NORWAY II

I arrived in Trondheim on the second of January. I am staying in a dormitory, where i share a flat with 15 other students. Another option would have been to live in a smaller residential community with 3 other students. But since i wanted to meet locals I preferred to stay at the dorms because apparently there are living more Norwegian students. Obviously the Norwegian students did not have to participate at the introduction week for exchange students, meaning that my whole flat was nearly empty for the first 2 weeks. So at the beginning i got to know a lot of exchange students from all around the world but unfortunately mostly from Germany and Austria. So from that point of view i did not really have the feeling of being far away from my home country. But after two weeks, when finally, the university started more and more students were moving into the dormitories. Finally, there was something going on. But I soon found out that the prejudice was true: Norwegian people are mostly very, very introverted persons. Especially when they do not know you. But that does not mean that they are bad persons. But still, I think that that was the first thing which i found extremely striking and also the first thing, which caused me some difficulty. Even if I tried i could not really start a conversation. They responded very nicely but short. And a lot of them were also wearing headphones while cooking by instance. For me that also was a sign that they don’t want to communicate at all. And since I am not the most extroverted person either I could not really get to know them. So I spent more time with the exchange students. But after a few weeks the Norwegians have opened up more and more and as i thought, they are all quite nice. So we even played card games, watched movies or cooked and had dinners together.

Talking about dinners brings me to the next very striking aspect: The Norwegian eating habits. I did not know and also did not expect that Norwegians have a eating culture similar to the united states. They love fast food and they love it greasy. Obviously I am aware that this is not true for everyone. But also the traditions are similar to Americans. Americans have taco Tuesday; Norwegians have taco Friday. this means, for example, that there are tacos in the canteen every Friday. In addition, also the products you can buy at the supermarket are very similar to the US ‘, like the bread for instance. What also surprised me were the eating times. Norwegians, or maybe Scandinavians in general, are used to completely different eating times than us in the rest of Europe. They have breakfast, eat something small and mostly cold for lunch at about half past eleven, and then have a warm dinner between 4 and 6 pm. And if they are hungry in the evening they maybe eat a sandwich at around 8. For us, in central Europe for instance, lunch is the most „important “or biggest meal we eat. Then we maybe eat something small at around 4 and eat a bigger meal, cold or warm, again at around 7. That has maybe also something to do with the different working hours in each countries. But to be honest i never adapted to this habit since we can eat independently. So i still eat lunch at around half past 12 and have dinner at around 7 or 8. But it is still very interesting for me to observe such small cultural differences.