. On a Friday or Saturday night, it's the only way you can tell Norwegians from ring-ins. Still, the few alcohol-free hours you've allowed yourself come in handy - once the band's done, you need to find a nachspiel.

Nachspiel follow a similar pattern to forspiel - you turn up at someone's house and drink everything they've got. Sometimes you even say thank you. Your best choice is to find someone who looks more sober than anyone you know, as the chances are they haven't got through their forspiel supply. Or you cultivate friends who are chemists. Chemists have access to industrial quantities of pure alcohol and spend their working hours diluting and distilling, working towards the holy grail of bootleggers - a perfectly drinkable moonshine. Incidentally, I have a sneaking suspicion that most Norwegians spend winter locked in their kitchens with a sack of potatoes and their great great grandfather's still, brewing away and rubbing their cold, chapped hands in anticipation of the nights of alcoholic oblivion that lie ahead.

Back to the matter at hand though. Oddly, because you're at a nachspiel with Norwegians you'll find that - miracle of miracles! - by about 5am you can speak Norwegian fluently. The Norwegians may not be able to understand you, but that's just because they're drunk. Remember, however, if you go to a nachspiel, you're under a constitutional obligation to come home after sunrise. At the earliest 10am. Anything before that is simply just not Norwegian.

And then? Wallow in the misery of a proper Norwegian-style Sunday.

A word of warning, however - don't even think of stopping in at the corner shop to pick up some paracetamol as you stumble home. You won't get any and the shopkeeper will immediately clock you as a foreigner. If you want to silence the tom-toms in your head, you'll have had to have gone to the state-run Apotek on Friday. Apoteken are the the only places you can buy anything vaguely medicinal. But don't worry, you get to take a wee ticket from the machine and queue for the legal maximum of 10 paracetamol. It makes it seem worthwhile. Incidentally, the term vaguely medicinal includes what are, in Britain and Australia, over-the-counter remedies for colds and hayfever, vitamin supplements and - this I find especially strange - veterinary medicines. Yep, Norwegian vets aren't allowed to dispense anything. In their surgeries, they can knock horses out with megadoses of ketamine, dose up your dog or cat with animal valium, carrying out intricate orthopaedic surgery on an anaeasthetised Fido, neuter your kitten or pup, but if your pet needs a course of antibiotics or ear drops, you'll have to go to the Apotek with a script.

Told you they were mad.

© 2002 Anthea Pitt

::Index::

• 7am - breakfast.
• 10am - a wee snack to keep you ticking over until lunch.
• 11.30am - lunch.
• 2-2.30pm - smoko. Eat just enough to keep your blood sugar levels bubbling along nicely.
• 4pm - meet friends for coffee and cake after work.
• 5pm - pre-dinner nibbly bits.
• 6pm - dinner.
• 8-9pm - mid-evening munchies
.
• 12pm - midnight snack.