Norway in May

End of Fulbright Visit

I am a little delayed in sending my final post from Norway regarding my Fulbright visit. The last three weeks have gone by quickly. There was the rush in finishing the official Fulbright visit in Bergen, to having family in town, to doing a week-long tour around Norway with family, to five days of travel with friends from Colorado, and then final a 3-1/2 day trip to Helsinki. This is third time that I have written this opening paragraph. I am also down to my last 24 hours in Norway. I will have one more post after I get back to Colorado. In that post I’ll share some bigger picture reflections from my visit and a link to more photos.

Send-off Presentation

The final week of my time in Bergen, and the formal part of my Fulbright visit to Norway, was a flurry of activities as things ended. For good and bad, the progress on my research slowed during this time. This is good because it means that I was taking advantage of the opportunities that were more local to my visit in Bergen. For example, I gave two presentations during my final week in Bergen. It is bad because the progress on the research has been slow throughout the visit. I also squeezed in last-minute tasks around Bergen, such as deciding on what souvenirs and keepsakes I want to bring home with me. My brother, John, and my sister-in-law, Karin, arrived into Bergen arrived on Saturday, May 9th. My sister, Krista, and my brother-in-law, Loren, arrived on Monday, May 11th. All of them were able to attend the “send-off” seminar presentation that I gave at the Bjerknes Center for Climate Research (a joint center including my host institutions – NORCE and University of Bergen). The presentation provided a review of the Fulbright exchange program, a summary of the activities that I did during my Fulbright visit, and a review of the research project that I had worked on while in Bergen. I felt that this was an appropriate way for me to end my visit as it bookended the seminar presentation that I gave at the beginning of my visit. That opening presentation was focused on introducing myself and providing an overview of the work to be completed. One of the university host faculty members also had some departing gifts for me.

After the send-off presentation, I took my on the funicular to the top of Fløien, for the skyline view of Bergen. This is the same trip over overlook of Bergen that I did with my parents in 2002.

Visit with Distant Relatives

In 2002, I traveled to Norway with my parents. As we were planning for the trip I suggested to my mom that she try to connect with distant relatives. This was something that I had not ever considered until my 1998 visit to Norway. During one of the evenings at a hostel in Trondheim, I met a mother, her sister, and her two daughters from Montana. They had spent the day visiting with their distant relatives. They then asked me if I had ever considered doing a similar visit. My response was “I have never even given that a thought”. My mom had been doing a lot of her with the genealogy of her family, including developing an in-depth database. My mom was able to connect with distnat family prior to our trip, but in the end it was not a lot of effort by my mom. We went to the website of the community that she knew they had emigrated from. That website said had a post “if you are trying to connect with distant relatives, please send us the information that you have, and we’ll see what we can figure out”. A few weeks later they emailed my mom saying that they felt they had identified the family and farm where our ancestors had come from. A few months later, on that June 2002 visit to Norway with my parents, we met the distant relatives for the first time. I have stayed in touch with the distant relatives ever since then. Unfortunately, our schedules were not able to align for us to connect earlier during my visit. Such a visit was able to happen when I traveled to Oslo with my brother and sister, and their spouses, earlier this month. The farm, and the original farm house, where our great-great grandma was born, is no longer in the family as it was sold since my visit in 2010. However, the family is close with the current owners and the current owners kindly let us visit the house, despite them being away for the weekend. This allowed my siblings, John and Krista, to have the same experience that I had with my parents in 2002 in seeing the farmhouse were my great-great grandma was born. After seeing the house, we returned to the home of Maren, the distant relative that I have stayed in closest contact with, where we also had Maren’s daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother for the afternoon to share stories and learn about each other’s lives. It was a great visit and fun was had by all.

The five us from went directly from visiting with the distant family in Rakkestad to Oslo, where we had dinner plans with a friend, Leif, who was an exchange student at our high school when we were in high school. (This is the same friend that I wrote about having lunch with during my Visit to Oslo in March.) The dinner visit was another great opportunity to swap updates on each of our lives, and stories from the past.

Syttende Mai

“Syttende mai” is Norwegian for the “17th of May”. It is their equivalent to the “4th of July” in the U.S. The day is also referred to as “Constitution Day” commemorating the signing of the Norwegian Constitution in 1814. Norway was in an established union with Sweden until 1905 when the union with Sweden was dissolved and Norway was a fully independent country. The 17th of May is a festive day and it is a dress-up holiday. The traditional outfit for the day is the bunad, which is the traditional Norwegian costume. The bunad is likely the outfit that is most likely correlated with your thoughts of what Norwegians look like. The bunad is handcrafted and the pattern typically represents a region’s identity. There are bunad’s for men and women but it is far more common with woman. We found men to more generally wear a suit with a lapel tassel indicating the 17th celebration.

The signature event for the 17th of May are the children’s parades. The biggest children’s parade is in Oslo where approximately 100,000 people travel to Oslo to participate in the parade. The parade is one school after another parading down the central street in Oslo and walking by the Royal Palace where the royals wave to the children, for hours. We made it to the parade for about two hours of watching children walk by. Every so often we’d hear one of the students lead their classmates with a “HIP, HIP”, and the classmates would reply “HURRAH”, or something like that in Norwegian. We’d also hear a lead student yell out “give me an H”  and the classmates would yell back “H”, and this would continue to until “and what does that spell” and they students yell back with their school name. Similarly, this was all done in Norwegian but the general idea was clear. There were some schools that were just children and their teachers walking down the street and waving Norwegian flags. Other schools had marching bands, or drum corps, that kept the students moving. There were also a few adult marching bands interspersed through the parade.

Beyond the children’s parades, May 17th in Norway is known for general celebrating and hanging out with others. The two main food items for the day are hot dogs and ice cream. I met up with three of the other Fulbright Norway recipients at a bar. That bar was giving away free hot dogs all day. As we walked around Oslo on the 17th there was a general festive atmosphere. I’ve heard about the May 17th celebrations since my first visit to Norway and it was great to finally be able to be a part of the activities.

Travels

I have been traveling all over Norway since my visit ended in Bergen. I did a road trip around the western fjords, including an all-day boat trip, with my siblings. I went around Lofoten, in northern Norway with friends from Colorado. I took the coastal cruise/ferry from Bodø to Tromsø in northern Norway. All of that was followed by a quick 3-1/2 day trip to Helsinki, including a “work” day at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. For those that are interested in the vacation time and visits around Norway, I will be doing blog-only, bonus posts regarding my travels around Norway. It will likely be a week or two until those bonus posts are included.