Chapter 4 – Norwegian Stereotypes
Here is the full text of chapter 4 from the book. You can also listen to it in audio format below.
I was still enrolled in the Norwegian course, but it wasn’t very interesting because it didn’t give me any of those strategies to become fluent fast or differentiate dialects. All we were doing was repeat words and grammar rules. In other words, I was bored.
I was reading a comic book called Pondus that Torbjørn had recommended. Every time I came with questions about new words from Pondus, the teacher wouldn’t answer them as they were not from the textbook. What was more interesting was that the others in the course had lived in Norway for longer than I had and could teach me some things about Norwegians. There was a clear contrast between what the teacher was telling us about Norwegian culture and society and what the other students were saying.
The Italian guy, Mario, had cycled from the North Cape to Rome one summer. That is when he met his future wife who lived in what he said was “a Christian village with not a single beer in sight.” He told me that he had cycled in many different countries: Macedonia, Turkey, even Iran. He had never been so badly welcomed on the road as in Norway. When he had knocked on peoples’ doors in Northern Norway, Trøndelag, and on the West Coast to borrow a piece of their garden or land to plant his tent he had mostly been rejected. Apparently not by everyone, as he met his wife on the way! In any case, he could not believe how hard the ice was to break, and how reserved some Norwegians could be.
“You will never make a Norwegian friend,” he warned me. “It’s almost impossible.”
Gerda, the Lithuanian finance analyst, had another view: “No,” she said, “the biggest problem here is that men don’t talk to women. Whatever we do, however we dress, they just never try to seduce us,” she said, looking helpless.
“And they are extremely nationalistic. Have you seen what happens on the 17th of May?” she asked. I had no idea what she was talking about. Ramu, the Indian IT engineer, had an opinion about relationships with Norwegians.
“But Gerda, Norwegian women are unchaste. That’s what we learn in India. That is probably why their men don’t need to make an effort to seduce them.”
I had to admit I had heard that one before, that Scandinavian women are very beautiful, but also very unchaste.
“No, listen. It’s not like that,” said Marte, the Polish kindergarten teacher who was also a biology student at the University of Oslo. “Norway is a fantastic place to be a woman. Women can be bosses here. They have it all, the career and the kids! Norway has one of the best working cultures in the world, because it enables people to have a private life outside of work. And salaries are much better here.”
The teacher was not happy about these stereotypes, especially the one about women. She told us not to forget that Norway has the highest gender equality in the world and is the best place to be a mother.
“And women are not easy, they are free. It is different” added the teacher.
She seemed very proud to be a Norwegian, and any criticism coming from any of us was taken as a personal offence. She asked us to stick to the book, which said that Norway is the richest country in the world, with the best standard of living. She praised the Norwegian system of welfare, redistribution to all, and the equality principle. It gave everyone in society a chance. She added that the Norwegian nation is one, and very uniform, and that the country was exposed to immigrants as late as the 1970s. She added:
“Norway is actually the best country in the world.”
I had heard that before, but where? Ah, I remember! In every single country I have been to. Ever. Australia, Canada, Denmark, the United States of America. It turns out many people believe that their country is the absolute best in the world.
“Yes, but in the case of Norway, it is true,” she answered.
The funny thing is that even Danes have stereotypes about Norwegians. I remember their reactions when I told them I was going to live in Norway.
“We call them fjellaper, mountain monkeys,” said Aske’s friend at a party. I had believed until then that Scandinavians were close-knit and that there was a true solidarity between them.
“Norwegians are very irritating. They are so rich. All that wealth should have been ours,” said another guy at the same party. Probably because Norway was once under Danish rule, many seem to think the Norwegian oil is in fact Danish.
Let’s talk about a few more misconceptions about Norway. For many people living outside of Scandinavia, Norway is hard to pin on a map. It is a place somewhere hidden in the North Pole, covered by ice all the time. I was asked a few times whether penguins and polar bears run free in Oslo.
Many also struggle to figure out what its capital city is, and whether Norway is in fact a country. Or a region, or maybe a city? Some believe it is part of a big country called Scandinavia, which has a very unstable capital city. I have been asked by a hairdresser in France whether everything was fine for me in Stockholm, the capital of Norway. Or Norway, the capital of Sweden. Or Copenhagen, the capital of Scandinavia (Norway isn’t an actual country, is it?).
All in all, those living outside of Norway seem to have a very approximate idea of what is really going on in this country. Those living here on the other hand, have very definite ideas of what Norwegian life is like.
Note to self: there seemed to be many conceptions and potentially misconceptions about Norway and Norwegians. Norwegians are unfriendly and unwelcoming, they are nationalistic, that Norwegian women are easy to sleep with, and that this country is the best to work in, especially as a woman. I also heard many times from Norwegians, sometimes joking, sometimes seriously, that Norway is the best country in the world.
I saw these stereotypes as a personal challenge. I would try to find out whether they were true, and my own conclusions would be based on my observations. Some obviously weren’t – I had not seen any wild penguins in Oslo, so I could check that one off the list. But others seemed to be more plausible.
But first I had to find a place to live.