I Feel Very Canadian...

...I'm sitting on the couch, drinking a beer, and watching hockey.

That is, until I remind myself that the beer is Heineken, and the hockey is Finland vs. Norway at the World Championships, with commentary in Norwegian. It's actually a great help with my Norwegian, because I know what the commentators are probably saying, so it makes the translation a lot easier.

I'm definitely cheering for Norway - not only because I'm now 10 feet from the nearest Norwegian flag (my landlord has one hanging over the balcony), but also because I'm probably only one or two degrees removed from the guys on the national team, simply by living here. Picture a situation where British Columbia had a national team - that's the population of Norway (Norway: 4,737,200; BC: 4,414,000). At that point, pretty much everyone in the province would be that much closer to everyone. Norway should, by all rights, be just barely scraping to stay in the top division (the "real" championships). However, in this game, they're holding the Finns 2-2 late into the second period. Good for them.

Speaking of learning Norwegian, I mentioned earlier that I would talk about the two different types of Norwegian. You can read in depth about it on Wikipedia (look up the article titled "Norwegian Language Struggle"), but here's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version: There have always been many and various spoken dialects in Norway. However, while Norway was part of joint governments (most recently under the rule of the Danish), they generally wrote something that was very close to Danish, and the pompous people at court, in the universities, and in the Oslo region generally considered it "high class", "intelligent" language. When Norwegian pride and nationalism started building through the second half of the 19th century, one of the ways that some people thought that they should express that was to have their own written language that was much closer to what people out in the countryside actually spoke. So this guy Ivar Aasen wandered around documenting rural "real Norwegian" dialects, and developed a written language that standardised a basis for them.

Unfortunately, even though the general nationalist movement was a big success - you may notice that Norway is no longer a property of the Danish queen - the whole language thing didn't really catch on other than in the rural areas where it really reflected the way they spoke. As a result, you now have Norwegian bokmål ("book language"), which is used by 85% or so, and is very very close to Danish. Then you have Norwegian nynorsk (ironically, "New Norwegian", even though it's based on the old dialects), which is used by only 11% (the other 4% are Sami, an ethnically different people in the North, who speak their own lanugage), in mostly rural areas... including Ulstein! It's minorly ridiculous that a people who number less than 5 million have two official forms of their language.

The issue is so political that, for example, I cannot take Norwegian classes in Bokmål here in Ulstein - I must take Nynorsk. Ah well, I end up communicating either in English, or with hand signals most of the time, anyway.

The two aren't that different. We have "Jeg heter Ashley. Jeg kommer fra Canada." in Bokmål and "Eg heiter Ashley. Eg kjem frå Canada." in Nynorsk. Should be fun...

We've developed a bit of an ex-pat network here, now, with the Brit who's at Rolls-Royce Marine, the New Zealander who's in the ship-design part of the Ulstein Group and the Venezuelan-German couple I've mentioned before. While we don't want to be the kind of internationals who don't actually meet the locals, it's awfully nice to have people who've gone through the same issues you're going through.

Some other notes:

-Kes goes back to Canada this week to tackle what will hopefully be the final stages of her thesis from close range. We don't know exactly when she'll be back, but we're obviously both hoping for "as early as possible". This was always the plan, but it's still no fun!

-I finally got my tax number!!! So I now have a bank account, and everything. I figure I'll buy a car sometime this week, maybe next weekend. It's too bad that I will be getting it just in time for Kes to leave, but she's sort of happy that it means I'll have to do all the legwork on it. She knows that if we were both here, and she was at home all day (even though she's working harder than I am!), she'd probably end up doing all the research, etc.

-I'm hoping to go to Stavanger this weekend for an international rugby match - Norway vs. Bulgaria. Not exactly high flyers, but international sports are always fun.

Cheers,

Ashley

Update: Going to Oslo instead - playing with the Oslo Rugby Klubb, refereeing a 10-a-side tournament. It means another pair of overnight bus rides, but it should still be good.