Scandinavian relations

Some of you were interested to know about Scandinavian interrelations. Well, I'm Scandinavian, so if you don't mind my lumping all Norwegians together and calling my humble opinion universal, well then, I'm off..

Firstly, Scandinavia. It's actually only Denmark, Norway and Sweden (listed alphabetically to avoid accusations of bias, ok?). If you add Finland and Iceland it'll turn out as The Nordic Countries. To us, that is. The rest of you still call it Scandinavia. (It's just the same that happened when a Norwegian I know (of) went travelling around the world, and although he insisted he was called Njål (...) people would say stuff like "that's all right, we'll just call you Bob!".. Digress? I wouldn't dream of it. )

Norwegians, on the whole, possibly spoiled by the ridiculous amount of money the oil's pouring into this country (if not into its inhabitants' pockets), tend to be rather optimistic. I was going to say joyful, but that's an exaggeration. It's more like kiddies' optimism. Only with a poker face. It's not true that Norwegians don't smile. They do. Just look: It's just that when you wear a woollen hat 9 months a year it doesn't show.

Norwegians are very proud of Norway ("didn't the UN just say that we were the best country to live in, again, this year?"), but we're not proud of things Norwegian. We mostly don't feel very attached to the old Norwegian culture at all, except for the bunad-wearing on the 17th of May and the Christmas lutefisk. Traditional dancing and music is very much a rural thing, and we'd rather talk about Madrugada, a-ha or Sondre Lerche... Or Sweden, actually - they've got Volvo, IKEA, Sony Ericsson - Abba, Roxette - Bjørn Borg, Tre Kronor ice hockey team, and a national side in football that's not just in various world cups, but doing well at it.

So, the further away from Norway we are, the more "uni-Scandinavian" we are - sure we can take credit for IKEA and Olympic gold winning olympic teams... Closer to home, we make fun of the Swedes, we have jokes about eachother, we claim they're a rather stupid people. But secretly, or not so secretly, they're the big brother we're really proud of, still rather annoyed at, for being so much better than us at everything... And they've got Astrid Lindgren.



We've got Swedish programmes on television and a lot of Norway has access to Swedish channels as well. Most Norwegians understand any given Swedish dialect on any given day. Swedes won't even try understanding Norwegian, so as soon as the border's crossed (- you can cross into Sweden a million places along the border, only a few are watched) Norwegians change into Norwedish, which is more easily understood, and which gives the Swedes the feeling that they do, after all, understand Norwegians...

Denmark will be dealt with later ;)