Living In Norway

I am an Irish person living in Norway. Or if you are reading this 5 weeks after I wrote it, I am an Irish person that lived in Norway for about one year!

I moved to Norway in October 2001. A lot of people ask me "Why Norway?". Well I don't really know. I put my CV on the Monster Recruitment Website and I got a phone call from this head hunting agency in the UK asking me what I knew about Norway. Well to cut a long story short a few months later I was living there.

I moved to a town called Kongsberg which is about 80km outside of Oslo. About 20,000 people live in the town but hell I've never seen such a small town centre. There are only 3 pubs in the entire town. There are a few more restaurants etc. that sell beer. Beer is expensive in the pubs and restaurants. 1 Ringnes beer which is a Norwegian lager that doesn't even taste that nice costs approximately €6.70. Becareful of the Norwegian beer as it gives a desperate hangover the next day. So I drink Kilkenny, not just because it's Irish, just because it is much better. That costs approximately €7.50. So drinking in Norway is expensive.

The Norwegian Drinking Culture

Most people have "forspille"'s which is where a group of friends meet up in one of their houses and bring their own beer which you can by cheaper in the off license. They stay there for anything from 3 to 6 hours and then go out! Yes it's a strange custom. In Kongsberg most people hit town around 12. The pubs stay open until 3 and kick you out at 3.30. But they stop selling hard liquor (whiskey etc.) at 1. After the pubs it is quite common to have a nachspiel. Same as a forspille except everyone is twice as drunk!

The Norwegian Tax System

Yes everybody know that Norwegian tax is very high. I pay 37% of everything I earn on tax. Unlike Ireland or any normal country there isn't much of a tax free allowance. They don't seem to have tax bands. So if I earned more money and was on a higher tax percentage 4x% they would take 4x% of everything I earn. The tax office (Ligningskontor) feel quite entitled to charge you whatever the hell they like.

The tax year ends is the same as the calendar year. But early in the following year they send you out this tax report form (skattekort). Well anyway this is in Norwegian because they are a shower of incompetent suckers in the tax office. And basically they show you in a way that nobody understands how much you earned etc. and how much tax you paid last year. Then you have to sign this and return it to them. If you don't you get fined something like 1% of your yearly salary. Then you get a bill in the post a few days later saying that you didn't pay enough tax last year and you owe them money! Even though you told them how much you would be earning last year. I mean seriously this crowd are ridiculous. They don't know how to do anything simple. I am a single male with no children/dependents, no mortgage loans etc. So I should be the simplest person to go through the tax system but in the Royal Norwegian style it isn't done right if it's not done complicated.

Transport in Norway

I couldn't afford a car in Norway. I guess that says enough. The bus to Oslo which is called the Timexpressen ( hourly express ) is very luxurious runs pretty much on time every hour 24/7. That is good. A return trip to Oslo from Kongsberg costs NOK210 ( €27 ). Yes a very steep price yet again. They drive on the wrong side of the road in Norway i.e. the same as the U.S. and the rest of continental europe. The speed limits here are ridiculous. All distances and speeds are in kilometres but on a normal road you are lucky if you can do 50mph. All cars drive with their lights on all the time. The most ridiculous rule I ever came accross in my entire life is the rule which applies to driving on smaller roads and in towns. You have to give way to traffic coming from your right. You are driving on the road, on the right side, and if there is a slip road from the right a car coming up there has the right of way. So you have to constantly stop to look for traffic at every slip road. I mean come on! Normally when you are on a road you have right of way until you are intersecting with or joining a bigger road!

The cars over here are quite varied. There are a lot of old cars on the road. Some 20 - 30 years old. It's blatently obvious that Norway isn't in the E.U. However a decent car costs a tremendous amount of money. Second hand cars aren't cheap either. In the garages there isn't much room for bargaining. As Lonely Planet guide to Norway put it "In Norway bargaining is as rare as bargains themselves." There are quite a few "Americars" driving around. It's quite popular to be a "ronera" - i.e. a looser that drives around town all day with the windows down and music blaring out the windows and revving the engine and basically just annoying everyone and thinking it's cool. Well a lot of the pathetic individuals that do this drive around in Chevy's etc. 60's american cars.

Norwegian People

Well if I had to stereotype the nation which I don't like doing normally it would be pretty easy. Boring is the first word that springs to mind. A man once said to me "In the winter Norwegians sit indoors and talk about the weather. In the summer time they sit on their veranda and talk about the weather!" Well even though I laughed I just had to agree. But it's not totally true. It's very difficult to stereotype the different age groups of a nation of 4.5 million people.

The people of my agegroup (early 20's) don't go out during the week much at all. They like to sit at home and do whatever the hell they do. At the weekend Saturday night is the big one. Well really the only one if I wanted to be blunt. On Saturday night between the forspiels and nachspiels and the time in the pub everybody goes crazy and gets ridiculously drunk. Worse than I ever saw. Quite a few of them are stubborn and rude bastards when they are out. They keep banging into you or won't get out of your way when you try to pass etc. There is no time for "Excuse me" or "sorry" if you bang into a Norwegian.

Generally speaking for Kongsbergers anyway the vast majority of them aren't very friendly. They seem to form groups and hang out with each other and aren't very interested in meeting too many new people. When I first came here I went out every Friday and Saturday night to the same pub. It took me 6 months before I really became friends with anybody. During that time I found that the people that had lived abroad in the UK, US or Oz for a year or so were much more friendly because they knew what life was like outside this country. But I'm not saying I was never talking to anybody during those few months. Most nights you would end up talking to some down and out or some chick but next the next week they wouldn't be out and the next time they see you they would ignore you. Yeah they behaved strange. But that's not true for all of them. I socialised a bit with the people I work with but that's generally something I try to avoid doing because after a few beers the conversation usually ends up to be bitching about something or somebody at work and that's not good food for having a good time. So I travelled to Oslo a good few times to visit an Irish pub there where at least the people are friendly and they are from home and know exactly how you feel because they are going through the same shit as you. I liked hanging out with Irish and English people because our cultures are way more similar than the Norwegian and Irish cultures.

But anyways then after a good few months here I started to get to know some really cool people. Then things started getting better in Norway. However it's one month until I leave now. I had decided to quit and get the hell out of Norway before I really became good friends with them (because you have to give 3 yes 3 months notice in a Norwegian job!) But when you get to know some good people - which takes time anywhere but a lot longer in Norway - it makes this country a heck of a lot better.

Languages in Norway

There are two Norwegian languages. Bøkmal amd Nynorsk. About 80% of the people speak Bøkmal. I don't know anything about the other one and I'm not going to pretend that I do either. But on TV in Norway most programs are the American and British and they are just subtitled. But be prepared they are way out of date with the series etc that they show so don't be too surprised. TV licenses in Norway cost an arm and a leg too. But because of the amount of English on TV and the fact that everybody learns it for a few years in school most people here have a pretty good level of English so it's not a bother. I bought Linguaphone to try to learn Norwegian. Well to be honest I was quite lazy and only got a quarter the way through the course before it started gathering dust on my shelf. But everybody says it is quite a difficult language to learn. I don't really think so. Maybe if you are learning it in a different country but when you are here and surrounded by it the whole time it doesn't take that long before you start picking some up. But I pretend I understand nothing coz I want to talk in English. I cannot talk much in Norwegian but I can understand a lot. Reading it is pretty easy as well. Pretending you don't understand a thing can be a valuable asset especially when people are talking about you in Norwegian so that you "don't understand"!

Getting to Norway

Getting to Norway is quite difficult. Gardermoen is the main Oslo airport. Bugger all flights to there except from the big airports. So to get here I usually go through London Heathrow and get a BA flight up. Scandinavian airlines (SAS) fly to some places but usually you have to change in Copenhagen ( which is a cool city might I add! ) A few times I went through other European airports ( Charles de Gaulle, Frankfurt etc.) Ryanair have started flying to "Oslo Torp" from Hahn in Germany and from London Stansted. So they can be pretty cheap. But I must say Torp is near Sandefjord and nowhere near Oslo. About 2 and 1/2 hours on the bus away to be precise so don't be fooled! Flying to here can be quite expensive especially if you don't book long in advance. A return flight from Ireland with Aer Lingus and BA usually costs me about NOK 5000 ( €635 ). So that is expensive. And it's not like things are cheap when you get here.

Cost of Living

Well as you have probably gathered from the jibes here and there Norway is a damn expensive country. I intend to put my shopping receipt up here. For example to post a letter to Ireland costs NOK10 ( €1.27 ) where as to post a letter from Ireland to here costs ( €0.41 ) Yogurt is about the only thing that I have encountered in this country that is cheaper than in Ireland. I can't really figure out why especially coz Ireland has huge amounts of dairy farming compared to Norway. Everything else is more expensive. Most things 2 or 3 times more expensive. However electronic equipment ( tv's, radios, pc's, etc. ) are only slightly dearer but they are dearer. Going out is expensive, staying in is expensive, doing anything in this country is expensive.

Scenery

Well now to something good about Norway. Norway is a very pretty country. I haven't been to the West coast yet ( where all the fjørds are ) or up North but what I have seen to date is very pretty. Around Kongsberg there is nothing except small hills and trees everywhere. There are trees growing absoloutely everywhere. Right up to peoples houses. Most people don't have fences around there houses. There are some beautiful lakes and rivers etc all over the place. If you do decide to go climb a mountain and get above the trees the view is absoloutely fantastic.

Snow

The snow came in late November and went away after Easter (early April). There are plenty of places to go skiing and snowboarding. A lot of people go cross country skiing ( boring ) or telemark skiing which is fucking weird. Then more people go slalom ( downhill skiing ) and the cool people go snowboarding. Well as you can guess I joined the snowboarding troops. It took me some time to get used to it. After about 3 trips I was able to stand up on the damn thing and move some way or the other. But it is really good fun to do. You can rent equipment at any skisenter. It is expensive to do that all the time so I ended up buying my own ( which didn't exactly work out cheap either ). But it was well worth the money. I certainly will miss the winter sports when I leave this country.

As regards snow in general. There weren't too many snow falls but the temperature is so low in the winter that it doesn't melt away the next day like it does in Ireland. How much it snows depends on which part of Norway you are in coz if you look at the map you will see that it is a pretty large country geographically speaking anyway. Kongsberg is pretty far south relatively speaking ( west of Oslo ) and I thought there was a lot of snow here but most Norwegians wouldn't agree because they have seen how much there is up North which I didn't experience.

They clean the snow of the roads but people have "winter tyres" for their cars and drive around as normal when there is snow. It doesn't really make much of a difference to them at all!

Conclusion

Well this is a first draft and I guess definitely will be updating it again so I won't bother writing a conclusion yet.

ronan@ronanos.com