Rain

A lot of emphasis was put on learning the words for weather in my Norwegian class. It’s the number one topic of conversation in Norway, especially along the coast where we lived. The Good Teacher Inga wanted to be sure we knew all the possible ways to say just how horrible of a day we were having. (We even learned the word for “complain.”) One day we learned the expression to use when it’s raining about as hard as it can. In America we might say “It’s raining cats and dogs,” but in Norway they say it’s raining “Trollkjerring” – which literally translated means it’s raining “female trolls.”




I almost felt like I’d stepped into that zone where the Eskimos in Alaska have 26 words to describe snow. It’s something like that in Norway – they are far more descriptive in their weather words (especially on the types of possible rain) than we are in America, but one day The Good Teacher Inga simplified things for us and said there are usually just two seasons in Norway – the white winter and the green winter. I thought that was pretty funny.



We started many school days off singing a song about rain. We even memorized a poem about playing in the rain. Norwegians do everything in the rain and even though they get a lot of it, the residents of Aalesund (where we lived) take great consolation in the fact that Bergen always gets more.



Even when it was pouring down rain and I often saw entire families out for bike rides all dressed in raingear from head to toe.



Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I was raised that if the sun is out, I should be out in it. When I moved to California to go to college, I didn’t clean my house for a whole year as I kept waiting for a rainy day to stay indoors and clean. It finally dawned on me that it wasn’t ever going to rain so I should probably get busy. It was the opposite in Norway - I eventually bought some rain pants so I could go out walking with friends.



We had pretty good weather the year we lived in Norway though. The year before we arrived it rained nearly every day. As Kory’s cousin was summing up how bad that year had been he said, “Summer came, but I was sitting on the toilet, so I missed it.”