Telemark Part 2: A Shortcut for Hazelnuts

This is the second in a four part series on my trip to Telemark this past weekend. These posts will be a little on the long side, since so much has happened, but in an effort to hold everyone's attention, I've split the trip up into four smaller posts. If you would like to start at the beginning, you can find the first post here:
http://kristofergoestonorway.blogspot.no/2012/07/telemark-part-1-boats-and-things.html

After our afternoon at the Vrangfoss Locks, our bus headed away from the Telemark Canal and into Norwegian dale country. Our destination was Uppigård Natadal. Uppigård, meaning "upper farm", refers to the location of the farm on the hillside 1,200 feet above the valley floor, and Natadal, which means Hazelnut Valley, refers to the valley the farm is located in. When we arrived at the farm, the persistent drizzle had not let up, and so we stood around in the rain looking at the farm buildings.

A traditional sod-roofed farm house, with a Norwegian farmer coming out of it.

Uppigård Natadal is still a working farm, with a few sheep and chickens, but the owners have turned it into an historic bed and breakfast. Most of the farm buildings were built in the 1700s and some even date back to the 1400s, before the Great Plague. The interiors, of course, have been renovated and installed with all sorts of modern conveniences, like running water and electricity. The couple who own the farm still live on the premises, but the nuts and bolts of the bed and breakfast are managed by a hired lady.

My first room.

After we stood around for a bit, the manager ushered us inside and started handing out room keys. (A short comment which will become relevant shortly: The manager did not speak any English, and so because I have advanced to the point where I can hold a conversation in Norwegian (!), and despite her rather strong Telemark accent, I was one of the few people in our group who could communicate with her). They had passed a sign up sheet for rooms on the bus and though I was last to sign up, I had gotten a double room all to myself. I was feeling pretty lucky, but I guess the Norwegian Lutheran in me should have known that good luck like that doesn't last very long.

Just after I had put my stuff down and stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, the manager hailed me in Norwegian from the balcony and asked if I would be nice enough to switch rooms with one of the girls from our group. There wasn't really any reason for me to say no, so I agreed, whereupon the manager informed me that the girl needed to switch because she was claustrophobic. This puzzled me for all of the two minutes until I found the room that the girl had vacated. I'm lucky that I'm a thin guy, because the room was about three feet wide. It wasn't really bad, and I can understand why it made the girl claustrophobic. I didn't spend very much time in there other than at night, and it didn't affect my sleeping at all, so I guess I have nothing to complain about.
Well, that's not quite true. Unfortunately, despite its person sized bed, the room must have been designed as guest lodgings for elves, gnomes, and/or trolls, because the door was all of four feet high. I probably hit my head on it at least five times during my stay. So, aside from a slight headache and the manager referring to me as Gutten med det lille roomet, "the boy with the little room", my minute lodgings were quite fine.

We had arrived about four in the afternoon, and dinner was not to be served until eight, and so the owner of the farm gave us a guided tour, and then settled us down to relate some Norwegian farmer wisdom. I wrote down some of the choice bits of advice and will pass them along here.
1. To keep ghostly hordes, spooks, and other creatures in league with the devil from entering your house, eating your flat bread and drinking your beer, draw crosses on the lintels with tar.
2. Never forget to move the nisse. The nisse, as you may or may not know, is a little fellow who looks a bit like a skinny garden gnome and lives in the barn. If he's happy he protects the animals, but if he's not, he lets them out and causes all sorts of havoc. And an easy way to make him unhappy is to build a new barn and forget to invite him in. Porridge is generally the best form of invitation.
3. Always hang a cross over the crib of an unbaptized baby. Otherwise a mountain troll will sneak into the house and steal your baby, leaving one of its mountain troll children in its place.
4. On Christmas eve, the ghosts of dead farmers who didn't receive a Christian burial will come back to try and claim their beds. To prevent this, go outside at 5 pm on Christmas Eve and shoot a gun off three times (once each for the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost).

That forest looks like a prime spot to find a troll, a spook, or a ghostly horde .

After receiving farm wisdom, I walked around outside a bit, taught some people from Vietnam and Poland how to play Go-Fish, and did a little reading. Having seen the farm, I must say that farming in Norway could only have been hard. The farm is surrounded by a dense pine forest, and the ground available to plant on slopes downhill at an angle of almost 50 degrees. The Norwegians must have rejoiced when they came to Minnesota and found flat land to plant on. And if the flatness of Minnesota made them happy, just think of their reaction when they got to North Dakota.

Anyways, farming aside, the last main event at Uppigård Natadal was dinner, prepared in authentic Telemark fashion by the Danish chef. We were served an appetizer salad garnished with smoked sei, a relative of the cod (which I think we call a pollack in the United States), along with fresh baked flat bread and Telemark butter, which is butter made with sour cream instead of sweet cream. It's really quite good.

The main course was roast lamb with carrots and potatoes grown on the farm, and dessert was a caramel flan garnished with hazelnuts from the valley.

Den fineste norske akevitt!

To make sure the meal was authentically Norwegian, our hosts offered us aquavit (akevitt in Norwegian) to be drunk as snaps with our appetizer of smoked fish. Aquavit  is the official Norwegian liquor, and is made from potatoes, seasoned with caraway seeds, and aged in oak barrels. It is also extraordinarily strong, and the caraway seeds give it almost a spicy flavor. I think it's an acquired taste, and I'm not sure I can recommend it, but the Norwegians sure are proud of it, and it's supposed to help digest fatty meals like Christmas dinner. 

Dinner took two hours, and then sleepy from all the food, I headed outside for a last breath of mountain air and a look down into the valley which by that point was obscured totally by fog. Then, I crouched down into my little room, curled up (well, stretched straight out, the walls were too close together to curl up), and slept soundly until the morning.

Telemark Part 1: Boats and Things

This is the first in a four part series on my trip to Telemark this past weekend. These posts will be a little on the long side, since so much has happened, but in an effort to hold everyone's attention, I've split the trip up into four smaller posts.

As part of the International Summer School package, we are entitled to take one excursion, several are offered, and the one I chose was to Telemark, south of Oslo (for those of you who are skiing fans, you may know Telemark for the variation developed here, using cross-country bindings for downhill skiing). I chose Telemark partially because it offered a chance to see the ocean, mountains, and the dale country all in one go, but mostly I chose it to go down to the sea-shore. 

We left early on a cloudy Saturday morning, and our first stop was the town of Stavern, on Norway's south-eastern coast. Stavern was a sleepy little sea-side town, with a healthy boating industry and a brightly colored church. It was a naval base from the 17th to 20th centuries, but after the war, it's grown up as a popular place for the rich to buy seaside houses. In true Norwegian fashion, it started misting slightly as we arrived, and so the town was pretty deserted. 

The large gold thing above the church's doors is the symbol of the King of Denmark

We were only in Stavern to eat lunch, but since we arrived at 10:30, I wandered around before eating the cheese sandwiches I had packed at breakfast. I went down by the wharf and looked at the boats for a little bit, and then followed a path down to the sea. The shore was very rocky; there were no sandy beaches, but up above the rocks, there were lush growths of sea-grasses and wild-flowers, flourishing with the water that the persistent mist off the sea provided. 

I absolutely love these wooden boats. This is definitely what I want for my birthday.

After clambering over rocks for a little while and peering down into the water expectantly, it started to rain instead of mist, and so I reluctantly headed back towards the bus. On my way there, I was given some free fish soup, which was quite good (only in Norway would they hand out free fish soup), and stopped by a rummage sale, where the man complimented my ability to speak Norwegian (in an effort to flatter me, so I'd buy something I'm sure), and where I successfully haggled in another language for the first time, talking him down from 50 to 40 kroner on my purchase. It was raining quite hard by the time we all got back on, and then our bus headed northwest towards the Telemark Canal and the famous Vrangfoss Locks.

If this picture showed my face, you'd see me staring
pensively out to sea at the approaching squall.

I will be honest, at first when I heard that we would be going to watch ship's going through the locks, I was not all too excited. Mostly it was because I was under the impression that these were modern mechanical locks. However, much to my surprise (and enjoyment), there is no electricity in the Vrangfoss locks.

One of the locks

The locks at Vrangfoss are opened and closed entirely by hand; the locks are staffed by one old Norwegian, who also does the blacksmith work repairing the opening system and a bunch of college students.

There are five locks in the system, and they raise/lower the level of the river an astonishing 23 meters (almost seventy feet) in a little over 100 meters. The first lock opens with a winch and chain, and the rest with a fascinating system of levers.

Opening the first lock.

I could have watched boats go through all day, but other people weren't of the same mind, so we only watched one boat go through, the Henrik Ibsen, the whole process taking about fifty minutes. Then, in true tourist fashion, we got back on the bus and prepared to head further into the interior, to see some farm country.

The grizzled, old Norwegian man in charge of Vrangfoss

An Afternoon at the Lake

One of the famous Fords of Norway...

One nice thing about Oslo is that for a capital city it's not very large, having a population of around 600,000. While that's not small by any means, it does make for an atmosphere with a little less hustle and bustle; Oslo is definitely one of the quietest cities I've ever spent time in.
In addition to being small in population, Oslo is also on the smaller side when it comes to area. Part of the reason for this is that the city is hemmed in by forest, and so the countryside is never very far away. In fact, hop on the metro and ride to the end of the line (it only takes about 10 minutes) and you feel like the big city is nowhere to be found. Yesterday, having a little free time in the afternoon, a couple friends and I decided to do just that. We hopped on line number 3, going west, and ten minutes later found ourselves at Sognsvann, a  conveniently located lake that is a popular weekend destination for many of Oslo's inhabitants.

Although some flock to its shores for swimming and grilling and other beach type activities, Sognsvann's largest draw is it's hiking trail around the lake, which runs through a dense pine forest. People come to hike, to bike, and to run, some of them every day of the week. The seagulls and the small children prevent Sognsvann from being very peaceful, but it is a definitely a nice place to sit outside and relax. I have not yet hiked around the lake, but it's on my list of things to do. Perhaps, the other side will be a little more quiet.

Doing a little homework down by the lake shore.

An American in Oslo

The fourth of July has never been a very big celebration for me. Aside from last summer when I was in Minnesota and celebrated Independence Day by watching a baseball game played by 1870's rules and baking an apple pie, barbecuing has generally been the extent of my celebrating. Thus, I was a little at loss for what to do to celebrate the fourth in a foreign country. However, luckily I didn't have to decide, because on Sunday, July 1st, many of the American ex-patriots and Norwegians who lived in America put on a little fourth of July fair.

They had all the basics: barbecued food, an American classic rock band, games, even pony rides. A good crowd showed up, although rain suppressed the attendance (I was told that some years 20,000 people go). I'd say about half the attendees were Americans, with the other half bemused Norwegians. 

Had to have a hamburger.

It was a fun time, and I don't think I could have come up with a better way to celebrate the fourth. The only disappointment? Sweet pickles. I really like pickles, but all of the ones I've encountered here in Norway have been sweet, and so I was hoping that at a Fourth of July gathering, I'd get dill pickles on my hamburger. But alas, I took one bite and tasted sugary pickles. However, the festivities did provide an answer to one of our (not-so) pressing needs, that being snack food. We played a spin to win game, and in true American fashion, the prize was more junk food than one should be allowed to own at any one time.

My friend Amanda, from Georgia, was the lucky winner

On the actual Fourth of July, I had a paper to write and a three hour practice examination to take, so I wasn't able to do very much celebrating. However, my next door neighbor, a Luther College student named Aaron, is also an American, a New Yorker in fact, and so we decided that we had to do a little something to commemorate Independence day. So, at 11:00 PM we got on the T-Bane and headed down one stop. Our destination? McDonald's, of course. Big Macs and Coca Colas secured, we toasted to freedom. Happy Fourth of July everyone.

Funny little side story to the McDonald's expedition: My friend ordered a Big Mac, a Coke and fries, to go, in English. I ordered a Big Mac, a Coke and fries, to go, in Norwegian. My friend received a Big Mac, a coke with no ice, and fries, to eat in, which cost 5 kroner extra. I received a Big Mac, a coke with ice, fries, and a free commemorative Olympic glass, to go. Moral of the story: It helps to speak the language.

A Little Bit More Sightseeing

While I really don't feel any shame in acknowledging that I am a tourist, doing touristy things, I am also both a student and a researcher here, and as those responsibilities grow, I figure that the amount of touristing I can do will shrink. But that time has not yet come, and so this past weekend I gathered up some friends and we checked a few more things-to-see off our to do lists. First we stopped at the apartment where Henrik Ibsen spent his last days, which has now been turned into a museum. Now, If I were to list who I thought were the two most famous Norwegians among Americans, Ibsen would probably be tied for first (the man he'd be tied with, Edvard Grieg, is best known in America for his composition "In the Hall of the Mountain King", which coincidentally was written for the staging of Henrik Ibsen's play Peer Gynt). Ibsen was a playwright and a poet, A Doll's House probably being his most read play outside of Norway. The museum was small and mainly consisted of many of Ibsen's personal effects, among them his shaving kit, watches and top hat. Perhaps more interesting were the cartoons that the museum had collected from newspapers; Ibsen was one of the favorite targets of Norwegian and Continental satirists.

With muttonchops like those, how can Ibsen help but scowl?

After Ibsen, we wandered over and took a look at the Royal Palace. They're surprisingly easy-going concerning the security around it. Although the palace is patrolled by a palace guard, there are no fences and folks can walk up to and around the palace without any trouble. They're doing construction on the roof at the moment, so it looks a little less impressive with scaffolding on it. Also, the king and queen have moved out to their summer home, and so when I find the time, I hope to take a tour of the inside.

Our last stop for the day took us to the other side of town and the museums of the University of Oslo. Admission is free for university students, and so we took the time to visit the Geological and Zoological branches. The Geological branch consisted of rocks and fossils, and while I can stare at rocks all day, my friends were not of the same mind, so we didn't spend all that much time there. Perhaps I'll go back by myself to peruse it further some time.

Most people find this guy a tad bit more interesting than the rest of the rocks.

Finally, we ended the day at the Zoological museum, where we observed displays of the wildlife in Norway, as well as a special exhibit of game animal trophies (I don't know if you've ever seen a full size moose head up close, but that is one large animal). The Zoological museum is actually a charming little museum, and one of the attractions is a wing where the people who construct the museum displays have built made-up, scary creatures for the children, among them a half-squirrel, half-pineapple, and a fox-snake. It's another place where if I find myself with a free afternoon, I'd consider going back and spending more time.

The Fishes of Norway.
It makes me grimace a little that I won't get to do any fishing
while I'm here.

Top Twenty Hits

I like to think myself as a fan of music, if but a casual one, and so when a few of my friends mentioned that there was a free concert on Friday night, I jumped at the opportunity. So, we jumped on the metro and rode down to the National Theater, where we were given free cokes as an advertisement for the London Olympic games, and then moseyed over towards the Oslo Fjord.

Fun fact: Norwegians drink the most Coca-Cola out of any country in Europe

There was a free concert down by the water all right, but I didn't realize just how big of a free concert it was. NRK, Norway's largest radio and television station, was putting on a countdown of the top 20 radio hits in Norway, and they had brought all 20 bands to play their hits. They estimated there were 10,000 people in the audience, mostly seeming to be in the high-school/middle-school demographic.

The music was fun, it seems that Norwegian popular music taste is not all that different than American, with a smattering of hip-hop, rock, and pop, with rap seeming to be the most popular at the moment. Probably two thirds of the music was in Norwegian, although I noticed that the "cool" rappers will throw English into their songs every now and then. (For those of you wondering whom my favorite of the night was, I present Lars Vaular & Sondre Lerche: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npo7r6ut5mM. Sondre Lerche is vaguely known in the United States, he did the soundtrack for Dan in Real Life, a movie that came out a while ago with Steve Carrell in the lead role.)

They even have their own Norwegian Back Street Boys

I was a little disappointed at the end though, because the number 1 hit in Norway was an American band, B.O.B. I didn't really recognize them, but I'm sure I've heard them on the radio before. My disappointment was made up for though with free frozen yogurt as we were leaving.

Å Lære Norsk (To Learn Norwegian)

Perhaps my previous writings haven't made it very clear, but I am here in Oslo to learn Norwegian. I take classes every week day from 815 to 1100. Class is conducted entirely in Norwegian; aside from another St. Olaf student who is a year younger than me, I am the youngest person in the class by five or six years. The class consists almost entirely of immigrants to Norway who require a knowledge of Norwegian for work or citizenship. In the twenty person class, we have represented Poland, Russia, Serbia, Hungary, the Ukraine, Pakistan, Germany, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Ecuador, and the United States. It's quite a mix and makes things quite the adventure, because everyone speaks Norwegian in the accent of their mother tongue.

Before I talk about the class itself, a short aside on Norwegian as a language. Norway actually has two official languages Bokmål, which I am learning, and Nynorsk. Bokmål, or "book language" is the dominant language in southern and eastern Norway, and is more closely related to Danish (and is sometimes referred to as Dano-Norwegian). It is also the language that the majority of published writing is done in. Nynorsk is very common in the west and the north. It is a language based upon the speech of the common folk, created around the turn of the century as an ode to Norwegian heritage when the country won its independence from Sweden. The situation is much more linguistically complicated than I have the space to go into, and is compounded by two things: one, the languages are fairly interchangeable in everyday speech. To non-Norwegian speakers, they sound fairly identical. Two, there is an enormous variation in the dialects spoken in different parts of Norway, so much so, that in fact some of them are fairly unintelligible (cue the old joke: Have you heard about the man who speaks a thousand languages? Every one of them is Norwegian). It's really a challenging, but supremely interesting, environment to learn a language in.

There are two primary goals in our class, the first being grammar and the second speaking. It's an odd situation, in that the majority of students in the class have been living in Norway for a year or more, and so speak the language much better than I do. However, few of them have taken it academically, and so most don't really know any grammar, which I guess is my strong point. It's sort of practicality versus philology. The class focuses mainly on grammar, although because it's entirely in Norwegian, we have a lot of opportunity to practice speaking. Outside of class we have workbook exercises to do, and I practice by listening to the Norwegian radio, speaking Norwegian out in Oslo whenever I can, and also by reading a comic by the name of Tommy and Tigern. It's known by a different name in the States, and perhaps you will recognize it by the cover:

Tommy and Tigern is convenient for learning Norwegian for a number of reasons, the first being that I've read them all so many times, but secondly, the sentences are short and simple, but written in a distinctly Norwegian style, so it's a good tool for picking up Norwegian diction, syntax and for lack of a better term, peculiarities. 

(On a side note, it's funny how they've had to change some of the wording to make the jokes translate, take this one for example, in which I think the original American cartoon had "Pittsburgh" as Hobbes answer:)

Calvin: I wonder where we end up when we die.
Hobbes: Bergen
Calvin: ...do you mean if we're bad or good?