We’ve both posted on Norway already, so here are some final thoughts on things we haven’t discussed.
Driving
Gas here is over $7 per gallon. That isn’t too surprising when you consider that most things here are expensive. However, it might be a little surprising when you consider that Norway is the 5th largest oil exporting country in the world, and they have a government surplus of over $900 billion from oil taxes. With $7 per gallon gas, it is a good thing our rental car got 55 miles per gallon. It was a VW Up! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the name) with a whopping 1 liter, 3 cylinder engine. I don’t think I have actually had the gas pedal pinned to the floor in a car as much since the Ford Escort I drove in high school.
Just like Scotland there are some dicey roads which are narrow to the point where only 1 car at a time can pass. The difference is that here, if you go off the road, you end up in the water at the bottom of a 200 foot cliff. Luckily, I kept all 4 wheels on the pavement. Driving through the fjords, there are an incredible number of tunnels. According to Wikipedia, there are 900 road tunnels in Norway. From Bergen to Lofthus we probably drove through 25 of them. And they are long. Part of the drive was through a 7.7km tunnel, through a roundabout inside the tunnel, directly on to the Hardanger bridge (the longest suspension bridge in Norway), then directly into another tunnel. See the video we took of that here. On the way back to Oslo, we drove through the Laerdal tunnel, the longest in the world at 15 miles long.
Language
One of the things we heard about Norway was that everyone speaks English. I am a skeptical person, and thought that meant that people in the hospitality industry spoke English, and maybe the young people. Nope. Everyone speaks English, and they speak it really well. Our first day here, we were buying coffee at 7-Eleven (which are everywhere), and said to the cashier, “Sorry, do you speak English?”, in an apologetic tone, feeling awkward that I didn’t have any clue how to speak Norwegian. The reply was “ha ha, yeah man, of course”, with an almost American sounding accent. Most people started conversations in Norwegian, then switched to English as soon as they heard us speak.
I was surprised at the similarities between written Norwegian and English. They are both Germanic languages, so share a common root. Some examples: “price” is “pris”, “bread” is “brod”, “apple” is “eple”, (you can’t get too cocky though because "orange" is “appelsin”). Once you understand a couple differences in pronunciation, you get even further. “K” sounds like “sh” and a “j” like a “y”, so the verb to shop (kyope) doesn’t look similar, but if you say it out loud, you get it. Beyond that, I am lost on the pronunciation and therefore didn’t understand a bit of the spoken language.
Bolle
Growing up, Grammy made Finnish coffee bread called nisu. It has the form of a braided loaf and has a distinctive flavor from cardamom (to this day I wouldn’t know what that spice is if it weren’t for nisu). The Norwegians have something very similar, called bolle, but instead of a loaf, they are individual rolls. While Grammy’s were obviously much better, they taste very similar.
Now on to Munich and Berlin.
Jake