Resistance

The entire Norwegian resistance movement has been overshadowed by the success of the “heavy water” incident where Norwegians sank the boat that contained critical material the Nazi’s were going to use in an atomic bomb.  But many other small resistance movements also contributed to thwarting the efforts of the Nazis occupying Norway during World War II.

The stories still circulate at dinner parties about what life was like during the war.  The prejudice toward Germans still lingers for many, but many also feel triumphant for the things they were able to do to “get them back” in little ways.  Norwegians have a sly sense of humor.

Halvor, my father-in-law, was a carpenter by trade, but the Nazi’s forced all the tradespeople to work for them, building things they needed for their own infrastructure.  Halvor refused to do the work so he started painting pictures and called himself an artist, instead.  He took great delight in outsmarting their plans to recruit him.  Another friend of ours actually worked in an office for the Nazis handing out ration cards to the natives during the war.  He felt triumphant every time he made out a card.  If a person told him they had six children, he’d write down they had twelve, so they could get more food. Decades later he laughed about the fact he was never caught, even though he would have been imprisoned if he were.

Many Norwegians hid local Jews, just as the Dutch did.  Some men pretended to be fisherman, then left Norway in small fishing boats, heading to England to be trained as soldiers for the resistance movement, and no German was the wiser.

Nighttime provided the Norwegians with the opportunity to sneak around and pour sugar down the gas tanks of the Nazi’s vehicles to ruin their engines. 

One of our relatives owned a butcher shop and was ordered by the Germans to not sell his high quality meats to the locals, but to save it all for their consumption.  The butcher agreed and told them to come back in a few days when he would have the best meat he could find.

The butcher then told all the boys in his neighborhood to go hunting through the garbage dumpsters and kill as many rats and find as many pigeons as possible.  He skinned and butchered them and was happy to turn over that meat to the Germans when they came in with their machine guns demanding the “best.”  The funny part was, the Germans had no idea what it was and they thought it was so good, they kept coming back for more.

Expressions

American’s have some pretty funny expressions that I don’t even think twice about until I use them in the presence of Norwegians and I get a puzzling look. When in Norway, I’ve often been caught in the same puzzle, in reverse.

We have many expressions in our house to describe someone that isn’t very bright.  We’ll say they “aren’t the sharpest crayon in the box,” “their elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top,” they “aren’t hitting on all cylinders” or “the lights are on, but no one is home.”  Norwegians just describe that kind of person, by saying, “dårlig møblert,” which translates as they have “bad furnishings.”  I think they could use a little more creativity with that one.

The American expression for someone who likes to exaggerate is they can “make a mountain out of a mole hill.”  Norwegians also have people who exaggerate but what they say, when translated is, “they can make a feather into five chickens.”  Now that one is funny.

When describing someone who eats their food very quickly, we might say they “eat like a pig.”  Norwegians say, “they eat like it was thrown into the mouth of a dog.”  I guess there must be a lot of hungry dogs in Norway to have everyone understand that one.

If it’s raining extra hard, our expression that it’s “raining cats and dogs” is just as odd as the Norwegian’s expression that it’s raining “trollkjerringer,” which translates as “old female trolls.”

It’s common when stopping by to visit a someone in Norway to be invited to “slå deg ned” which means “sit yourself down.”  But the Norwegian word “slå” has another meaning and is most often used as “slap,” so it could sound like they are saying “slap yourself down” if you didn’t know better.  It’s even funnier when they play off that double meaning and if you don’t take them up on their offer to have a seat, they use the expression, “slap yourself down before I do it for you.” This, of course, is meant to be funny, and considering how peace loving Norwegians are, it really is.    

If someone is making more work for themselves than necessary, Norwegians use a very old expression, “Å gå over bekken etter van” which means they are “crossing over the stream to get the water,” rather than getting it from the side they are already on. 

The Norwegian expression, “the male goat is watching over the oat bag” has the same meaning as our expression “the fox is watching the hen house.”

So we may be two very different cultures, but on some level, we sure think alike.

New Words

In my Norwegian language class one day, we learned what Norwegians call popular food items.  Many of these words are nearly identical to what we call them in English, so it was a day of feeling rather triumphant in the otherwise abysmal world of trying to learn a foreign language.

Potatoes are called “potet”, bread is called “brød,” and milk is called “melk.” These are the staples in every Norwegian home, so learning these words took the fear out of going hungry should I ever need to ask someone for a bite to eat.

Our teacher also taught us that certain foods last longer than others and that’s why so many fresh produce items aren’t available in Norway – because they won’t survive the trip so far north - like I hadn’t figured that one out already.  She also told us about some foods that become poisonous after awhile.

In describing the poisonous food, I heard her say the exact same word that she used a few days earlier when she was teaching us the names of all the family members. The word that caught my attention was “gift” (pronounced “yift.”)  It’s the Norwegian word for “married,” but as we all learned during our food lesson, it’s also the Norwegian word for “poison.” 

I brought up the irony of “gift” being used for both “married” and “poison” and asked our teacher why that would be.   I got her to think a minute, but she was not able to answer my question. 

There were several Spanish-speaking students in our class too, so I also pointed out that the Spanish word “esposa” means “wife,” but it also means “handcuffs.”  I don’t like those “coincidences” one little bit, but I must say, it makes certain words easier to remember – like the English word “but” is “men” in Norwegian.  There are so many things to remember when learning a new language I must do what I can to help the process. 

I never could connect the dots on why a “child” is called “barn” in Norwegian, though.  I know as a kid, my mother used to ask me if I was “born in a barn” when I left the door open, so maybe there’s something there -- she is full blooded Norwegian, after all.

We studied weather words that same week too, and we learned that if it’s cloudy they say in Norwegian it’s “skyet” (pronounced “she-it”).  And here all these years I thought my mom was swearing when she’d say a certain word in a particular kind of way, but as it turns out, it seems, she was just talking about the weather.

My Norwegian Classmates

The year I attended Norwegian language school, we had 28 students from 18 different countries. Most of them were women married to Norwegians. It made for some interesting coffee breaks as we tried to communicate with one another. I found many of my classmates’ stories quite interesting.

Several women in class were from the Ukraine.  Many Ukrainian and Thai women meet Norwegians via the Internet and marry them without ever spending much time together first. One woman knew no Norwegian and very little English, so I often wondered how she communicated with her husband and then I saw them together during lunch one day. Even though they’d been married a year, they still acted like lovebirds - there was a clue. He was a balding, forty-ish, not so great looking guy and she was in her early twenties and quite the Ukrainian hottie. Norwegians aren’t dumb, that’s for sure.

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

The woman that sat next to me became 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. Fish factories hire people from Eastern Europe to do the grunt work that no respectable Norwegian citizen wants to do. Not a single Norwegian was on the payroll at their factory, including their boss, who was from Canada.

We had a lot of turnover in our class, but My Pal Vestina and I stayed on the whole year and ended up lifelong friends.  In many ways, she reminded me of myself when I was her age. We were very competitive with each other in comparing our test scores and we could crack each other up with just one look.

I found something to like about most everyone in our class, but Vestina was much more selective.  Any woman from the Slavic countries that didn’t dress to the hilt with high heels and stylish clothes insulted her greatly, and she vehemently hated them.  I asked her why we were friends since it was obvious I didn’t dress like that.  She said I was fine because I’m “older than her mother and no one cares what old people wear,” but it’s an insult to her generation if women neglect their looks. 

Up until then, I’d considered us equals, but she set me straight.   

Norsk Food (again)

Every August, our hometown of Ålesund holds a matfestival (food festival) right next to the harbor. The best part is watching the chefs compete in making cool looking uncooked food.  Presentation is everything. 

Inside the tents are all kinds of food displays and samplings to be had. If a person actually liked Norwegian food, they’d hit the jackpot by going there – but I’m not particularly fond of all the sausages, cold smoked and jelly-ish salmon, or whale meat.

While walking through the festival tents the year we lived there, I did manage to get a free cup of coffee and a few chocolates that were to my liking, but then I needed to leave quickly to escape the aroma of all the dried fish and sausages.

I swear, you could cram anything in a tube and call it pølse – which is Norwegian for sausage - and Norwegians would eat it. They have every kind of pølse imaginable – even something called “blood sausage” – which doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what it is.  They sell big ol’ coils of lamb sausages in the grocery stores that you just grab and yank off however much you want and pay for it by the kilo. They are as crazy about their pølses as they are about their cakes and vanilla sauce.

I was offered more than one sample of sausage at the festival, and not wanting to offend the vendors, I just responded with, “I don’t eat meat.”  If it were up to me, I’d just eat their breads, cakes, vanilla sauce and cheeses.  Norwegians make a flavored goat cheese with cardamom in it that tastes almost as good as candy.  My husband and son prefer all their dead creatures, however, sliced and diced and stuffed into little packages.

At the festival there was a whaling ship pulled up to the dock selling fresh whale meat right off the boat. A guy nearby was selling stir-fried whale meat to go.  I’m not an adventure-in-eating kinda gal so I’ve never tried it, but my husband, Kory, says it tastes like something between steak and liver.  It’s very lean and high in omega-3s, but I’m still not going for it.

Norway is so proud of the fact that they still kill those majestic creatures, that one of their politicians designed a T-shirt with a drawing of a whale on it that says, “Intelligent people need intelligent food.”

Kory bought ten of those shirts and gave them to a friend from the Makah Indian tribe, back when they were whaling.

Even though whale meat is one of my husband’s favorite foods and he eats it often in Norway, I haven’t noticed it has made him any smarter, however.