Norway Day 4

Ah, Mondays. Even here in Tromso, they turn out to be rough. Jonmikel’s illness is roaring ahead full speed, so we spend most of the day indoors at our hotel. He naps on and off, as well as does his real-world work, and we generally take it easy. We DO, however, manage to get out to the tourist office to book a dogsled ride for tomorrow, have a quick drink at Olhallon, which was vastly less crowded than it had been on Saturday, and to pick up some bread and cheese at a local supermarket for dinner. However, today was a day of reflection for me, about Norway.

First, I feel I should say something about Tromso. It is a beautiful town (I say town, but it has a population of about 60,000, though it feels much smaller). The actual cathedral, as opposed to the Arctic Cathedral, which is just a church, is a small wooden church that is the seat of the world’s northernmost Bishop (which I count as a cathedral, though I’m not for certain). There is also a Lutheran Cathedral, which is also Norway’s only wooden cathedral. Everything is wooden here, and it adds a certain Nordic quality to the city. Tromso has the highest concentration of wooden homes in Norway, as the ban on building them didn’t occur until fairly recently. And the homes are all well taken care of. They have freshly painted siding and well cleaning trim. The lights in the windows are soft and welcoming and supplemented by Christmas candles. Each house is distinct while still remaining Nordic, almost farmlike. The colors are varied and bright, from a plain white house, to a barn-red one, to a fire burnt oranges to hues of blue and green. The city has a very New England feel to it with the ocean sites and smells, and with the homes and the pedestrian-friendly streets, it feels almost like walking around Burlington, VT. The same kinds of people seem to live here also, outdoorsy and hardy but also stylish and fun-loving. The people are friendly and happy, and nobody seems to get upset when they find out we don’t speak Norwegian. They are then patient and curious. There’s also a United Colors of Benetton on the main drag, but that’s neither here nor there.

I do, however, find Norwegian to be a confusing language. It’s a strange mixture of German and Italian techno-speak, and it’s hard to distinguish. Half the time when I hear it, my brain is convinced that it’s really English and that whoever is speaking is just mumbling. I can understand many of the words, or at least their concepts, and I’m stuck in funny-accent mode from Scotland, so it seems to make sense in some weird-brain way that Norwegians really speak English, they just slur their words together so as to make it impossible for a Yank like me to understand. Reading it, also, is odd, because when I look at Norwegian sentences, it takes a full 10 seconds for me to realize that I am, in fact, looking at Norwegian and that I should not, in fact, be able to understand it. But for those first seconds, my brain is convinced that it’s just poorly spelled English. I’ve had to actually stop reading things and just look for Os with funny slashes through them in order to decide whether or not it’s English. If its got funny Os, then I’m not supposed to understand it. I just can’t get a handle on Norwegian, especially because I know nothing about its sentence structure or grammatical concepts. With German or Italian or Spanish or Arabic or Chinese, etc, it’s easy to realize that I don’t understand because I know at least a little about those languages and how they work. It’s just…. Odd. If you’ve ever seen the episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine titled “Babel,” yeah, it’s kinda like that. For a few crucial seconds, doesn’t make sense why it doesn’t make sense.

I would also like to mention the state of the weather. There is snow on the ground, but currently is raining and turning to ice. It warms up at night (for some odd climate reason, I’m sure) and is coldest during the day, but the temperature hovers around freezing most of the time, which is much warmer than I was expecting. Back in Montana, it would be about 0 degrees F about now. We heard tell that it’s been so mild this year due to incessant cloud cover, which also means more rain. It doesn’t usually get icy here because the precipitation falls as snow, not rain. Cloud cover means warmer temperature and less opportunity to see the lights.

We did manage to hike back up to our lake to try to see some more lights, but it was just too cloudy. They may have been out there, but City Funk won out.