Small place

For those of you that don’t know Norway, let me try to tell you how small Norway is. OK, the surface area is a respectable 68th in the world (while trailing Vietnam in 66th, it beats the tiny UK into 80th :-), but the population is only creeping up towards 5 million. This means that if you mapped out all friendships and acquaintances and accidental meetings in Norway, there would not be very many intermediate steps before everybody in Norway was connected to everyone else. The tight web of human relations in Norway makes the grieving a truly national exercise.

If you wander around a Norwegian town you will quite regularly see local and national celebrities. Twice I have seen the sitting prime minister close up. Stoltenberg rushed into a bar I was drinking in, and dragged someone from a table into a waiting dark-glassed car. Bondevik, on the other hand, wandered past our chalet on Gran Canaria, playing crazy golf! Neither time did anyone around us make a fuss, or even raise an eyebrow, as I recall. This reflects the open and easy relationship between public figures and the public in Norway. They aren’t hidden away. Will Norway manage to react in a measured way to the shootings? Will politicians be removed from the public? So far the signs are for the balanced, measured, sober reaction to win the day.

 

Utter shock

We left Oslo airport in the morning, got to Heathrow and picked up the rental car, and then listened to the reports of the bomb and shootings that have changed Norway as we drove around the M25. Surreal.

I like the initials reactions of the Norwegian powers that be. There will be more democracy, not less. Be determined not to get blown off course by this.

We have heard that two youngsters from Nesodden are missing. We hope that they are safe. Oh the pain of the families is hard to conceive.

 

Five hours

The neverending move drags on…

The movers came, took two days to do the whole house, nipped into our offices and then drove off, condemning our stuff to a hangar at Fornebu.

The packers were a cheerful pan-European gang, and worked their way through the house. The second day was spiced up by Her Excellency marvellously misplacing her car key for 5 hours, the day before we were going to sell it.

We put all the important stuff in the snug to try to prevent the passports and the like being packed away, so this is your faithful blogger.

Actually, if you look carefully at what’s there, you might very well think that our priorities are somewhat skewed.

Then the day after, the cleaners came. Well, they were due at 9. They rang at 10 to say that one of them had had a suspected heart attack, and that they would come at 11. At 2 they rolled up, yes, 5 hours late, including the one who had been rushed to the hospital. All well, and so now the house is clean, and just waiting for the tenant.

Mention of whom reminds me of the fun had changing the addressee of the various subscriptions… Your internet company expects you to know the username and password to the email address that they gave you in 2007, and which you have never used. And a similar rigmarole for the other utilities, and we are at time of writing still trying to explain to the cable TV people that they should write another name on the envelope…..

Well, well, bye bye Nesodden for a while

 

The calm before the storm

Tonight will be our last night in the house, for years and years. The girls are at their grandparents so have had their last night, which was a wee bit emotional.

Tomorrow the real, proper packers come, to empty the house. The tenants want to keep a sofa and the garden furniture but the rest of the contents will be despatched to who-knows-where for safekeeping. Apart from, that is, two rucksacks and two suitcases that have a locked door between them and the unquenchable determination of packers (last time we moved they packed Ragnhild’s bag, doh). While supervising the packers, we just have to make some trips to the dump, book a car for the holiday in England, find out how one transfers the bills for the electric, the wifi, the phone etc to someone else, and then retire to a fancy hotel for the night 🙂 The holiday begins here (sort of)…

 

Poor us, reduced to using the silver cutlery

We are munching our way through the old tins, jars and packs at the back of the cupboards, making food that looks like leftovers even as it’s bubbling fresh on the plate. You know the type, where the sell-by date is wrong by years. Anyway, the everyday knives and forks are on a boat to Hanoi, so we are using the reserve set, which is made of silver. The kids aren’t getting a holiday this year, but I’m sure that touching the special cutlery more than compensates.

So the days go to tidying and throwing away, with bursts of brutal efficiency drowned out by slumps spent reading old letters, gawping at old photos, and calling the kids to show them how Mum/Dad looked in 1988. If I had a scanner I would show you, hahaha.

The sweaty bit now is keeping track of important things and making sure they end up where they should be, ie. keys in folder for tenant, passports in rucksack. I swore after the last move that I would never move again. Not only am I not keeping to that, this time we’re even planning two moves, outward and homeward. Doh. But at least we are going to live forever more in tidy homes…

 

Bønner and bønner, in Vietnamese

The Norwegian language has many fascinating features. I mean, just those extra three letters are cool: æ.ø, and å. To us speakers, they are not a & e smashed together, o with a line through it, and a with a bobble on, they are actual letters in their own right. And while I mash up Norwegian on a daily basis, not least the three possible genders nouns can take, I get quite a lot right.

One feature of Norwegian that I am still useless at however, is the tonal prosody that can distinguish between some words. The word for “beans” and the word for “prayers” are spelt the same way (“bønner”) and yet have a different lilt in how they are pronounced. “Prayers” (or it could be “beans”) starts high and goes down then up again, whereas “beans” (or it could be “prayers”) does the opposite (or not).

It causes NO difficulty in daily life (apart from during the harvest thanksgiving service :p) and its main function is to humiliate foreigners on language courses. It turns out things are somewhat more complicated in Vietnamese…

 

Tidying up

You may have seen the BBC programme, the Life Laundry, where a matronly busybody picks on some poor hoarder each week, and forces them to finally clear that room and garden and garage and lounge. Many of the participants appear to have some deep-seated and dark reasons for clinging on to stuff, and you often see some while-you-wait therapy.

 

All work and stress makes Jack a dull boy

In between sorting out all the stuff with the move, we are not forgetting what’s important: Tromsø IL.

On Monday I drove with J & S to Fredrikstad to see Tromsø play. This was the fourth time J & I have been to this very fixture, and until Monday we had seen 7 Fredrikstad goals to 1 measly last-minute irrelevant Tromsø effort.

Despite this we were all toothy smiles before the game:

And our optimism was rewarded: We were due a break, and we got it 🙂

And it ended 0-2, a cracking game, highlights here. Only one Tromsø match left before leaving, next Sunday against Vålerenga…

 

The packers are here!

Bye bye stuff! See you in Hanoi! The idea was to bring as little as possible, but we ended up filling a van, that will go via a hangar in Fornebu to a boat and then to Hanoi, getting there some time in August. Recycled sock time.

And while some pack, and I diligently record the work, some do what comes naturally…

So, bye bye stuff!

Then standby for the packing of the rest of our things. That happens in a couple of weeks when the belongings that didn’t make the cut are driven to a warehouse for 4 years. There were some tough decisions, particularly regarding teddy bears…

No toaster, telly or bikes for a while…

Actually the house now looks much tidier than normal…

 

Norwegian blue parrots in Hanoi

When I moved to Norway 18 years ago, I really knew next to nothing about Norge. But what I was sure of is that Norway was rubbish at the Eurovision Song Contest and that the indigenous parrots were blue and plunged into depression if deported from their natural habitat. Turns out neither of these facts is true. (This man used to live in the house next door to us, though tragically enough for all concerned, before we moved in).

The state of my knowledge about Hanoi at the beginning of 2011 was probably on a par with my prior knowledge of Norway. So, for the past few months I have, amongst other things, been reading a few blogs written by expats living in Hanoi, although one has now retired his blog, and two others are now leaving Hanoi. Room for my blog then, haha.

Here’s a shout out to the blogs I have learnt about Hanoi from:

http://sarita331.wordpress.com/

http://ourmaninhanoi.com

http://laninnam.blogspot.com/

and my favourite:

http://www.ahoyhanoi.blogspot.com/

Thanks for the intro to Hanoi, and good luck with it all 🙂