Returning to Norway

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I returned to Norway last weekend to attend my 40th high school reunion. 

It was remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which was that I hadn’t been there in 38 years and the country has changed dramatically.

The experience underscored for me the importance of making time for the big “macro” events in life – reunions, weddings and funerals.

We make a big deal about tracking short term progress by counting steps, calories and reps in the gym; reunions provide a long-term reckoning.

I arrived in Norway in 1983 as an exchange student with AFS. I attended a year at one of the secondary schools that Norwegians call gymnas. I lived with a family on Sotra, an island outside Bergen. I arrived unable to speak a word of Norwegian and left almost fluent.

At the time, Sotra was remote. In local slang it was called “Strilelandet.”  The word has a charming etymology, defined as an area of farms outside Bergen that can be reached by rowboat. In local parlance it was derogatory, akin to “the sticks” in America. 

Norwegians were prosperous but hardly wealthy. The country felt insulated. Few people I met then had been to America. There was one TV network and it signed off at midnight. Many people showered and changed clothes only every other day because of the high cost of heating water.

It’s hard to find that scarcity mindset today. Norway has become richer and more global in much the same way as every other place in the world. But here oil has acted as an accelerant, creating an enormous number of millionaires. 

After I left Norway, I had lost touch with most of my classmates, We reconnected in about 2010 via Facebook.

About one third of the 60 or so people from the graduating class of 1984 attended the reunion and I was given a warm welcome. The majority still live on the island; many have grandkids. Some were divorced and three classmates have died, but overall people were doing well. 

The biggest surprise for me was that I was still able to speak Norwegian which I had barely used in the past four decades. But it all came flooding back and I found myself in sustained conversations using phrases I didn’t know I knew. 

Everything was familiar and yet completely different. 

Sotra is now home to one of the country’s largest shopping malls and tens of thousands of new homes. The government is spending more than $2 billion on a new bridge and system of tunnels to connect with Bergen. Sotra’s rocky terrain even has a nine-hole golf course.

As a student, I walked to school in the dark and rain beside open fields. That walk today is bordered by four-story apartment buildings. Most of my classmates smoked in the 1980s; now, almost none do. An amazingly large number of Norwegians drive Teslas. 

The whole world has changed immensely over the past four decades but it’s hard to see when you experience it incrementally, a little bit day by day.

The trip reminded me that to really appreciate any transformation you have to leave a place or group of people for a long time and then go back.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

HOW IT STARTED & HOW ITS GOING: Me last week and 40 years ago sitting in the same spot in the same kitchen where I lived when I spent a year as an exchange student in Norway.

WRITING: Solid advice from Paul Graham on writing.

SAVE WATER: Sign from a house where I stayed in Norway last week. The sign definitely made me conscious of how much water I used. Maybe we should all have signs up everywhere reminding us.

POWERWASHING: Couldn’t agree more with this post. Visited my brother recently and we power washed the deck and it felt liberating.

SHOPPING CART FRIENDS: Not a bad litmus test.