Imports

Whenever we travel home from Norway, I always bring back our favorite Norwegian foods like blueberry flavored Jello and Vanilla Sauce – things we can’t get in America.  Vanilla Sauce is Norway’s most beloved dessert topping that tastes like the vanilla custard inside a donut, only better.  Norwegians are always shocked when they hear we don’t have that stuff in every store in America.  They are under the impression that America has everything.  I think they are delighted to realize they have something so wonderful all to themselves.

We’ve also brought home dried fish a few times.  Usually it’s for my husband, but this year it was for our neighbor whose ancestors hail from Iceland.  The only problem with bringing that stuff home is that it stinks up the luggage so badly that it takes forever to air out.  I’m happy this year it all went to our neighbor just so we could get that smell out of our house.

My husband broke a tooth on dried fish one year when we were in Norway.  It’s hard as a rock and is meant to be hammered before gnawing on it, but he couldn’t wait. He chomped down hard and that’s all it took.  When he went to the dentist she told him she gets at least one patient a week that either breaks a tooth or knocks one out completely from chewing on dried fish.  If it were sold in America, I’m sure they’d require warning labels.

Likewise, when we travel to Norway, we have more than a suitcase full of foods from America that we can’t get there, as even my most basic recipes include items not available in Norway.  Chocolate chip cookies, for example, are impossible to make without importing vanilla, brown sugar and chocolate chips – none of which are found in stores anywhere in our part of the country.  When I mention this fact to Norwegians they get very defensive and tell me how they do too have vanilla (but it’s powdered, not liquid) and brown sugar, but it’s more like raw sugar than the soft, squishy variety we have in America, so it doesn’t work the same in recipes. They fail to comprehend the differences.

I’m certain someone could make a lot of money if they started importing chocolate chips to Norway.  Every time I’ve made chocolate chip cookies, there is non-stop chatter about how good they are and everyone wants the recipe. Then I have to tell them the sad news that it’s just not possible without imported ingredients. 

I ran out of chips one year and tried to make them by chipping away at chunks of Norwegian chocolate, but it took way too much time, made a huge mess, and had disastrous results with consistency in the size of the chips.  But at least no one broke a tooth on them and they did leave a rather pleasant smell in the kitchen.

Fitting In

The year we lived in Norway, my husband’s cousin was overly concerned about the type of school backpack we brought from America for our son.  It wasn’t Norwegian, and he was sure he’d be ridiculed because it was different.  The cousin worried our son wouldn’t fit in.  His fears were justified.

A Norwegian woman I know, now in her fifties, told me when she was in elementary school, her left hand was tied behind her back every day, and she was forced to write with her right hand, because she was naturally left-handed.  The government felt it wasn’t “normal” to write left-handed and they wanted her to fit in with the rest of the children.  They don’t do that anymore, of course, but it’s still fresh in people’s minds that “fitting in” is of utmost importance.

For generations, the name of every newborn had to be approved by the government before a birth certificate was issued.  They didn’t want children feeling like they didn’t fit in because they had an unusual name.  One cousin named her daughter Roda, which is not a common name in Norway.  Initially, that name was rejected, but when it was submitted again, showing reference to where it was in the Bible, it was approved.  It may not be a common Norwegian name, but the government didn’t want to argue with God’s Word. However, it took six months before the cousins knew if their baby would be called Roda or not.

Immigrants, of course, now have the worst time fitting into Norwegian society.  Many can’t even get jobs because they have foreign names.  Some are legally changing them to Norwegian sounding ones so they at least get called in for an interview.

This past summer, one of the political parties in Norway went on record as saying that all immigrants need to “dress like Norwegians, speak Norwegian, get jobs, respect Norwegian culture and values, adhere to the proper use of welfare benefits, and generally behave impeccably” before they should be allowed permanent residency.  They want them to fit in to Norwegian society in every way possible.

I often hear talk about this sort of thing when I’m in Norway.  Norwegians hate it that immigrants cluster together, still speak their native tongue, and don’t even try to fit in to Norwegian culture.  In those moments I get far too much pleasure in telling them about my Norwegian ancestors immigrating to America, and how my grandfather, the second generation to be born on American soil, could only speak Norwegian until he entered school.  How, in his little world of Norwegian immigrants in North Dakota, all business was transacted in Norwegian, church services were held in Norwegian, and newspapers were printed in their native language even a century after the first immigrants arrived. “How’s that for fitting in?” I ask.

Ironies

Norway taxes café and restaurant food differently based on whether it’s “eat here” or “take away.”   I often wonder why the ferry system cafes have two different price lists based on this law.  Everyone orders their food for “take away” because it’s much cheaper, but how far can they take it?  It’s a ferry.

It’s not that America doesn’t have its quirks.  There are ironies everywhere in our country, too - like the obscene amount of money we spend on public education, compared to other nations, yet our education outcomes are just “average” and “most resemble Poland’s” according to one study I read.   Another irony is that we continue to bill ourselves as the “land of the free,” yet with the passage of every new law, someone’s freedoms are lost.

Norway’s ironies are easier to laugh at, however.  Like the fact they now have many bank branches that don’t deal in cash - everything is done electronically.  I walked into a bank a few months ago to make a deposit, and the teller kindly pointed me to an ATM machine that was happy to inhale my kroner.  The teller acted like my money was poison and she wouldn’t even touch the stuff.  That was funny, frustrating, and ironic all at the same time.

Another irony is that Norway has now done away with the 50 øre coin, which is half a kroner.  Even though the smallest coin is now a kroner, about 18 cents, the deposit on pop bottles is still two and a half kroner.  My son figured out rather quickly if he buys two bottles of pop, he pays a five kroner deposit, but if he returns just one bottle at time, he gets six kroner back, since they must round up.  He pays roughly 45 cents deposit for each bottle but gets over 63 cents refunded.  When is someone going to figure that one out?

I also think it’s ironic that with Norway’s socialized medical system, it takes such a long time to get in to see a doctor that people are often well by the time their appointment rolls around.  But then again, maybe that’s part of the plan in making them wait so long.

The cost of stamps are also a conundrum. It costs nearly double to buy a stamp in Norway to mail a letter to a Norwegian address, than it costs to buy a stamp in America and mail it internationally to Norway.  Strange economics there.   

I also scratch my head over the fact that the Norwegian government spends two dollars on a stamp to send me a bill for an automatic toll station I drove through that costs just over two dollars for the toll.  Someone needs to do the cost effectiveness on that one.  The ultimate irony would be if they actually did.

Adjustments

The scenery on the western coast of Norway is a little like the Pacific Northwest on steroids, with water and mountains dominating the landscape.  It’s easy to see why so many Norwegian immigrants settled here years ago, as it has a comfortable familiarity to it all.  But when Norwegians come to visit us, we take them to Eastern Washington.  Our little piece of heaven west of the mountains is just too boring for them. They want to see something different.  They love the long straight roads, brown fields and mountains and tumbleweed blowing across the road.  They think it’s good for a visit, but of course, they’d never want to live there.

An old friend of ours emigrated from Norway after World War II.  He took a steamer ship to New York, then a train across America.  While traveling through the Dakotas, he got very worried that it was the end of the line.  He was sure he’d made a big mistake.  He couldn’t possibly imagine living in such a flat, desolate place with no view of water or mountains.  He started thinking right away about how he would earn enough money to return to Norway as soon as possible.  But lucky for him, the train kept going. 

As he traveled through Montana and on into Washington and over the Cascade Mountains, his fears dissolved.  He said he’d never forget the incredible sight of the sparkling blue waters of the Puget Sound framed in by the backdrop of the Olympic Mountains the day his train arrived in Seattle.  His soul was at rest and he knew he could now call America his new home.

His story made me wonder about all my maternal grandparent’s Norwegian grandparents that ended up living out their lives in the flat Dakota territories, taking advantage of the free land given by the Homestead Act of 1862.

The birth rate in Norway was always tempered by the high infant mortality rate, but when the small pox vaccine became mandatory in the 1840s, many of the children that would have otherwise died, lived.  This created a population explosion that Norway, a country with only 3% tillable soil, could not handle. There were just too many mouths to feed.  It’s what turned America into the Promised Land for so many Norwegians.

I’ve visited all eight of the farms my great-great grandparents left behind in Norway and each of the tracts of land they homesteaded in eastern North Dakota.  What a contrast.  The Norwegian farms are all unbelievably beautiful places, surrounded by majestic mountains only Norway can produce.  The flat North Dakota farms, on the other hand, are surrounded only by what the locals call the “North Dakota state tree” – telephone poles. 

It’s hard to imagine the adjustments my ancestors had to make in order to start a new life in America, but as my husband says, “You can’t eat a view,” so they must have been pretty darn hungry.