Happy Valentine’s Day!

Read time: approximately 16 minutes

This week

• Tuesday, 10 February co-taught with teachers-in-training, at their request, at Kruseløkka Ungdommskole in Sarpsborg. Turns out no teacher-in-training has ever requested to co-teach with a Rover before! It’s cool to be able to work with the entire sequence of students: secondary, their teachers, teachers-in-training, and teacher educators. 
• Wednesday, 11 February served as a juror for the National Writing Competition in English and got to see four out of five rovers to catch up and for wine, cheese, chocolate chip cookies, and Valentine’s Day card making
• Thursday, 12 February presented at the annual Fulbright Seminar and got to hear about what everyone else has been up to since August and what this semester’s grantees will be up to
• Friday, 13 February—Sunday, 15 February ski retreat outside of Lillehammer at the Skeikampen Resort! Something I have been looking forward to since I applied for a Fulbright!

When I’m roving, secondary students often ask me what I like about Norway. This is a welcome break to students’ curiosities about what’s going on with the United States, including a range of questions like, what do you think of Trump? Have you ever been in a school shooting? Who did you vote for (in the 2024 presidential election)? Have you ever been inside a Target? (yes, literally the question is just have I ever been inside a Target) Have you ever had crumbl cookie?

Not only is the question of what I like about Norway a nice break, it’s an opportunity to think about what I do enjoy about living here. There are three things I really love about living in Norway, and I’ll share two of them here (the third thing is that their food doesn’t contain poison like our food back in the States. My digestion system has never functioned better!).

First, I really enjoy how Norwegians embrace all weather. There is a Norwegian saying I have grown to love: there isn’t any bad weather, just bad clothing. Norway, if you haven’t looked at a map lately, is really far north. As a fellow Fulbrighter mentioned this weekend, it’s on the same latitude as Siberia. It doesn’t get Siberia-cold because of the currents from the Atlantic that intermingle with the waters of the Arctic, but it is cold. It also gets very dark, and we are now just verging on 9 hours of sunlight (up 3 hours from the darkest days of December!). It has been cold and dark since approximately October, and no one anticipates warmer and sunnier weather until at least April. That’s seven months of relative cold, grey, and dark. 

As an American who lives in Colorado who is used to living in approximately 300 days of sunshine, it’s been a little bit of an adjustment to still get outdoors and stay active when it’s cloudy or rainy or snowy. When I was training for and completed my half-marathon in the fall, I did a fair amount of it in the dark, illuminating trails with a flashlight or just letting my eyes adjust to the darkness and the moonlight. When Jeremy was visiting and it was pouring rain when we were planning on going to a Jule Market (Christmas Market) in Fredrikstad, he wanted to sit it out because of the weather. But if we used the weather to determine what we would do, we would stay huddled inside all day.

And while there is an element of coziness to staying inside under blankets and reading and eating soup, Norwegians like to be active. They don’t let adverse weather conditions dampen their plans and are safe while doing so. Case in point: Norwegians are excellent at winter sports. They invented skiing (which is pronounced shee in Norwegian) and hold the most number of Olympic gold medals for skiing; another popular saying is that Norwegians are born with skis on their feet. Have you been keeping up with Johannes Høsflot Klæbo’s Olympic medal count? 

At the Fulbright ski retreat this weekend I wanted to embrace this Norwegianness and was able to rent some cross country skis, poles, and boots, and went out for my first three days of cross country skiing ever in my life. Fellow Fulbrighters were our teachers and I had a blast! My glutes and triceps are sore! But it was so much fun. I better understand the cross country ski Winter Olympics event, which had previously mystified me in terms of how their skis worked. Still mystified by the biathlon (a top contender for favorite Winter Olympic event): let’s ski and then shoot things, but at least the skiing part is more understandable. At this ski resort, they had a mountain with alpine trails, but also miles and miles and miles of cross country ski trails, which they groomed meticulously. And there were so many Norwegians who were cross country skiing. Germans and Danes too, but lots of Norwegians.

I think part of why Norwegians are so up for doing winter outdoor activities, like skiing and sledding, and just plain taking walks in the freezing temperatures, is because it’s nice to get outdoors and because of sauna. I have now sauna’d three times: once in Oslo with my wacky uncle Brunsie, once in Bergen with other Rovers, and now at this ski resort about 45 minutes northeast of Lillehammer. I was telling Jeremy that I had been spending my days cross country skiing and then saunaing and he noted that it sounded delightful. That was absolutely the right word for it. While cross country skiing definitely works up a sweat, a deep chill also enters your bones, especially in the extremities of your hands and feet. Perhaps I needed to put on one more layer. But even in full sun that caused me to sweat like I had been running, my feet were freezing by the time I returned back to the lodge on Saturday. So I put on my swimsuit and just sat in the sauna until that deep chill was replaced by a radiating warmth. At dinner on Saturday after sauna, another Fulbrighter noted that I looked so relaxed. And they were right. 

I will note on the side here that there is something really special about jumping into the Oslo and Bergen fjords as one saunas, and I believe I’ve written about that in another recent blog post. We didn’t have that option this weekend, and had to use cold showers as a substitute. But moving between extremes of hot and cold is exhilarating and leads to really great sleep.

Secondly, I have grown to appreciate the interiority of Norwegians, with a caveat. But first, what I enjoy. We were told at Orientation in August that Norwegians are reserved. Some said shy, but I think the word for it is reserved. They are in their heads all the time. When you pass them on the street or make eye contact with them anywhere in public, no one greets you, no one says hello hi how are you doing like they do in many places where I’ve lived in the States. At work, it’s completely okay to come into the office and say hello to no one else there and just get my day started. The theory is that it’s better not to disturb those already working by saying hi as I come in. And anyway, we’ll catch up at the national Norwegian lunch time, 1130a.

This is because Norwegians recognize that everyone is in their own heads and it is rude to disturb them by saying hi all the time or having all these little distractions as you go about your business. This was hard for me to get used to at first, but now I have come to really appreciate it. I’ve noticed that when I’m on the bus or train or walking somewhere—or even in the office working—I can really get in my head and do some thinking, and I appreciate not having those thoughts interrupted. 

The one exception to this is if you are in the woods. When in the woods, everyone wants to say hello to each other. This is completely counterintuitive to me. I get my best thinking done in the woods on a hike, on a walk, and then all of a sudden I am bombarded with the “hei hei”s (pronounced hi hi; always said twice) of other hikers or runners. I don’t get this. When you’re in the woods, don’t you want to be surrounded by uninterrupted nature sounds? I didn’t say Norwegians weren’t confusing.

The one caveat to what I like about this is that no Norwegian will ever tell you what’s wrong because they don’t want to disturb your interiority and perhaps undermine your independence. So they just lock everything inside. In a book I am slow reading, The Nordic Theory of Everything, the author, who is Finnish, notes that people from Nordic countries value independence—emotional, financial, psychological, etc—so that one doesn’t have to enter into relationships in which one is dependent on a person, which could then lead to resentment or entering into potentially dangerous commitments. 

I get this. I have been told by many people that I am extremely independent. And I think I am such because I don’t want to bother others. But I had a therapist once who told me that such extreme independence can be toxic because then you don’t learn how to ask for help. So I get independence and turning inward, but where does that leave space for community and a healthy reliance on others and opportunities to support each other? 

I recognize this extreme independence in Norwegians, though, and I do think it comes out of being in their own heads. This weekend, our Fulbrighters Norwegian book club was able to discuss in person our latest book, Out Stealing Horses, most of which, all of which? takes place in the mind of the narrator. Ultimately, we discussed, he doesn’t have the capacity to even ask for help or work out some of his massive trauma because he belongs to a society that, while not a monolith, doesn’t really have the space for this. Everyone is turned inward. Another friend and book club mate brought up that Norway has the largest percentage in Europe of older people living alone. 

So while on the one hand I appreciate the allowance of people to be in their own heads, there is something to be said about making connections with others, especially when one needs the support of the community. And there’s something to be said for others offering help rather than you always having to ask for it. 

I have heard about exceptions to the disruption of interiority, though: if you have a dog and are out walking the city streets, your interiority will be interrupted. A fellow Fulbrighter was telling us this weekend that they were knitting and obviously doing something so wrong that a Norwegian woman on the train (Norwegians are a society of knitters) just took the knitting and essentially said, let me fix this for you. That is definitely not Norwegian. But evidently can be!

I have one more thing, and don’t know quite how it fits, but it feels like it fits here, so here is where I will put it. I have not encountered many Norwegians who will know how to tell you how to do something. It is assumed that you know how to do it because you are to do it in the exact same way your Norwegian uncle did it. If you do not have a Norwegian uncle, they are mystified for how to tell you how to do something. 

For example, if you need to open a bank account, no one can tell you how to do it. For them, they have always had bank accounts and therefore don’t know how to tell you how to do it. I am not exaggerating on this. Their answer is, just go to the bank. No, actually, they will turn you down if you just show up at the bank without an appointment. You have to go online and request an appointment and upload all your paperwork and precious identity information just to request an appointment to open a bank account. If you ask them how to get from the train station to their school, they don’t know how to tell you how to do it. They have been getting to the school since time began for them and don’t know how to tell others how to do it. They will identify landmarks that don’t exist and some can’t even tell you which streets the school is located on. You think I’m joking! I wish!

I feel like this is related to interiority, perhaps because in Out Stealing Horses, when the character needs to know how to fix a part of his house, he simply closes his eyes and just imagines how his father would have done it, and then he knows how to do it. No YouTube university for him—it’s built into his body and mind how to do a thing he didn’t previously know how to do and he can channel what he is supposed to do, even if it’s been over fifty years. I really do think this is how Norwegians know how to do things: they just intuit it from their ancestors. Maybe that’s why they’re so good at skiing—they have some sort of bodily knowledge passed down since skiing was invented (by them). 

But if you don’t know how to do something and ask a Norwegian to help you it is hella frustrating. As part of my Roving duties, this week I was serving as a juror for the National Writing Competition in English. When I arrived in the juror room, there was a packet with my name on it. It contained the word “creativity” and a definition from a dictionary (uncited), a rubric in Norwegian, paper, and a pen. The other four jurors had already arrived and were silently eating the provided lunch. When I walked in, no one greeted me. When I put down my stuff one woman asked for my name and directed me to where my packet was. I didn’t know if they had already introduced themselves to each other, so I told them my name and asked for theirs. But I was disrupting their interiority. They offered very short answers to my questions about what they taught and what schools they were from, assuming I had enough context to understand what they were talking about. I didn’t. When they told me just the names of their schools and I asked where those schools were, they looked at me like I had asked them what 2+2 is: why don’t you know this, their look said. I had to follow with, I’ve just been here seven months I don’t know where everything is. 

We finally finished lunch and received student work to read. The other jurors set about reading while I still had no idea what we were doing and how. I started to ask questions about the theme of the writing competition (it was not creativity, contrary to the word and definition in my judging packet), how long the students received to write, how old the students are, why their work was typed, you know, questions about what we were doing. I got what I interpreted as annoyed responses from the other jurors. When I asked about a rubric and if the students had received it, one woman directed me to the rubric in my packet. Which was all in Norwegian. Wasn’t this an English writing competition? She asked if I could read it and, sensing that I had disturbed her enough, told her I would use my translator app. This is not the worst of it.

We read in two rounds. Did I know this going in? Nope. At every stage of the judging, I had to ask what was going on. I sensed that they were like, why don’t you know this? They knew it was my first time, as I had told them when I introduced myself. But it was like they didn’t even know that I needed instructions or had to be inducted into how the judging worked. And they were all teachers. How does their classroom work? How do students know what is expected of them? Oh, wait. If they’re all Norwegian, they will simply be able to intuit what is required. But what about the students who are newcomers who don’t have Norwegian uncles?!

When we were deciding together who would advance from the second round, some of the student work that the fellow jurors were applauding were completely illegible to me. My notes contained phrases like, “low key I do not know what is going on in this short story” and “I am absolutely confused” and “wtaf.” And the fellow jurors were saying how amazing the writing was and beautifully written and so moving. I was sitting there thinking, is there something wrong with the way I understand “good” writing? Did I read a completely different piece? Would I only know what this piece of writing was talking about if I could channel a Norwegian uncle? What were they even talking about? It was a trip. But again, I think I’m supposed to just know how to do things because if I close my eyes and reach back into my mind, I will understand how my Norwegian ancestors did the thing. In this, I am not completely Norwegian. 

I facilitate a pretty popular workshop where I help students understand what I think it means to be American and they tell me what it means to be Norwegian. I have enjoyed thinking about their responses relative to my experiences in Norway. I’m looking forward to continuing my exploration of what it means to be Norwegian.