My Norsk Classmates

One day during break in my Norwegian class, Mai, a classmate from Thailand, offered to share her snack. She handed out apple slices dipped into a mixture of sugar, salt and a dry Thai spice mix. I tried it. It was better than a cup of coffee to wake me up. She said people in Thailand always like to have a little “hot” with something sweet. She wasn’t kidding. No one else but me asked for a second slice. I only had five hours sleep the night before so I needed the extra “wake-up.” I’m sure I gained some respect that day as everyone looked at me in awe when I took the second bite.



We had 28 students at the beginning of my Norsk class, from 18 different countries. Most of them are women married to Norwegians. We were put together because supposedly English was a language we all knew, and it made learning Norwegian easier if explanations could be made in English at times. If nothing else, it made for some interesting coffee breaks as we tried to communicate with one another. I found many of my classmates’ stories quite interesting.


The woman that sat behind me was from Germany. She is a pediatric doctor, her husband, a dentist. The government solicited them to work in Norway because there aren’t enough medical professionals in the country. (German dentists are the norm in Norway.)


The woman that sat next to me was my partner when we practiced our pronunciation. Her name is Vestina and she is from Lithuania. She was 22 and she moved to Norway with her boyfriend to work also, but on the opposite end of the spectrum from the doctors and dentists. Many service jobs and fish factories hire people from Eastern Europe to do the grunt work that no respectable Norwegian citizen wants to do. Vestina and her boyfriend worked in a fish factory. Not a single Norwegian was on the payroll there, including their boss, who was from Canada.


Another woman in our class was from the Ukraine. She met a Norwegian via the internet and married him. She knew NO Norwegian and very LITTLE English. I saw them together during lunch one day and even though they’d been married a year, they still acted like love birds. He was a balding, forty-ish, not so hot looking guy and she was in her early twenties and quite the hottie. Norwegians aren’t dumb, that’s for sure.