I didn’t go to Norway to learn Norwegian, but almost everything good that happened to me in Norway was somehow connected to Norwegian class.
A German colleague once said, “Where else do you meet people in this country but in Norwegian class?”
I think my life is still driven by what happened to me in Norwegian class. Because that’s how I ended up in a car this summer with two Norwegians and a French woman (now an American citizen) driving up to Vancouver from Seattle. Four people originally from three different countries living in two different countries who were all connected through Norway.
Today it’s a non-issue to meet people outside of the few square miles generations in the past were limited to. What am I talking about. Today we don’t even have to leave our couches to have a conversation with a large group of people across continents in different time zones, and even different days.
We don’t even have to talk to interact today. But in language class, you cannot not talk. You’re even forced to reveal mundane facts about your daily life that you’re likely to never discuss with anyone. You probably wouldn’t tell someone you never met before what kind of soap or shampoo you use. But this was an exercise in my beginning Norwegian class. It seems absurd as an adult, only because you’re hopelessly bad at translating the words from these simple exercises into adult conversations, unlike toddlers who do it all day long.
Two of us travelers were living on opposite coasts in the USA, and two of us were living in Norway. The Norwegians were my former Norwegian teacher, Eli, and her teenage son. The other person was a French woman married to a Puerto Rican man, who had been living and raising a family in western Massachusetts for the last twenty or so years.
The thing I had in common with the French woman, Ingrid, who admitted it was an unusual name for a French woman, was that we both met Eli in Norway, not together, but around 10 years apart. Eli was my teacher in Norwegian class, while Ingrid and Eli met each other as university students.
Eli is the kind of language teacher who fixes your sentences without you even feeling it. She also keeps in contact, mainly by traveling around the world to see her former students once they go back to their respective homelands. If possible. Some in her classes cannot. I had the luxury, that if I didn’t want to stay in Norway, I could always go back home to the USA.
So for this international encounter, Eli did the hard part of traveling to the west coast of the USA from Norway. All I needed to do was take a 2.5 hour flight up the coast to Seattle from Los Angeles to meet them. I had nothing else to plan.
Other than how we all were connected, there was nothing super remarkable about our little trip. We drove from Seattle to Vancouver. I even spent my first night in a hotel near the airport in Seattle. I just couldn’t see spending over 300 USD on a hotel room for one night in the city center. As I read through the extra fees for a room at a hotel I had been to a few years before, I wasn’t sure what the cost of the hotel room was for. The airport hotel was close to the light rail station in the airport anyway, which is a direct ride into the city.
“Did you take the shuttle from the airport to get to the hotel?” the woman at the hotel asked.
“No,” I said. “I just walked, once I figured out that all I had to do was walk through the light rail platform and onto the overpass to the other side of the roadway.”
We ate at Olive Garden and Subway, stayed in an Airbnb in North Vancouver, ate delicious Chinese food at a family run restaurant in the area, took the Hop on Hop off bus around the city, wandered around Granville Island, went to the beach, remarked on how expensive groceries were (which means a lot coming from a Norwegian), and then got stuck at the border for three hours on our way back.
I would say I got an impression of Vancouver, not any insider information on what to do there or where to eat if someone were to ask. Just that Vancouver is a beautiful, walkable city.
When we were stuck at the border, after an hour, I said to the driver Ingrid, “We haven’t moved for the last half hour. Just shut the car off.”
I’m convinced delays by authorities are a psychological test. Those who break under the delay, lose their cool, get detained.
The authorities have their methods. I thought when Norwegian customs officials pulled me into a private room to go through my bags at the airport in Bergen, I was going insane when they asked me the same question over and over again, just different ways. Or when you’re a young woman traveling alone, and you’re not sure if an attractive male authority is serious with his questions or he’s using the opportunity to flirt with you. You realize it’s a ruse, just another way to disarm you, to get you to slip up and reveal your nefarious intentions for entering their country.
The three hours on the Canadian side of the border was all due to a computer glitch, on the American side. When the border patrol waved us through, Eli’s teenage son broke the tension with a teenage boy joke.
“Hey, I farted all the way from Canada to the USA.”
Eli’s son is one of the most decent kids I’ve ever met. His idea of a temper tantrum when he was a toddler – at least the ones I witnessed – was to lie on the floor quietly and not move.
The border delay was part of a pattern that day. Our first stop had been Hard Rock Casino near Vancouver, not in it. Never mind the reason, Hard Rock Casino was on the way back to the USA, in an area 40 minutes outside of Vancouver to the south and east. The significance of casino in the name didn’t register until we arrived and found ourselves in a business/industrial park that couldn’t have been more stripped of anything resembling life. Except for the characters entering the casino. And they represented an interesting form of life, emphasizing that any time spent in casinos required less exercise of brain cells than doom scrolling.
After the casino, it should have been easy to head for the border, but we got caught in a loop, and stopped for lunch instead at a Syrian restaurant. It was in part my fault – I should have kept my mouth shut, but in the end we had a pleasant lunch and got off in the right direction with the help of the free wifi. Real food, rather than Party size snacks from Costco, always helps.
Seattle is only about an hour and half from the border. Our hotel was in Port Orchard, a town at the same latitude as Seattle but to the west of the city. Anything west of the city is across a body of water. That meant we had to drive down to Tacoma and back up again to the small town of Port Orchard, adding another hour of travel to our day.
I had looked up the hotel when Eli gave me their itinerary. I didn’t ask why they booked a hotel so far outside of the city. The rates were less expensive, and I figured they had some plan to explore the region as they were staying a few days longer than me. Ferries also made it easy to get from Port Orchard to Seattle and back again, on foot or by car until almost midnight. I went ahead and booked my room direct, through the hotel. My friends, however, booked their hotel room through Expedia.
At 10:30 at night, when we arrived, the man at reception said to Eli and Ingrid, “There’s no reservation for you.”
Ingrid showed him her booking number. The patient man at reception figured out what had happened. A consequence of our booming middle man culture born from the internet. Ingrid had booked the right days, but Expedia booked them in June instead of July. They had come up as “No Shows” in the system. The hotel had one room available for them, but only for the night, not the three they had paid for. And because they hadn’t shown up for the booking in June, they had to pay for it.
I left the next morning on my back-up plan, the foot ferry from Port Orchard to Bremerton followed by the fast ferry to Seattle. The ferry to Seattle was packed with no air moving through the main cabin. It was a Saturday after all, and Taylor Swift was in town.
I wasn’t experiencing any Covid-like symptoms so when two deer were spotted swimming across the sound, people spoke to me. The young guy sitting next to me googled the behavior and discovered deer can swim for up to 10 miles in water. Even my mother, no stranger to the behavior of wild animals, only recently learned this curious fact about deer.
We were on the fast ferry so the swimming deer were quickly out of sight. But with that opening, I asked for a recommendation for dim sum, once I found out I was speaking with locals. I had just a couple hours in Seattle before my flight out to Los Angeles, and I was determined to have dim sum. The woman recommended the Jade Garden Restaurant on 7th Avenue S.
About crime in the city, she said, “The city is so busy today, it will be crawling with security.”
Dim sum is one of the most frustrating meal ideas for a solo traveler – there’s more you want to try than you can possibly eat in about 20 minutes -, but on the plus side, I didn’t have to hold back on the fried dim sum. No carts. I placed my order on my phone, in the restaurant.
Outside of what to eat and what to see on our mini-meet-up, Eli and I stayed up late catching up on our mutual circle of friends still in Norway, and well, some politics. Not so many of my group remain in Norway, but the ones who have stayed have either settled with a Norwegian or have made peace with their lives in Norway, especially after children have been born.
I’ve said it before, there’s no greater lesson on what it means to be an American (or an Italian or a Frenchman), than living in another country. Something about living in Norway opened my eyes to the fallacies of the way governments work, including my own. They all have their plusses, but in my determination, more is not better. More is just different. We all think our form of government is the best. And we think that, the more we travel.
In my Norwegian class, I learned that a Ukrainian physician made next to nothing in her home country but could afford a life for her family once she retrained as a nurse in Norway. That the Polish never forgave the West for surrendering them to the Communists after World War II, but that this betrayal only fueled their aspirations to remain a modern country. That European governments have some pie-in-the-sky ideas about how to live that their constituents do not agree with – like giving up nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster rendering countries more dependent on Russian oil.
I never thought the USA was better than Norway, just different. But I’m still an American, and the strengths of my country in my mind far outweigh the deficiencies. So I still found myself in our conversations defending the results of our elections. I still believe there’s no freer country in the world, even under questionable leaders, and people from communist ruled countries, even some European democracies, have confided in me they feel freer in America than anywhere else. When it comes down to it, the thing people see in Americans when they travel, whatever their ethnic history or color, is that they are American.
I’ve always had an affinity for learning languages. Surprising as I’m an introvert. I figure it’s an example of seeking to fix what we feel deficient in. I hardly know what to say sometimes to the people who know me best. But a guy I dated in college asked me, a chemistry major studying Spanish and Italian one summer, “Do you like learning languages so much, you would try learning Russian or Chinese?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I think you’re in the wrong major,” he said.
I’ve often thought he was right.
Janice Nigro 
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