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Fast and high times in Norway
- del.ico.us
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- Last edited: 22:14, Aug 07 2007
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Norway is friendly, safe, beautiful and expensive. Did I mention it is very expensive? Oh my god it is expensive!
I haven’t posted in a while for two reasons, firstly I was in the rainy Motherland which I assume made the news back in the colonies. There wasn’t much to report as I spent the whole time relaxing from the two months of travel with family and friends.
Secondly Lauren and I went to Norway, and right now I am paying NZD$15 an hour to write this on the internet! The first line in the Norway chapter of the Scandanavian lonely planet says “Norway is the most expensive country on the planet”. ‘Yeah sure, whatever that means’, I thought to myself when planning on coming here. In New Zealand I had heard rumour of the fifty dollar hamburger but I didn’t think it was possible. Nobody would surely organise a country around having super expensive junk food. Needless to say, I now know what it feels like to be a third world citizen visiting a first world country.
The first day we were here, we stopped in a city called Bergen, which is Norway’s second largest city. Along the fishmarket are a group of UNESCO world heritage Bryggen buildings which contain pubs and cafes. For 72 krone Lauren and I got a latte and a Scheweppes tonic water, which is about NZD $18 for two non-alcoholic drinks! A cheap meal in a restaurant is 100 krone, around NZD $25 but really, you are lucky if you find that. 150 - 200 krone is the standard price and a large pizza will cost 250 krone or NZD $60! London isn’t even this expensive! There is a continuous economic pressure about going to a restaurant to buy even a cheap meal, so we have been cooking more in Norway than we did in New Zealand.
As always from my observations, conversations and wild speculations (not to mention gesticulations), the reason for these crazy prices is twofold: the state pays people very well and takes care of many amenities, but this makes inflation rampant; the NOK has a lot of surperfluous zeros in it. The reason the state can pay for a lot of things is because of oil. Norway has lots of oil and pumps half of it’s profits back into the country and the other half into a superannuation fund. Norway is now the largest single investing fund in the world, and they have created a list of companies which they black-list due to bad behaviour. Ironically they may extend this list to include climate change inducing companies.
Which leads me into the last little insights: Norwegian people. We have yet to sit down and interrogate someone on the ins and outs of being a Norwegian, but have noticed some overarching trends. They speak English better than New Zealanders. Being only 4 million people, their population isn’t large enough to sustain a homegrown television industry, so all of their shows are imported from either the U.S. or Sweden. Unlike the French or Germans who dub their own languages over everything, the Norwegians subtitle it, so tourists have the pleasur of watching crap Swedish reality tv with Norwegian subtitles. Just because it is foreign and exotic, doesn’t make it cultured. This has the side effect of making the entire younger generation at least bilingual, if not more.
Norwegians are also very, very quiet. Maybe we have arrived when the entire country has gone on holiday or into hibernation. The cities are nearly empty, when you meet people they appear a little shy at first, and nobody speaks loudly on trains or in public places. It is nice and non-threatening, but sometimes if feels like Vanilla Sky when Tom Cruise walks into an empty Times Square, disconcerting.
They love the outdoors to bits. Anyone can camp anywhere with a tent for free, they have an extensive hut system, although I would call them mountain lodges as they still cost a fortune, have food which you can buy at them although it works on honesty - a theme I will come back to - and some even have cafes which sell the obligatory hotdogs. I can only assume that it is so expensive to stay in hotels here that even Norwegians take to tents.
The last and possibly bizzarest Norwegian trait is their honesty. This really blows my mind, and on the third day we abused it only to realise that we could get away with a lot more if we tried. The systems for paying and transport are so set up that it is very easy to ’slip through the cracks’ and not pay, if one was so inclined. Where say in London I might have hopped on the back of an occasional bendy bus (two buses attached with a bendy middle) while forgetting to swipe my Oyster card, here we often have to chase down conductors on ferries or buses to give them our money. In a country where everything is so expensive, it is quite a feat of honesty to want to part with $20 when you know that no one will notice or care. On the manner of abuse, we did a tour called ‘Noway in a Nutshell’ which involved a train from Bergen to Voss, a bus from Voss to Gudvangen, a ferry from Gudvangen to Flam, a scenic train from Flam to Myrdal and another train from Myrdal to Oslo. The tour isn’t official, rather it combines a lot of existing transports that can be prepaid, but often aren’t. Due to so many other people doing the tour, when we got on and off the bus no one asked us for our tickets so we didn’t ask to show them. We haven’t done that again - honest.
